ABSTRACT
The author refers to the significance of multi-sited fieldwork in his research experience among Malayali migrants in Rome and Ernakulam. In his early account of the possible ways of constructing multi-sited analytical objects, Marcus identifies 'following the people' as one of the most obvious and conventional techniques allowing anthropology a certain degree of adaptation to contemporary migration processes. Indeed, as Hannerz notes, by the time the term 'multi-sited' was coined, migration studies had already recognized the importance of placing research at different ends of migrant trajectories. Nonetheless, migration has compelled anthropologists to develop new sensibilities beyond the traditional 'research imaginary' as demonstrated by the well established literature on transnationalism. The 'research mandate' of multi-sited ethnography 'takes seriously the movement that constitutes the migratory processes'. In a thought-provoking article on Lebanese diaspora, Hage interrogates the reasons why mobility is uncritically taken for granted in many studies of transnational migration.
