ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a slightly different idea, that of the 'multi-sited ethnographer'. Ethnographic constructions of the local are challenged not only by mobilities, diasporas and 'scapes', but also by seismic shifts in the demographics of anthropological production. Sharp distinctions between desk and the field are deeply problematised when anthropology is done at home. The connections between the 'fieldworking' person and the 'fieldworked' place often become complex and loaded as geographical and cultural distance are reduced, and when the very agency of the anthropologist as author is deconstructed either by informants or by the ethnographer. The chapter describes Gupta and Ferguson end up suggesting the idea of seeing anthropological knowledge as a kind of situated intervention, existing and possibly contending with other representations in any given context. Geertz's Works and Lives famously shows how the ethnographer inserts the fieldworking self into place, into a state of 'being there'.
