ETHNOGRAPHY PROJECT

Ethnography Project

Ethnography Project

Surely, 'global ethnography' is an oxymoron? How can the global be ethnographic? How can ethnography contribute to the understanding of globalization? After all, in anthropology, we stereotypically picture the lone ethnographer settled in his or her village, itself isolated from the world around. In sociology, we think of the ethnographer as the specialist of face to-face relations or of situational analysis, but with the context ?rmly bracketed. Or perhaps we think of the ethnographer-sociologist studying con?ict and cohesion in the urban community; but, as with the anthropologist, it is a community cut off from the world beyond, often by physical barriers such as buildings, parks or railroad tracks. What could be further from global ethnography? After three-quarters of a century of professional anthropology and sociology, global ethnography appears oxymoronic because we have blotted out the prehistory of our professions. Global ethnography is not new at all. As Joan Vincent (1990) has argued, before the First World War anthropology was swept up in debates between evolutionists and diffusionists who saw the world as their canvas. James Clifford (1997) makes a similar point: with peripatetic missionaries and colonial administrators monopolizing knowledge about 'the native', anthropologists had to seek out their own niche of expertise, which they found in the careful, systematic and prolonged observation of indigenous peoples in a single place. This professionalization of ?eldwork led to its circumscription, its concentration on dwelling rather than traveling. In overlooking the vast web of Empire, the multiple and asymmetrical connections between metropolis and colony that made focused ?eld research possible, anthropology bracketed its own global underpinnings.

Similarly, in sociology, the ?rst great ethnography (in the broadest sense of the term), William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918), had a transnational scope, linking sending and receiving communities, locating each in the intertwining histories of nations. But as sociology became more established, its ethnography became more con?ned - ?rst burrowing into the urban metropolis, and then into the interstices of organizations. It too lost sight of its national framing, let alone its original global moorings. Today the return of global ethnography is a reaction to the globalization of scienti?c communities. Jet-setting academic cosmopolites measure their status by their world travel. They think nothing of attending conferences in the furthest capitals of the world, negotiating international linkages through electronic communication, or organizing multi-national research projects. They paint a picture of a new community of transnational connections, and of globalization as a veritable force of nature, a juggernaut sweeping up everything that lies in its path. For these cosmopolites, ethnography - the focused attention to detail and process by assimilating the point of view of participants - is replaced by tourism, tripping around from site to site. Global ethnography, on the other hand, speaks, ?rst and foremost, to those left behind on the ground. It shows that time-space compression or time-space distanciation are not as universal as the cosmopolites would claim. It shows globalization to be a very uneven process and, ...