ABSTRACT
The ethnography of peoples, places, and cultures in situ, and their immense contemporary transformations, is, piecemeal, alive and vigorous in all sorts of interdisciplinary venues which define anthropology's participations and research agendas. An unreconstructed Malinowskian practice does indeed make the idea of multi-sited ethnography as the major modality of basic research difficult to practice. The need to develop forms and norms in research design to anticipate and manage this collective nature of ethnography, despite its individualistic form in professional culture, is at the core of reforming Malinowskian method in multi-sited projects. Dissertation fieldwork and ethnography are where the shape of anthropological research gets collectively and normatively defined in the shadow of its tradition. The 'writing culture' critique was widely appreciated as being about texts and only implicitly about fieldwork. The contemplation and attempt to do multi-sited ethnography in one or more of its alternative modalities opens onto this seminal project.
