Document Type
Introduction
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Central to ethnographic construction and production of knowledge(s) is the fieldwork experience and the location of the knower. Anthropological fieldwork conventionally privileged knowing the Other and the going elsewhere. As a spatial practice, fieldwork refers to "a specific style, quality, and duration of dwelling"; that is distinguished from travel (Clifford 1997: 22). Territoriality of the field and prolonged immersion in the locality defined this fieldworker conducting fieldwork in the field (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). The growing acceptance and recognition of mobility among communities and the interface of the local and the global in everyday life of an individual have naturalized multi-sited ethnography as a fieldwork practice. The dichotomy of dwelling and travel that Clifford spoke about has a radically different meaning here. Tropes of entry and exit no longer define boundaries of fieldwork and the fieldworker's engagement (Arora 2006: 145). In the book In Ethnography through Thick and Thin, George Marcus underscored the role of complicity, circumstantial activism, and serendipity in multi-sited ethnography. Current debates on fieldwork underline how events and encounters mould ethnographic enquiries, the fieldworker's reflexive construction of knowledge, and finally the ethnographic present (Halstead 2008:1-2, Arora 2008: 131, 137).
Repository Citation
Arora, Vibha, and Justin Scott-Coe. "Fieldwork and Interdisciplinary Research." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 9, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–8. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol9/iss1/1