Ethnography on an Awkward Scale

Abstract

In what ways has the movement of anthropology off the reservation, and off the island, challenged the ethnographic practice that has historically been its raison d'être? How has the increasing historicization of the discipline, and its encounters with the variegated effects of globalization, altered its methodological orientations and strategies? How should those orientations and strategies change in proportion to transformations in the social and cultural geographies of the worlds inhabited by our `natives'? Is it possible to `do' ethnography on an awkward scale in multiple dimensions? What are the epistemic implications of these questions for the anthropology of the future? Taking as its point of departure current debates over (i) the relationship between evidence and explanation in the social sciences, and (ii) the relative demands of the local and the global in focusing the ethnographic gaze, this article explores the premises and promises of contemporary ethnography. It invokes recent research on the rise of an `occult economy' in the South African postcolony to argue for a radical expansion of the horizons of ethnographic methodology, for a method simultaneously inductive and deductive, empirical and imaginative.