Multisituated

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.

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and author of Pharmocracy: Value, Politics of Knowledge in Global Biomedicine, Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets, and Biocapital: The Constitution of Post-Genomic Life, all also published by Duke University Press.