ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the scaling and visualization of open-systems ethnography, drawing out methodological rationales and challenges in interrelating multiple sites and levels of analysis. Multi-sited ethnography pieces together a picture of an 'object' with material from many places. Multi-sited ethnography is sometimes understood as being without design, method, even theory as somehow emergent organically without friction. Such a tendency, in the view, works against the critical potential of ethnography, and of multi-sited ethnography in particular. The development of multi-sited ethnography amongst cultural anthropologists can be seen as analogous. Cultural anthropology has been exemplary in this regard, reliably recognizing that the 'right' focus, analysis or book to write at a given moment is literally subject to the discursive field in which it takes shapes and will circulate. A scalar schema is but one portal into what multi-sited ethnographic projects do and produce, and it is critical to recognize.
