Expanding Sites: The Question of ‘Depth’ Explored

Book chapter

Horst, Cindy (2009) Expanding Sites: The Question of ‘Depth’ Explored, in Multi-Sited Ethnography. Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Social Research. Aldershot: Routledge (119–134).

Publisher's website

A wide-spread observation in existing literature on multi-sited ethnography, is that multi-sitedness is inevitable in dealing with the realities of many people’s lives today but also compromises the anthropologist’ ability to conduct indepth, holistic fieldwork. However, in a multi-sited approach the ‘fieldsite’ is perceived in a transnational way, which questions common assumptions about what is indepth and what is not. Furthermore, most interesting multi-sited research that has been conducted, is based on indepth fieldwork amongst one ethnic group, where sites have been added over a period of time. In this chapter, I will argue that, when doing fieldwork on transnational networks and flows amongst members of the same community in different contexts, depth and multi-sitedness can well be combined. A review can be found on http://www.etmu.fi/fjem/pdf/FJEM_1_2010.pdf, pg 70.

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