ABSTRACT
The original idea behind multi-sited research was that the partial perspective afforded by a single research site was insufficient for understanding local phenomena such as trade and ethnic identity, because these things are part of systems that operate on a much larger specifically, on a global scale. In his influential 1995 paper, George Marcus listed a number of appropriate topics for multi-sited field research, including the media, science, and the global political economy. In any case, its absence from the multi-sited research agenda was conspicuous in view of the attention anthropologists of so-called 'world religions' had already devoted to conceptualizing the relation between on the one hand the various beliefs. The practices of Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, and so on, which they observed in the different local settings they had severally studied, and on the other the trans-local cultural systems of which they conceived these to be part.
