Multisited Ethnography

En el año 1995, entre los meses de mayo y noviembre, un grupo mapuche ocupó primero oficinas y luego tierras de la Corporación Interestadual Pulmarí.  Ante esta situación, se solicita al Ministerio de Defensa que informe sobre los hechos relacionados al caso.
El Informe que remite dicho Ministerio, y que constituye el material de análisis de este trabajo, permite indagar antropológica y etnográficamente varias cuestiones. La primera de ellas es la condensación particular que se produce, a fines del siglo XX, entre diversas interpretaciones sobre la escena política, del “enemigo” y los intereses a ser defendidos. En segundo lugar, cómo, a partir de la identificación de actores, situaciones, probables causas y orígenes del conflicto pueden rastrearse discursos sobre la seguridad y la defensa de larga data junto con la asimilación de las nociones de "nuevas amenazas" recién introducidas en el lenguaje internacional. En tercer lugar, se aprecia la disputa por la legitimidad de las fuerzas armadas en el escenario político luego de la apertura democrática y el papel de las comunidades indígenas en la lucha por la soberanía.
Finalmente, este trabajo da cuenta de un tipo de indagación que, retomando la propuesta de la "etnografía multisituada" de George Marcus, aborda temas, conceptos y objetos aparentemente lejanos para la antropología.

Navegar fronteras reconstruye las travesías íntimas de migrantes indocumentados mexicanos en Estados Unidos. Es un libro que describe lo que significa vivir entre dos países cada vez más interconectados y permanecer sobre la frontera incluso a miles de kilómetros de ella. Basándose en cuatro años de observación participante entre Puebla y Nueva York, Esteban Salmón evoca vívidamente experiencias que transcurren en espacios transnacionales como hogares divididos por la frontera, servicios de paquetería en Queens y fiestas suntuosas en el Valle de Atlixco financiadas con remesas.
Narrando el ciclo migratorio de mexicanos recién llegados a Estados Unidos, este libro explora la importancia de recrear vínculos locales y comunitarios en el extranjero, la intención de dar sentido a diferencias nacionales mediante metáforas, la situación de explotación en la que se incorporan los mexicanos al mercado laboral estadounidense y la ostentación de los dólares que se acumulan en el extranjero. Todos estos temas remiten a un supuesto básico: por su enorme poder productivo, la frontera se sitúa al centro de la vida cotidiana en espacios trasnacionales. Navegar fronteras es un retrato minucioso y conmovedor de una comunidad dividida por una frontera que se expande y multiplica.

Abstract
Innovation studies research is at the forefront of recent theoretical and interdisciplinary debates. However, it also faces at least three methodological challenges, namely: the need for empirical strategies to analyze inclusive innovations, the need to conduct symmetrical cutting-edge research in both theory and methods rather than giving lopsided emphasis to one or the other, and the need to adequately grasp the multiple, multi-sited and mobile character of social phenomena as well as the diverse impacts of digital culture in our lives stemming from globalization. This article aims to analyze the potentialities that ethnographical approaches have in facing these challenges, and multi-sited and digital ethnographical approaches in particular. Ethnography will be explored here not only as a flexible research strategy to grasp phenomena but also to develop theories closer to local actors and their different types of knowledge in the global South. These reflections about methods in innovation studies are also an opportunity to take part in a renewed discussion about how to conduct research in a more collaborative and inclusive way.

Abstrakti Artikkelissa tarkastellaan, miten toimistotuolin muotoilu-ja suunnittelutyössä on läsnä käsitys tuolin tulevasta käyttäjästä. Lisäksi analysoidaan niitä keinoja, joilla toimistotuolin ja tulevien käyttäjien identiteettiä muotoillaan ja miten nämä " muotoilut " saadaan vaikuttamaan luonnollisilta. Artikkelissa avataan myös sitä, minkälaisten kontekstien, keinojen ja vaiheiden kautta toimistotuolille tehdään design-objektin status. Tutkimuksen haastatteluaineistot ja kokoustaltionnit on kerätty toimistoympä-ristöihin kalusteita ja sisutusratkaisuja tuottavassa yrityksessä. Tutkimus ammentaa analyyttisiä ideoita diskurssianalyyttisestä lähestymistavasta ja monipaikkaisesta etnografiasta. Tutkimus tuo esille, miten ajatus taloudellisia resursseja säästävästä avotoimistosta käännetään yrityksessä visioksi esteettisestä ja vähemmän hierarkkisesta kohtaamistilasta, joka merkityksellistyy harkittuna muotoiluna ja entistä avoimempina tilaratkaisuina. Hierarkiattomuus merkitsee visiossa sitä, että kaikki ovat yhtä lailla tyy-litellysti näkyvillä. Tapaustutkimuksen avulla artikkeli pyrkii havainnollistamaan, miten ymmärtääk-semme nykyaikaista työelämää meidän tulee myös ymmärtää sen materiaalisen järjestämisen muotoja.

This article examines the cultural mobilities of Albanian immigrants in Greece (Corinth) highlighting how the economic crisis and the legalization programmes transform the past gendered labour patterns of Albanian immigrants in the country of the 1990s. However, a careful examination of the way in which the gendered identities are constructed in Greece and in Albania demonstrate that gender can be mobile, due to the structural conditions mentioned above, but gender perceptions remain unchanged. They are only occasionally renegotiated in the labour context of Greece to deal with the unstable living conditions in the host society, and then reproduce the patriarchal frameworks of power relations in Albania.

is article presents new ethnographical information on milestones in the history of the transnational migration of Chilotes (inhabitants of Chiloe Island, southern Chile), from the 1950s up to the assemblages existing today in di erent parts of Chilean and Argentinean Patagonia. In particular, we analyse stages in the development of mobility linked to the economic boom in these southern territories, highlighting sectors in which jobs were created on both sides of the border.  e preliminary results show how cultural connections are retained with places of origin and residence through the formation of com- munities, the circulation of goods, the extension of symbolic meanings and new inter-regional migratory trajectories.  e methodology used was that of ethnographies in movement derived from circumstantial approaches in di e- rent locations in Chiloe and Patagonia between December 2015 and May 2017.  e re ections in this work are a contribution to studies on human mobility in southern Chile from multi-local perspectives that allow cultural continuities to be identi ed in the experience of migration.

In Senegal, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the national administration in charge of the National Parks set up a co-management of marine protected areas between 1994 and 2004. This article analyzes this partnership up to the point at which it imploded, with particular attention to its official discourse, the influence of the Dutch cooperation agency, as well as the power asymmetries between the two institutions. The article puts into perspective the alleged hegemony of international conservation NGOs and their scientific and technical rationality, supposed to prevail in their action strategy.

Innerhalb der transnationalen Migrationsforschung ist in jüngere Zeit eine Debatte um methodologische Ansätze und Prinzipien entstanden, die den Herausforderungen grenzübergreifender Fragestellungen gerecht werden können. Ausgehend von der Kritik am methodologischen Nationalismus werden insbesondere die Frage nationaler Grenzen und damit die Unterscheidung interner und internationaler Migration, der essentialisierende Charakter ethnischer Zugschreibungen (‚ethnic lens‘) und die Möglichkeiten grenzübergreifender Datenerhebung jenseits des nationalen Containers diskutiert. Dabei ist auch eine Debatte um den Einsatz neuer und die Anpassung älterer Methoden entstanden. Transnationale Forschungen nutzten dabei oftmals vielfältige Methoden, auch innerhalb eines Forschungsprojektes oder -programms. Hierzu gehören, wenngleich noch selten, (quan/qual) mixed method designs. Eine methodologische und vor allem dezidiert epistemologische Reflektion der genutzten methodischen Ansätzen und Forschungsstrategien existiert dagegen kaum. Wo aber liegen die Grenzen, wechselseitigen Befruchtungen aber auch notwendige Grenzziehungen der einzelnen Methoden für die transnationale Migrationsforschung, welchem Paradigma folgen die jeweiligen Strategien, wo lassen sie sich zusammenführen, wo schließen sie sich gegenseitig aus? Zur Diskussion dieser Fragen werden in diesem Beitrag zwei Forschungsstrategien in den Blick genommen, nämlich ›mixed methods design‹ und ›multisited research‹. Beide Strategien finden aktuell zunehmend Anwendung innerhalb der transnationalen Migrati­onsforschung. Genutzt werden sie insbesondere zur internen oder externen Validierung. In diesem Beitrag sollen beide Strategien allerdings als Elemente einer pluri-lokalen und pluri-methodischen Erforschung pluraler Perspektiven vorgeschlagen werden. Dies schließt an ein Verständnis von Triangulation im Sinne multiperspektivischen Forschens zum Ausloten verschiedener Dimensionen und Aspekte eines Phänomens an. Ein solcher Ansatz macht es außerdem notwendig das nunmehr klassische Plädoyer der ›investigator triangulation‹ aufzugreifen, das hier über methodologische und national-staatliche Grenzen hinweg gedacht werden muss. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Perspektive werden hier verschiedene transnationale Studien in den Blick genommen, Potentiale aufgezeigt und Herausforderungen thematisiert.
download: http://publikationen.soziologie.de/index.php/kongressband_2016/article/view/607

In current fluid and uncertain political, economic and social conditions are experienced by the most countries in the world, many people choose to emigrate in search of better living conditions. Anthropological studies claim that the movement of people in modern globalized world is an ongoing, continuous and complex process in which migrants establish relations, create networks and connect many places beyond local and national boundaries (Schrooten, Salazar, & Dias, 2015, p.24-25). The possible routes of immigrants are often involuntary, unpredictable and are influenced by the global political system of states that regulate and control the parameters of their transnational movements (Salazar & Smart, 2011, p.iii). Thus, we should consider the transnational context of their lives in order to understand the immigrants’ experiences, which are constantly changing and are influenced by historical and structural factors and perceptions prevailing in both the country of origin and the host country (Glick Schiller et al., 1992, p.8). The aim of this presentation is to propose the approach of cultural mobilities as an analytical lens for understanding contemporary forms of movement, highlighting the multiple ways in which people and their cultural practices are not limited to a fixed ground, but constitute a part of multiple spatial networks and interconnections (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013, p.185-186). The establishment of a unified approach to mobility, which will examine the general category of the movement in all its range, is problematic because all forms and types of mobility are deeply impregnated with the cultural meanings of each society and should be studied within the specific cultural, economic and social conditions which are created (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013, p.196). The instability and fluidity that characterize the cultural mobilities of immigrants’ routes lead us to search for new methodological tools, far removed from the traditional fieldwork that predominantly performed in stable environments. The fieldwork among the mobile groups is a practice that unfolds, according to Kurotani, into scenes and spaces and not in sites or places, which exist only through active participation and presence of the informants (Kurotani, 2004, p.210). The ethnographer is asked to follow their temporary lives and to put himself within the global system where the multiple aspects of their experiences unfold and to interpret their experiences living with them and not looking at them and interpreting them "from above» (Marcus, 1995). As aptly pointed out by Wulff, if she was not able to follow the Irish dancers who studied on their trips to Japan and Washington, she would be the only one that would be left behind in the field. Think of a field researcher without field (Wulff, 2002, p.119). Concerns on particularism of knowledge in multi-sited research which results in this context should be sidelined because even if we succeed we are constantly present in the movements of our informants, paraphrasing Geertz, we will always hear a discussion that has started before we have arrived to the field and which will continue after we have gone (Kurotani, 2004, p.211). Adopting the approach of cultural mobilities in migration studies, we highlight the subjective migratory experiences, which reflect on culturally defined reasons for mobility. The latter in turn affect other factors such as the sense of belonging, power relations, nationalism and transnationalism (Salazar, 2010, p.64). Looking mobility "from below" in conjunction with the policies adopted by the states for her - "from above" – can be given sustainable solutions to the immigration issues that afflict the global world.

REFERENCES

Glick Schiller, N., Basch L., & Cristina Blanc-Szanton, (1992), “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration”. In Glick Schiller, N. Basch L. and Blanc-Szanton C. (Eds.) Towards a transnational perspective on migration: Race, class, ethnicity and nationalism reconsider. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. pp. 1-24.
Glick Schiller, N., and Salazar, N. B., (2013), “Regimes of Mobility across the Globe”. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39(2), 183-200.
Kurotani, S., (2004), “Multi-sited Transnational Ethnography and the Shifting Construction of Fieldwork”. In Hume L. and Mulcock J. (Eds.) Anthropologists in the field: Case in participant observation. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 201-215.
Marcus, G., (1995), “Ethnography in/of the World System: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95-117.
Salazar, N. B., (2010), “Towards an anthropology of cultural mobilities”, Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, 1, 53–68.
Salazar, N. B and Smart A., (2011), “Anthropological Takes on (Im)mobility”, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 18, i–ix.
Schrooten, Μ., Salazar Ν. Β. & G. Dias, (2015), “Living in mobility: trajectories of Brazilians in Belgium and the UK”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, DOI:10.1080/1369183X.2015.1089160. Accessed: 20.12.2015

Wulff, H., (2002), “Yo-Yo Fieldwork: Mobility and Time in a Multi-Local Study of Dance in Ireland”, Anthropological Journal on European Cultures, Shifting Grounds: Experiments in Doing Ethnography, 11, 117-136.

Reisen, Arbeiten, Abenteuer – Welche Erfahrungen machen Backpacker, wie erleben sie den globalen Raum und wie wirkt sich dies auf ihre Biographien aus?
Katrin Ullmann bietet mit den »Generationscapes« ein mehrdimensionales Modell für die Analyse globaler Generationalität, das sowohl zeitliche als auch räumliche Dimensionen analytisch neu für die Generationentheorie erschließt und die Komplexität gegenwärtiger Biographien in Bewegung abbildet: Am Beispiel der Backpacker, einer besonders mobilen sozialen Gruppe, offenbaren sich individuelle Erfahrungen und kollektive Schlüsselerlebnisse als Teil einer ambivalenten Globalisierung.

In this methodological paper, I viewed field and archival data standing in a dialectical relationship in the wider context of the contributions and limitations of the subaltern school of history in India and the recent methodological innovations of anthropologists towards multi-sited ethnography. Accordingly, I have explored into the complementary roles of archival materials and field observations in the form of a multi-sited ethnography. Methodologically, the description revealed the pluralism of anthropology. At the theoretical level, society and culture existed not only in space but also through time, and what we observed in the field could be related with the records which human beings preserved, used and manipulated in the archives. I concluded that ‘field’ and ‘archive’ were cultural artifacts having an underlying unity.

Este artículo discute la relación entre procesos sociales de movilidad y formas espaciales que se producen con ello en la frontera tacno-ariqueña (sur peruano y norte chileno). Esto se aborda desde una perspectiva etnográfica multidimensional, procesual y multisituada.
Se propone la categoría de espacialidad como alternativa de aproximación a lo estudiado. La interpretación del material etnográfico sugiere que Tacna y Arica presentan una espacialidad transfronteriza caracterizada por el compartimiento común de procesos
sociales contemporáneos de movilidad.

This chapter attempts to construct a multisite ethnography of land grab by the government for private profit-making companies in Paschim (west) Medinipur district of West Bengal under the pro-peasant leftist government. The text of the article juxtaposes the direct fieldwork experiences with archival data collected from land acquisition files. The transition from a land-based rural economy toward an industrial regime was not smooth. It was characterized by protest, resistance, and bargains by the peasants as well as government and private company failures despite official claims of industrial development and employment during the transition. This micro level anthropological study also has macro implications in which the author takes up the role of a storyteller, an actor interacting with parliamentarians at New Delhi as an expert on land acquisition, and also listening to the protesting and satirical voices of the peasants affected by governmental land grab.

El profesor Ulf Hannerz, antropólogo sueco formado en la Stockholm University, es un destacado estudioso de las culturas transnacionales en las últimas décadas. Algunas de sus obras más notables son: Exploring the city: Inquiries toward an urban anthropology (1980), Cultural complexity: Studies in the social organization of meaning (1990), Foreign news: Exploring the world of foreign correspondents (2004), Anthropology’s World: Life in a Twenty-First Century discipline (2010). Es profesor-investigador en Stockholm University y University of Oslo, miembro honorario de Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

This thesis is based on the professional experiences of a small group of transnational Angolan traders known as the Moambeiras, due to their particular method of importing goods: suitcase trading. Considered in Angola as being on the margins of legality, these women travel abroad to bring back manufactured products (clothing, shoes, and women’s accessories) that they transport in their suitcases without declaring the commercial aim of this activity. This practice, used across the African continent, developed during the 1990s in the context of economic scarcity due to clientelistic economic policies. After the end of the Angolan civil war in 2002, allowing for the opening of international relations with partners such as Portugal, Brazil, Dubai and China, the feminization of this commercial practice intensified. However, since 2010 with the constant devaluing of the kwanza against the U.S. dollar, the plummeting of oil prices and the strengthening of bureaucratic and security policies worldwide, these commercial travels have been made more and more difficult to accomplish.
This thesis analyzes these phenomena through different case studies involving two waves of female transnational traders: the first being from Angola to Brazil, and the second from Angola to China. By investigating the specific roles of these African women in the three different spaces where they were observed, the markets of São Paulo, Luanda and Guangzhou, the research fits into the perspective of globalization from below. The business travels of these women also shake up traditional gender roles as well as the sharing of tasks and powers within families. By investigating these emancipatory processes, this research attempts to verify if this commercial activity allows the women to become conscious of the power relations that marginalize them and whether this consciousness develops the capacity to transform them. However, the thesis defended here assumes that the characteristics of the “parallel” economy, where the borders blur between legal and illegal, licit and illicit, condition the capacities of the women’s empowerment and put them at a disadvantage in the collective demands for their rights.  At of time when globalization is accelerating, this study endeavors to give an intimate, feminist vision of mobility through the journey and the life stories of various Angolan women as they travel between Brazil, Angola and China.