Article written by 2009 DPDF Critical Agrarian Studies Fellow Pablo Lapegna, featured in the Journal of World Systems Research, Volume 51, No. 1:

How does ethnography come to terms with our current “global condition”?
Being a method characterized by its in-depth knowledge of a bounded space, how
does ethnography cope with a world scale? How does the “global condition”
affect the definitions of key ethnographic concepts? In this article, I first
reconstruct ethnographic debates regarding the status of “the global,” showing
how ethnography can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the binary
global/local. Then I review two projects that study global processes from an
ethnographic point of view: multi-site ethnography (Marcus 1995) and global
ethnography (Burawoy et al. 2000). I compare these two approaches along four
dimensions: site, context, research design and reflexivity. I argue that while
multi-site ethnography and global ethnography are often used interchangeably,
each ultimately presents distinctive answers to key questions for the ethnographic
study of global processes.

Publication Details

Title
Ethnographers of the World… United? Current Debates on the Ethnographic Study of “Globalization”
Authors
Lapegna, Pablo
Publisher
American Sociological Association
Publish Date
June 2009
Citation
Lapegna, Pablo, Ethnographers of the World… United? Current Debates on the Ethnographic Study of "Globalization" (American Sociological Association, June 2009).
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