ABSTRACT
This chapter examines calls for multi-sited research which have urged us to expand the possibilities and vistas of ethnography in order to deal with a complex world. It attempts to characterize this new 'research imaginary', an imaginary which is centrally concerned with freedom, complexity and expansion. In 1995, George Marcus coined a phrase which was to achieve resounding fame in and beyond anthropological circles, namely 'multi-sited ethnography'. Even lay readers of anthropological texts, Marcus and Fischer pointed out, were increasingly aware of the fallacy of localized holistic studies of 'a culture'. Sites are understood as the products of often conflicting political and epistemological processes 'on the ground', processes which should themselves be the object of anthropological study. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson's later deconstruction of the anthropological field could be seen as the culmination of both Appadurai and Marcus's arguments.
