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ETHNOGRAFEAST
graphy
Copyright 2003 SA GE Publications (London, Thousand O aks, CA and Ne w Delhi)
w w w.sagepublications.com Vol 4(2): 201216[14661381(200306)4:2;201216;034179]
Ulf Hannerz
Stockholm University, Sweden
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Trobrianders along the Kula ring. Yet the very fact that this style of doing
ethnography was given a label, and prominently advocated, and exemplified (if in large part by borrowing a case from journalism), and that this
occurred much at the same time as ideas of place and the local were coming
under increasing scrutiny in and out of anthropology, no doubt helped
accelerate its recent spread, as a practice or as a topic of argument.
Whether due to convergent interests or mutual inspiration, a number of
my colleagues in Stockholm and I were among those who fairly quickly saw
possibilities in configuring our projects along multilocal lines. One of us
studied the organizational culture of Apple Computer in Silicon Valley, at
the European headquarters in Paris, and at the Stockholm regional office;
another studied the occupational world of ballet dancers in New York,
London, Frankfurt and Stockholm; a third connected to the Armenian
diaspora across several continents; a fourth explored the emergent
profession of interculturalists, what I have elsewhere a little facetiously
referred to as the culture shock prevention industry; and so on. We debated
the characteristics of multilocal field studies fairly intensely among ourselves
and with other colleagues, and a book some 10 of us put together on our
projects and experiences, particularly for teaching purposes, may have been
the first more extended treatment of the topic (Hannerz, 2001a). As far as
I am concerned myself, perhaps lagging a little behind my more quicklymoving colleagues and graduate students, my involvement with multi-site
work has been primarily through a study of the work of news media foreign
correspondents which I will draw on here.2
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spend most of a life time in a single posting, while others are rotated every
three years or so, between countries and continents? When large parts of
the world get only brief visits by correspondents, described on such occasions as parachutists or firemen, and only when there is a crisis to cover,
how does this shape their and our view of these lands?
I am not going to devote my space here to any great extent, however, to
discuss the specifics of my own project. I will rather try, against the background of this experience and that of some of my colleagues, to spell out a
few of the issues which characteristically arise in multi-site ethnography, and
ways in which it is likely to differ from the established model of anthropological field study, as I have let the latter be represented above by EvansPritchard and his half-century old formulation. For I believe that in
arguments over the worth of multilocal work, it is not always made entirely
transparent how it relates to the assumptions based on classic understandings of being there.
Constituting the multi-site field
In a way, one might argue, the term multilocal is a little misleading, for
what current multilocal projects have in common is that they draw on some
problem, some formulation of a topic, which is significantly translocal, not
to be confined within some single place. The sites are connected with one
another in such ways that the relationships between them are as important
for this formulation as the relationships within them; the fields are not some
mere collection of local units. One must establish the translocal linkages,
and the interconnections between those and whatever local bundles of
relationships which are also part of the study.4 In my foreign correspondent
study, a major such linkage was obviously between the correspondents
abroad and the editors at home. But then there was also the fact that the
correspondents looked sideways, toward other news sites and postings, and
sometimes moved on to these. They often knew colleagues in some number
of other such sites, having been stationed in the same place some time earlier,
or by meeting somewhere on one or more of those fireman excursions
which are a celebrated part of the public imagery of foreign correspondence,
or by working for the same organization. In some loose sense, there is a
world-wide community of foreign correspondents, connected through
local and long-distance ties.
These linkages make the multi-site study something different from a mere
comparative study of localities (which in one classical mode of anthropological comparison was based precisely on the assumption that such
linkages did not exist). Yet certainly comparisons are often built into multisite research. My colleague Christina Garsten (1994), in her study of three
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national election was called there, and while that could have been an attractive field experience, I suspected it would be a time when correspondents
would have little time for me. Then the second time an ailment of my own
made the streets of Delhi seem a less appealing prospect. To begin with, I
had not expected to include Tokyo in my study, although it turned out to
be a very good choice. But in no small part I went there because I had an
invitation to a research workshop in Japan at a time when I could also stay
on for some research.
Questions of breadth and relationships
Evans-Pritchards anthropologist, again, would study the entire culture
and social life of the people assigned to him. Being around for at least a
year, he could make observations during all seasons, and he would work in
the local language (although it would probably be true that it was a
language which in large part he had to learn during that year). And then,
having spent, everything included, a decade of his life on that study, one
could hope that there would also be time left for getting to know another
people.
This is the kind of image of real field work which tends to worry current
practitioners of, and commentators on, multi-site studies in anthropology.
Compared to such standards, are these studies inevitably of dubious
quality? If you are involved with two, three or even more places in much
the same time span that classical anthropology would allow for one, which
for various practical reasons may now be the case, what can you actually
do? I do not want to assert that no problems of depth and breadth arise,
that no dilemmas are inevitably there to be faced. Yet it is important that
we realize how one site in a multi-site study now differs from the single site
of that mid-20th century anthropologist.
I was in Jerusalem and Johannesburg and Tokyo, and more marginally
in several other places, but I was clearly not trying to study the entire
culture and social life of these three cities. I was merely trying to get to
know some number of the foreign newspeople stationed in them, and the
local ecology of their activities. In fact, I was not trying hard to get to know
these individuals particularly intimately either; what mattered to me about
their childhood or family lives or personal interests was how these might
affect their foreign correspondent work.
Anthropologists often take a rather romantic view of their fields and their
relationships to people there. They find it difficult to describe their informants as informants because they would rather see them as friends, and they
may be proud to announce that they have been adopted into families and
kin groups not only because it suggests something about their skills as
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field workers, but also because it carries a moral value. They have surrendered to the field, and have been in a way absorbed by it. (Evans-Pritchard
[1951: 79] shared similar sentiments: An anthropologist has failed unless,
when he says goodbye to the natives, there is on both sides the sorrow of
parting.) Perhaps it is for similar reasons that I much prefer describing my
encounters with correspondents as conversations, suggesting a more
personal quality, rather than as interviews, although I certainly also want
to convey the idea of only rather mildly structured exchanges, with room
for spontaneous flow and unexpected turns.
There is no doubt a time factor involved in how relationships evolve. Yet
I believe most multi-site studies really also have built-in assumptions about
segmented lives, where some aspect (work, ethnicity or something else) is
most central to the line of inquiry, and other aspects are less so. The ethnographer may be interested in the embeddedness of a particular line of belief
or activity in a wider set of circumstances, but this hardly amounts to some
holistic ambition. It is a pleasure if one discovers a kindred soul, but one
keeps hardnosedly in mind what more precisely one is after, and what sorts
of relationships are characteristic of the field itself, as one delineates it.
To some extent personalizing encounters in the modern, multi-site field
comes not so much from deepening particular interactions as from the
identification of common acquaintances from placing the ethnographer in
the translocal network of relationships. Meeting with foreign correspondents, I have sensed that it is often appreciated when it turns out that I have
also talked to friends and colleagues of theirs in some other part of the
world; perhaps more recently than they have. Or even to their editor at
home. As I have tried to include informants from the same news organization in different postings, to develop my understanding of its operations and
as a kind of triangulation, such connections can be discovered fairly often
and easily. It is a matter of establishing personal credentials.
Site temporalities
Anthropologys classic image of field work also includes an assumption
about the durability of fields, and the involvement of natives in them,
relative to the length of the ethnographers field stay. At least implicitly there
is the notion that the ethnographer, alone a transient, has to develop in that
year or two the understandings which match what the locals assemble
during a life time. That year, moreover, covers the most predictable variation that one finds in local life: that of seasons.
Obviously the people we are concerned with in present day field studies
tend mostly to be less dependent on seasons and their cycles of activity
on planting and harvesting, or on moving herds to greener pastures. But in
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This can be as true in single-site as in multi-site studies, but it problematizes the relationship between native and ethnographer knowledge. Do
things become easier for field workers if their informants also find the world
opaque, or more difficult as they have to understand not only the structure
of knowledge such as it is, but also the nature and social organization of
ignorance and misunderstandings? In any case, we sense that we have
moved away from the classic field work model.
Materials: interviews, observations, etc.
Again, in my foreign correspondent project, interviews, be they long,
informal and loosely ordered, were a large part of my field materials. I did
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sit in on a daily staff meeting of the foreign desk at one newspaper, and
went on a reporting trip to the Palestinian West Bank with one correspondent. More materials of these and other kinds would no doubt have been
of value, but for practical reasons I did not pursue some such possibilities,
using the time at my disposal rather to ensure diversity through the interviews. (I tried to include different kinds of media, although with an
emphasis on print correspondents, and I wanted to include a reasonably
broad range of nationalities.) Also, as in Jerusalem, Johannesburg and
Tokyo, and to a more limited extent in a couple of other places, I met with
correspondents as they were immersed in the activities of a particular beat,
and the interviews could be detailed and concrete.
Probably the time factor has a part in making many multi-site studies
rather more dependent on interviews than single-site studies. If the
researchers have to handle more places in the time classic field work would
devote to one, they may be more in a hurry. Language skills also probably
play a part. In interviews, it is more likely that you can manage in one or
two languages. My conversations with foreign correspondents were in
English, except for those with fellow Scandinavians. In those sites, for many
of the correspondents particularly those who were expatriates, rotating
between assignments English was their working language as well. George
Marcus (1995: 101) concludes that most multi-sited field studies so far have
been carried out in monolingual, mostly English-speaking settings.
This is surely not to say that multi-site ethnography must rely entirely on
interviewing and informant work (in which case some might even feel that
in the field phase, it is less than fully ethnographic the ethnographic
tendency may become more obvious in the style of writing); this still
depends on the nature of research topics. Studying ballet companies, Helena
Wulff could view performances and sit in on endless rehearsals. Although
she could not very well participate in the public performances, her own
dance background meant that she still had a particular empathetic insight
into the more practical, bodily aspects of dancing lives.
But then if pure observation, or participant observation, has a more
limited part in some multi-site studies than in the classic model of anthropological field work, it may not have so much to do with sheer multi-sitedness
as with the fact that they tend to involve settings of modernity. There are
surely a great many activities where it is worthwhile to be immediately
present, even actively engaged, but also others which may be monotonous,
isolated, and difficult to access. What do you do when your people spend
hours alone at a desk, perhaps concentrating on a computer screen?
At the same time, whatever you may now do along more classic ethnographic lines can be, often must be, combined with other kinds of sources
and materials. Hugh Gusterson (1997: 116), moving on personally from an
ethnography of one California nuclear weapons laboratory to a study of the
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horizons. But then ethnography is an art of the possible, and it may be better
to have some of it than none at all. And so we do it now and then, fitting
it into our lives when we have a chance.
Often, no doubt, this will be a matter of being there and again! and
again! returning to a known although probably changing scene. Multi-site
ethnography, however, may fit particularly well into that more drawn-out,
off-and-on kind of scheduling, as the latter does not only allow us to think
during times in between about the materials we have, but also about where
to go next. It could just be rather impractical to move hurriedly directly
from one field site to the next, according to a plan allowing for little alteration along the way.
Concluding one of his contributions to a recent British volume on
anthropological field work Oxford-based, and thus also in a way updating
the classic Evans-Pritchard model detailing his own enduring East African
commitment, David Parkin (2000: 107) notes that practical circumstances
such as the growing number of anthropologists, and governmental financial
restrictions on purely academic research, are factors which probably matter
more to changes in styles of doing research than does intellectual debate;
and he suggests that if more ethnographers now actually spread their field
work over many shorter periods than do it in the classic way of larger blocks
of time, that is one such change. That sounds very likely, for again, ethnography is an art of the possible. Yet this is not to say that intellectual
argument over changes and variations in the conduct of ethnography is
useless. Perhaps these notes on experiences of multi-site field work can
contribute to such debate.
Acknowledgements
This article was originally presented at the Ethnografeast Conference held at
the University of California, Berkeley, 1214 September 2002. I am grateful for
comments by the participants, and to my colleagues in the Department of Social
Anthropology, Stockholm University, especially those on whose work I have also
drawn here: Ulf Bjrklund, Tommy Dahln, Christina Garsten and Helena
Wulff.
Notes
1 Being there is, for one thing, the title of the first chapter in Clifford Geertzs
(1988) study of anthropological writing, where another chapter is indeed
devoted to Evans-Pritchard. It is also the title of another British anthropologist, C.W. Watsons (1999) collection of accounts of field work, half a
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References
Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Bjrklund, Ulf (2001) Att studera en diaspora: den armeniska frskingringen
som flt, in Ulf Hannerz (ed.) Flera flt i ett, pp. 86107. Stockholm:
Carlssons.
Dahln, Tommy (1997) Among the Interculturalists. Stockholm Studies in
Social Anthropology 38. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1951) Social Anthropology. London: Cohen & West.
Ferguson, James (1999) Expectations of Modernity. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Garsten, Christina (1994) Apple World. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology 33. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.
Geertz, Clifford (1988) Works and Lives. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
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ULF HANNERZ is Pro f essor o f Social A n t hro p olo gy, St ockh olm
University, Sw eden. He has tau g h t at several A merican, Euro pean
an d A ustralian u niversities an d is a f ormer Chair o f t he Euro pean
Associatio n o f Social A n t hro p olo gists. His research has been
especially in urban an t hro p olo gy, media an t hro p olo gy an d
transnatio nal cult ural processes, an d his most recen t b o oks in
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