Scaling the Ethnographic
As disciplines other than anthropology increasingly look to ethnography as a method of research, that method is itself going through significant transformations. Anthropologists are now conducting ethnographic fieldwork that would have been inconceivable only fifteen years ago: in federal reserves, labs, colonial archives, and submarines, on the future, documents, organs, and individual biographies, and with insects and other critters, to name but a few. What seems to be at work here is twofold: on one hand, there has been a rethinking of the scales of ethnographic practice and its objects, radicalizing changes previously brought on by the incorporation of world-systems analysis, historicity, and global connection. On the other hand, the emergence of scale itself has become an object of ethnographic inquiry.
The spirit of the times – global finance, internet technologies, international law, the recognition of broader ecologies – necessitate an ethnographic practice that can look through and across the traditional sites of ethnography. The notion of scale recognizes that people, communities, and things can exist in and across many different dimensions of experience, and that the ethnographer must be able to move through these dimensions, taking difference in amongst scales as central to the problem posed by a research question. This raises the question of how ethnographers can conceptualize the worlds in which they carry out their investigation in terms of different scales of research – Where does one look? How does one look? How does one constitute the space in which an ethnographic practice can proceed? What is it ethnographers are trying to know? Is it knowable? What sort of questions do we find when we assume that the scale of the ethnographic practice is itself problematic?
In each of the three panels, participants will address one of our sub-themes in a conversation moderated by two students, who will pose questions raised by the work of the panelists. Brief remarks framing each panel will be made available in advance of the conference date, and the proceedings will be recorded and made available online.
