multi-sited ethnography

is a method of ethnographically constructing aspects of the system itself through the associations and connections among sites that one posits.

It develops instead a strategy or design of research that acknowledges macrotheoretical theories and narratives of the world system but does not rely on them for the contextual architecture framing a set of subjects. This mobile ethnography takes unexpected trajectories in tracing a cultural formation across and within multiple sites of activity that destabilizes the distinction, say, between 'lifeworld' and 'system' (49) by means of which much ethnography has been conceived. Just as it investigates and ethnographically constructs the lifeworlds of variously situated subjects, it also ethnographically constructs aspects of the system itself through the associations and connections among sites that it posits' (Marcus 1995).

is a method that stipulates some sort of total world system, but it does not do so as some kind of opportunistically constituted ethnographic site.

Thus, the multi-sited ethnography is content to stipulate some sort of total world system as long as the terms of any particular macro construct of it is not allowed to stand for the context of ethnographic work which becomes opportunistically constituted by the path or trajectory it takes in its design of sites' (Marcus 1995).

multi sited ethnography, n.All

multi sited ethnography