Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
96
local and national processes and policies of global restructuring that fundamentally influence the
local reality and people’s everyday life. While recognizing the usefulness of data collected
through non classical anthropological methods, these works continued to draw on the traditional
ethnographic methodology. As testified by the works cited above and by an increasing number of
others (such as, for example, Armstrong 1998, Gill 2000 and 2001, Bardhoshi 2010, Lindsay
2011, Mollica 2012, Engebresten 2012), long-term field research in a specific site is a
sine qua
non
; participant observation and in-depth case-studies are made possible by the ‘fine gained daily
interactions’ (Falzon 2009) and the relations of trust established with local people (Pardo 2000
and 2001).
Attention to the relationship between micro- and macro-processes should not be confused
with the methodological arguments that, in the 1990s, questioned the validity of traditional
fieldwork. This is the case, for example, of the kind of a ‘multi-sited’ ethnography proposed by
scholars like George F. Marcus. Having argued that many contemporary social phenomena –
such as globalization and transnationalism – could not be accounted for by focusing on a
contained space, Marcus (1995) suggested that anthropologists should study the ‘connections
between places’ (Falzon 2009: 5). A major criticism of this approach is that, in their ambition to
develop a holistic understanding of supra-local processes of globalization and transnationalism,
post-modernist advocates of multi-sited ethnography have often produced ‘thin’, superficial
ethnographic accounts, to the detriment of an in-depth understanding and analysis of the local
reality (on this debate, see, for example, Falzon ed. 2009). Furthermore, Hannerz (2009) has
rightly questioned the novelty of this kind of multi-sited approach, arguing that, in the mid- and
late-twentieth century, all too often new fashions and vocabularies have been presented as
innovation. The Marxist and post-modernist critical stance of this new generation of
anthropologists towards the past of the discipline not only led to questioning the validity of
traditional fieldwork but, as Hannerz notes, also produced a ‘mass-amnesia’ in the wider
academic community. Since the dawn of the discipline anthropologists have carried out fieldwork
not just from the veranda and have engaged in some form of ‘multi-sited’ investigation. More
recently, as Pardo’s work shows (see, for example, 1996 and 2012), anthropological research
carried out applying traditional methodology, while based in a specific urban area, offer an
empirical understanding of the broader context and of the attendant sociological connections
through the ethnographic study of local people’s links throughout the rest of the city and beyond.
Pardo makes it quite clear, and in fine detail, how, as a participant observer, he ‘followed’ his
informants in their dealings within and without the neighbourhood, thus providing an in-depth,
articulated understanding of the ways in which local people relate to the wider social, economic
and political system that stimulated a correspondingly complex analytical and theoretical effort.
Similarly, Seligmann’s study (2004-2012) of street vendors in urban Peru shows that multi-sited
fieldwork has played a fundamental role in tracking intertwined micro-, meso- and macro-
processes in the Andean economy. These are just two examples of the kind of multi-sited
ethnography that at once offers an in-depth understanding of how people relate to the wider
