Zsuzsa GILLE , Sean O. RIAIN : Global ethnography

Journal article by Zsuzsa Gille, Sean O. Riain ; Published in the Annual Review of Sociology, 2002

INTRODUCTION

Globalization poses a challenge to existing social scientific methods of inquiry and units of analysis by destabilizing the embeddedness of social relations in particular communities and places. By locating themselves firmly within the time and space of social actors « living the global, » ethnographers can reveal the socioscapes that people collectively construct of global processes (Albrow 1997), thus demonstrating how globalization is grounded in the local (Burawoy et al. 2000). At the same time, globalization also poses problems for ethnography. The potential and uneven delinking of the spatial and the social under conditions of globalization upsets ethnography’s claim to understand social relations by being there and thus demands that we rethink the character of global ethnography.

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