Duke University Press Multisituated: Ethnography as Diasporic Praxis

In Multisituated Kaushik Sunder Rajan evaluates the promises and potentials of multisited ethnography in light of contemporary debates around decolonizing anthropology and the university. He observes that at the current moment, anthropology is increasingly peopled by diasporic students and researchers, all of whom are accountable to multiple communities beyond the discipline. In this light, Sunder Rajan draws on his pedagogical experience and dialogues to reconceptualize ethnography as a multisituated practice of knowledge production, ethical interlocution, and political intervention. Such a multisituated ethnography responds to contemporary anthropology’s myriad commitments as it privileges attention to questions of scale, comparison, and the politics of ethnographic encounters. Foregrounding the conditions of possibility and difficulty for those doing and teaching ethnography in the twenty-first-century, Sunder Rajan gestures toward an ethos and praxis of ethnography that would open new forms of engagement and research. Review "The remarkable transformations over the past thirty years in the nonetheless emblematic research process that still defines anthropologists have never been explored so comprehensively, so instructively, and so passionately by a gifted, imaginative teacher to those who become anthropologists today in an historically key department."--George E. Marcus, coeditor of "Fieldwork Is Not What It Used To Be: Learning Anthropology's Method in a Time of Transition" About the Author Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and author of Pharmocracy: Value, Politics, and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine, Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets, and Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, all also published by Duke University Press.