Collaboratory in Critical Security Methods
The International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies is an ESRC funded project (RES-810-21-0072)
Multi-sited Ethnography (Marcus, 1995)
This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the "local" and the "global," the "lifeworld" and the "system." Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several "tracking" strategies that shape multi-sited ethnographic research are considered. The review concludes with observations about the reflexive persona of the ethnographer as "circumstantial activist" in which methodological discussions about multi-sited research in anthropology are now being developed.
Hannah Hughes says
This was a useful article, thanks Lara. I too will leave the question of situatedness, it seems he bases much of this discussion on Haraway (1989), so perhaps it is best left for the horse’s mouth as she is on our list.
In terms of security, and here I am thinking particularly of the speech-act approach as that is what I am most familiar with, Marcus’s contribution is most apparent in encouraging a multi-sited investigation, which all ready takes us one step towards being able to situate and contrast different practices of constructing existential threats. Previously, I investigated the UK government’s role in conceptualising climate change as a security threat, which culminated in the UK raising climate change as an issue for debate in the UN Security Council in 2007. In light of Marcus’s discussion on “knowing the language” (100-1), I would have paid greater attention to the differences in language used to frame the climate change problematic and how this translated between sites. Although I had noticed that securitizing actors constructed the threat according to the audience, I did not give this “threat translation” much significance—one would expect the appealer to relate the threat to the audience and their situation—but the necessity of translating the frame of the problem may tell us something about how security operates, why it is brought into operation, and the limits of its effect.
The limits of its effect, brings me to the second contribution I think Marcus makes to a discussion on multi-sited research. There is a point at which framing climate change as an existential threat ceases to have an effect. Connecting those spaces in which framing climate change as a security threat produces similar, recognizable effects may be important and this is where Marcus’s discussion on following the metaphor (108-9) takes us. This not only helps us to think about what joins these sites together and what makes security effective in these locations, it also reminds us that fields have limits—security ceases to have an effect—and therefore, security must be reinserted into other situations that jostle alongside it in the struggle to conceptualise the social and political meaning of issues like climate change.
In regards to what I am working on now, I am at the “groping my way” stage, attempting to construct the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as an object of study and understand something (anything) about how this institution is conceptualising climate change and how knowledge and power operates in this process. I think Marcus (105-6) has been helpful here, and as in the case of security, I think one of the important elements of the project will be following the people—the experts—in order to translate their discourse and practice as they move between different sites. Many of these sites are themselves a product of the IPCC and even the traditional research facilities and research agendas are being shaped by this institution. The IPCC’s meetings and plenary sessions remove experts from the disciplinary fields that constitute them as authoritative voices on the climate change problematic, and put them in new sites, which do not yet have solidified ways of being: metaphors with known effects; routines practiced unconsciously. These are sites that the participants themselves, which include those from political, economic, and scientific fields, are in the process of co-constituting.
The conceptual approach informing how I construct the IPCC as an object of study is strongly influenced by Pierre Bourdieu and his notions of field, habitus, symbolic capital and symbolic power. However, as others taking this conceptual path in International Politics have observed, these notions were developed by Bourdieu within his own situated research position, which focused on relations of domination in particular fields, and although in later commentary he turned his attention to globalisation he did not conduct intensive field research as he had in previous (national) realms. I think Marcus’s article on multi-sited ethnography compliments Bourdieu’s conceptual approach well, although others may disagree, and offers some initial thoughts for re-thinking the notion of an international field and the relations of association between different sites that better captures the international space and time that they span. A bit of multi-sited ethnography is perhaps exactly what my project needs!
16 April 2010, 11:37
Lara Coleman says
I had mixed feelings about suggesting this as very much focused on ethnography. However, its seems to have been quite influential amongst IR people studying situated practices (I’m thinking of e.g. Carol Cohn’s work on US national security discourses as well as several conversations I’ve had) and I think it could at least be a useful starting point for some of our discussion areas.
I was introduced to Marcus’s work at a point in my PhD when I knew that I wanted to theorize resistance by exploring how what is called “anti-globalisation” protest, “global resistance” is produced, normalised, managed, repressed through interrelated techniques of inclusion and inclusion. I also knew that I need to do this by means of situated empirical work, tracing the trajectory of specific mobilisations against multinational corporations in Colombia and elsewhere, to put this thing called the “anti-globalisation” movement “through the grid of practices” so to speak. But I was frustrated by much of the conventional literature on fieldwork/ethnography. Situated analyses were almost always presented as bounded “cases” of something else, instances of some sort of global phenomenon.
So, I found Marcus helpful for thinking about studying very specific and situated practices with an eye to how they might be invested by more widely-dispersed logics, more global forms of domination (in the sense of a what Foucault called an ascending analysis of power). In practical terms, I felt he outlined a research practice that makes it possible to construct a sense of more global relations from within particular sites and situations, without relying on a “fiction of the whole”, a dichotomy between macro and micro, but instead collapsing the global into the local. Marcus himself sees this in terms of “the world system” but the sort conceptual move that he talks about is, I think, also compatible with a move from specific, situated techniques and rationalities to broader regimes of practices, processes of ordering, relations of domination. Instead of starting with case studies, he talks about allowing an object of study to emerge from juxtapositions of sites and situations, which is more or less how I ended up framing my own fieldwork - as an exercise in mapping out a research terrain as I moved between sites, forged relationships, traced connections and juxtaposed the different techniques of government, modalities of power and forms of normalization that I found at each site.
I was less convinced by Marcus’s discussion of techniques for moving between sites. I found it helpful to some extent - at least for having a sense of how people have approached/constructed different objects of study. I like the idea of mapping out a research terrain by following connections and associations between sites but I’m not at all sure about the need for an explicit logic of connection between sites to be posited in advance, which is what I take Marcus to be saying. I wonder how this might lead to a reproduction of pre-conceived categories and apparently obvious objects of study…. In my own fieldwork I started out doing something like “following the conflict” (tracing a boycott of Coca-Cola from Britain, to Colombia and beyond) but soon found that I was directed to other sites, other struggles as a consequence of my own situatedness and positionality within a network of social organisations - everyday life took over and in the end this proved to be a more interesting and productive way of resolving the question of which connections and associations to follow.
I also find Marcus quite unsatisfying on the question of one’s own situatedness but I’ll leave it there for now and maybe say something about that later.
15 April 2010, 10:42
Xavier Guillaume says
I found this article to be a good starting point to think about situatedness despite some of the limitations Lara highlighted within the field of ethnography (as far as I know it). First, it is clearly a reflection on the different sites within which individuals and groups evolve. In contemporary societies, one cannot imagine individuals or groups evolving in single 'sites' (say the village or the tribe, whatever these terms actually mean); the social agents have a mobility, ergo are situated differently depending on 'where' they socially or materially are, that needs reckoning. The idea of a 'mobile ethnography' (96) reflects that social agents have a form of social mobility, social being taken here to mean the multiplicity and variety of social interactions and roles to be taken or confronted with, that needs to be addressed epistemologically and methodologically by researchers. So the first situatedness is the one of the 'subject', for lack of better term.
Second, there is the situatedness of the research and the researcher; I agree with Lara that Marcus is a bit weak on the latter topic (the end of the article) and tends to enter some generalities about the researcher as having to be 'constantly mobile' etc. (113). Then I found his input in regards to the situatedness of the research more interesting. I take from him that in order to tackle this social mobility, a researcher has to pay as much attention to the movements between sites than to the differentiated sites per se. The language he uses is that of 'relationship', 'translation', 'association', 'chains', 'paths', 'threads', 'conjunctions', 'juxtapositions' between/of locations (102; 105). I conclude that we should understand situatedness in two different settings: within a 'site' (a compounded 'place' or 'situation' within which a social agent is enacting a specific sociality) and between 'sites' (the process by which a social agent is mobile between 'sites'); i.e. the wandering is as important as the wanderer. I take the different 'locus' – the people, the thing, the metaphor, the plot, the life, the conflict (106-110) – to be methodological strategies/threads to get a hold of the wandering and that to focus on such or such is a matter of the research question at stake. I am not too sure, however, if those are the best categories to understand the wandering beyond understanding the different sites through which a specific wanderer (the people, the thing, the plot, etc.) goes through. I believe categories such as transport, control, consumption, translocality (i.e. complex activities or processes) are better suited to follow and understand the wandering. The question being, from a methodological perspective, to 'operationalize' these categories into methodological strategies (or tactics) in order to transcribe the multiplicities of sites and paths, their connections, etc. according to a specific question.
19 April 2010, 17:18
Jef Huysmans says
I liked this article, not because of answers it gives to the question of situated knowledge but because of its setting up of the key issues. The piece maps really well some of the central moves that we are interested in and especially raises the question of how to connect situated practices to global dimensions, i.e. to other practices and sites.
The first is to look for a form of critical analysis of situated practice that does not depend on drawing connections between a global system or totality and a local practice or between a system and life world.
Secondly, with the loss of systemic notions of domination, the focus on the subaltern in critical ethnography loses its privileged status. There is a need to rethink the construction of power asymmetries.
The third is that the search for situated knowledge that differs from the above is that the world has become fragmented thus making the local its core – a conception of local that cannot be easily grasped through a contrast and relation between system and lifeworld.
Fourthly, in this fragmented world there is not something like ‘a global system’. The global is always an emerging dimension that exists only in the connections among sites that are made by the objects and ideas one ‘follows’ in the analysis.
Finally, the methodological question of what objects of study allow an analyst to trace connections in a fragmented world.
I agree with many of the comments made so far but I am very sympathetic to his insistence on the need to identify specific objects of research that allow to study chains, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of sites.
One of the questions that his focus on sites – multiple sites – opens for me is that while he is strongly bound to a spatial logic, it is clear that situated knowledge will often depend on it being a mobile object; it is its mobility – movement from site to site - that is in many cases central for drawing relations between practices. Mobility also suggests that situated knowledge has a temporal logic build in: many study objects imply moving from one situation to another. The question that arises here is whether there is an important difference between study objects that allow the juxtaposition of various sites by existing simultaneously in various sites and objects that connect by moving in succession from one site to the other over time.
Like others here, I was not convinced that his ethnographer-activist solved the problem of the loss of a capacity to critique following the loss of systemic notions of domination. For me, it is all a little too SELF-oriented, too much about renegotiating ones identities in different sites.
Here the question arises whether it is possible to study claims and practices of ‘justice’ in a way that allows for being a more activist scholar and that prevents us falling back into systemic accounts of explotation. And this is one of the crucial questions: how can one by critical without assuming some global (total) system of dominations Boltansky and Thevenot should be interesting here but I am sure many of the articles somehow will explicitly or implicitly touch on this issue.
29 April 2010, 22:21
Manuel Mireanu says
As a starting point, I think this article is excellent for what we set out to do. As all of you agreed, it lays out the main themes, tracks, and also potential difficulties in grasping the situatedness of knowledge(s) and (in)security. For me at least, the most important concept in this respect is what Marcus calls the ‘system awareness’. Intuitively, I can understand this as a form of knowledge that subjects have regarding the wider conditions of their existence. As such, it seems very useful in untangling a number of conceptual difficulties that we may encounter in discussing situatedness, such as the relationship between everyday life and broader discourses, possibilities of agents exercising power, dominance and resistance, and so on. However, I feel that even if for Marcus this concept is central in his vision of a multi-sited approach to ethnography, he leaves it under defined and underdeveloped. Perhaps in some later writings it has been further explained, but in this piece at least, it somehow does not manage to get through as a clear cut concept. The system awareness of actors is at the one time the keystone for articulating a multi-sited project, where one (somehow) moves from one site to another, following metaphors, conflicts etc, and where one manages to detect similarities and parallels to ‘another related or worlds apart site’ (p. 111); and at the same time, it is vaguely defined as ‘a sensed, partially articulated awareness of specific other sites and agents to which particular subjects have (not always tangible) relationships’ (ibid.). Leaving aside the circularity of the definition, in which ‘awareness’ itself becomes an elusive word (is it knowledge, is it consciousness, information, or is it just a vague intuition?), I did not get the sense of what is the ‘system’ here. Is the mere awareness of other sites and agents to which I am related enough to make me aware of something with its own rules, functions, and that is greater than the sum of its parts – what we usually call a system? I might be misled here, but I found this as an important problem that we can attempt to untangle, especially since the concept itself has the potential to be highly useful.
The second idea that I found useful is the collapsing of the global into local, which erases the strict boundaries between ‘local’ and ‘global’ as understood by traditional ethnography – not to mention International relations. This has been already discussed here. In my own research and future projects, this idea may help me at least distinguish how international or transnational phenomena can be detected and analysed at a local level, in quotidian practices. It may allow me to assess how wider security discourses, institutions and even speech acts are able to influence and to be influenced by local security practices. However, as this idea is clearly dependent on the concept of system awareness, or at least in strict connection to it, I think we need to spend some time in better articulating them. Collapsing global into local opens the possibility of analyzing systemic features (potentialities, powers) in daily actions and agents with low social or political capital. Yet we need to be clear on how exactly does the system awareness work to connect these features to agents’ actions and non-actions.
My third concern is with the idea of moving between sites. As Lara suggested, there might not always be an a priori logic of connection between sites. In fact, this may even run counter to Marcus’ idea of a field of research as being generated and developed through various juxtapositions, in which both the researcher and the agents are differently situated. If we are to study different sites, and how subjects and objects have various positions and relations between them, and moreover how the sites themselves are connected through that system awareness that he is talking about, the transition – or if you want, development – from one site to another, has to be open, indeterminate, even spontaneous. Here I also converge with Xavier’s concerns about the categories through which we capture the ‘wandering’ between sites.
Fourth, of course, the entire idea of how multi-sitedness is more useful than single-site research should not be taken so easily for granted. Even if the concept of system awareness would be better refined and defined, I still find it problematic that different sites, within different territorial and temporary logics, may have an intrinsic connection between them, or between agents situated within them. How are these connections to be detected? By an authoritative posited intervention of the researcher, or by what is perceived to be a similarity of problems, actions and practices of agents, or by what may be seen as communications between sites? This is all problematic, and I can think of so many examples where local events or practices are almost entirely autonomous from one another. Moreover, this autonomy is not just an empirical fact, but also, if you want, a normative position that a researcher should have. I mean of course the respect for the originality and individuality of each site, event, and phenomena. Unless we posit a universal global system or structure to which everything and everyone is connected (and of course, we can do that, but what for?) (this is Jef’s concern as well, as far as I understood), I think that to a large extent the autonomy of agents situated within a certain site should be emphasized. This is also one of the arguments of the ‘Colectivo Situaciones’ articles suggested by Lara – the impossibility of authentic communication between locations, practices and struggles.
Finally, I think we should discuss a bit – now or later – what do all these ideas and themes that we all outlined mean for critical security. Certainly, we agree that security has to be studied as a set of practices embedded in other actions and situations. Also, we might agree that security practices may not be always performed by agents with high social capital or high positions within ‘the system’, since the borders between quotidian and exceptional situations, and between locally embedded and globally determined events, are contested and blurred. The awareness of systemic opportunities and constraints may also have a great effect on how security practices and discourses are being played out, reinforced or resisted
4 May 2010, 13:41
Jef Huysmans says
In reply to Manuel's last point: once we have read/discussed a few more articles we could blog around a particular security questions (an issue that pops up in the news) trying to formulate how a 'situated' perspective would approach the event and what it has to say about it.
14 May 2010, 11:36
Natalie Konopinski says
I enjoyed re-reading Marcus' article - although as with many review pieces a sense of the issues at stake (here multi-sited ethnography/'situated' knowledge)is often clearer when engaging with some of the original work. The Emily Martin book he discusses is a good case in point.
My own fieldwork was multi-sited to some extent, although less by design than by following my nose and local and national security practices and events as they unfolded in Tel Aviv. To follow on from Jef's comment, it would be very interesting to blog around a particular security issue in the news - some of my own fieldwork involved following national conflict by moving back and forth between print media, tv, websites, political discourse and discussions and debate over the newspapers at my
neighbourhood cafe. Marcus prompted me to think again about the sites I worked in and with, how things could have been done differently and how similar security events and issues would be approached from a critical security perspective.
In the meantime I look forward to reading the B&T article.
7 June 2010, 18:40
Christian Bueger says
As a latecomer to the discussion, let me start in saying that re-reading this piece was a pleasure, for at least two highly personal reasons, firstly, although I have an ongoing admiration for ethnographic work, reading a text likes that clarifies the differences to political studies (World system theory! The obsession with the local! The subaltern!); secondly, although ethnography is hailed by many to be some sort of sheet anchor in a raging postmodern sea, I find many issues not sufficiently considered. Much has been said about the piece already, and I hope in adding my own nuggets of wisdom, to be not too repetitive.
The text is a nice combination of a menu of choice (what techniques can I apply to do multi-sited research?) and nicely to quote, manifesto like statements (of the character multi-sited ethnography “is” X and Y – which might explain why it is highly quoted).
The list of techniques is particularly useful for the security studies student. Indeed we can follow those people we assume they “make” security; we can follow things, which are assumed to be threatening (a weapon) or a thing carrying securityness (a military doctrine perhaps); we can follow the metaphor of security and investigate how it is employed and revised (which is what many security studies people have done); we might want to follow securitization narratives (e.g. the Global War on Terror) and threat images (e.g. transnational organized crime); we may follow the career of security makers (e.g. a security expert) and reconstruct the habitus of a security profession; we may trace struggles over securitizations (e.g. the securitization of migration), or we may look at distinct sites and investigate how they get connected through security to others (such as the European Commission). Indeed, this list implies that in Critical Security Studies de facto much of multi-sited ethnography is being done, although it is hardly conceived as such.
There are several instance, and this might be part of the ethnographers style (or not), where Markus appears to rather use a language of obfuscation then clarification. Why so many terms, metaphors, neologisms? What do we make out of an advice such as: “Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography”? While I am a big fan of scientific prose (and the French tradition), the language employed is especially dissatisfying when it comes to the key term: the site. What a site is can only be determined in the act of ethnographic observation. Granted. But don’t we need a pre-understanding of what a site may be? Markus refers to locations primarily, but is multi-sited than no more than multi-location (and multi-lingual) research? Certainly, we require a better notion of site, than exemplified by Markus.
To continue a critical reading, another point struck me, and this is one that security studies scholars have been especially sensitive to. Leaving Markus’ “the scholar as activist” rhetoric aside, for him situatedness of the researcher (renegotiation of identity, etc) and his political/activist role appears to end the moment writing starts (cp 112). Yet, as we meanwhile know well presenting scientific results through writing, publishing and other forms of dissemination is consequential and political. It requires equally reflexivity, and indeed considerations of situatedness have to be extended in this regard.
13 May 2010, 18:06