Rethinking Ethnographic Practice in Anthropology: Challenges and Transformations

This essay seeks to investigate some of the recent shifts in conducting and writing ethnography in socio-cultural anthropology. Overtime, anthropological thought has undergone a series of major transformations which have reshaped many of our notions, theoretic al perspectives, and research methods. Ethnographic practice has traditionally relied on studying spatially localized societies and cultures. However, in the last few years there has been a serious effort to conceptualize ethnography beyond the idea of studying a culture in a geographically defined and bounded field. This essay is primarily concerned with the applications and implications of new forms of ethnography such as multi-sited ethnography, network ethnography, reflexive ethnography, and virtual ethnography. Forces of globalization and transnationalism, in addition to contemporary debate on themes such as subjectivity/objectivity, self/other, and modernism/ postmodernism, have played a pivotal role in the development of these shifts and the emergence of new forms of ethnography.