Globalisation, Migration, and Multi-Sited Ethnography

Classical anthropological fieldwork, as established by Malinowski and Boas, assumed a bounded field site — a single village, island, or community — where the ethnographer could plausibly claim to observe 'a culture' in its entirety. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, anthropologists increasingly recognised that this model could not adequately capture phenomena that were inherently transnational: labour migration, diaspora communities, global commodity chains, and transnational media flows that connected multiple sites simultaneously and could not be understood by studying any single location in isolation. George Marcus's influential 1995 formulation of 'multi-sited ethnography' proposed that ethnographers should instead 'follow the thing' — a commodity, a person, a metaphor, a conflict, a life story — physically tracing its movement across multiple field sites connected by the same social process.

Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large (1996) provided an influential theoretical vocabulary for this globalised anthropology, proposing five overlapping 'scapes' — ethnoscapes (flows of people: migrants, tourists, refugees), mediascapes (flows of images and information), technoscapes (flows of technology), financescapes (flows of capital), and ideoscapes (flows of political ideologies) — that together constitute the disjunctive, non-uniform texture of global cultural flow, deliberately replacing older centre-periphery diffusion models with a picture of multiple, uneven, and reciprocal flows moving in many directions at once, not simply from a Western 'core' outward.

Diaspora studies, drawing on foundational work by Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993), reconceived cultural identity itself as constituted through movement and dispersal rather than rootedness in a single homeland: Gilroy argued that the modern Black Atlantic world — encompassing Africa, the Caribbean, Britain, and the Americas — produced a genuinely transnational culture forged through slavery, migration, and continuous circulation of music, political thought, and religious practice, challenging both ethnic-absolutist accounts of national culture and simple assumptions that diaspora communities merely preserve an unchanged 'homeland' culture in exile.

The anthropology of migration has documented how transnational migrants increasingly sustain what Nina Glick Schiller and others termed 'transnationalism from below': dense, ongoing social, economic, and political ties across two or more nation-states simultaneously, exemplified by remittance economies that can constitute a substantial share of some sending countries' GDP, hometown associations that fund infrastructure projects in migrants' places of origin, and dual or multiple civic and political participation that unsettles the assumption, common to earlier assimilationist immigration theory, that migrants inevitably shift primary loyalty and identity fully to a single receiving society.

Methodologically, multi-sited and transnational ethnography raised difficult practical and epistemological questions that anthropologists continue to debate: how can a single researcher achieve the deep, long-term immersion of classical fieldwork across multiple dispersed sites without sacrificing depth for breadth; how should researchers handle radically different regulatory, linguistic, and safety conditions across sites; and whether 'following the thing' risks losing analytic focus compared to Malinowski's single intensively studied community — debates that mirror, in a globalised register, the discipline's much older tension between holistic local depth and comparative generalising ambition.