Manufacturing the Global

Surely, 'global ethnography' is an oxymoron? How can the global be ethno graphic? How can ethnography contribute to the understanding of global ization? After all, in anthropology, we stereotypically picture the lone ethnographer settled in his or her village, itself isolated from the world around. In sociology, we think of the ethnographer as the specialist of face to-face relations or of situational analysis, but with the context firmly brack eted. Or perhaps we think of the ethnographer-sociologist studying conflict and cohesion in the urban community; but, as with the anthropologist, it is a community cut off from the world beyond, often by physical barriers such as buildings, parks or railroad tracks. What could be further from global ethnography? After three-quarters of a century of professional anthropology and sociology, global ethnography appears oxymoronic because we have blotted out the prehistory of our professions. Global ethnography is not new at all. As Joan Vincent (1990) has argued, before the First World War anthro pology was swept up in debates between evolutionists and diffusionists who saw the world as their canvas. James Clifford (1997) makes a similar point: with peripatetic missionaries and colonial administrators monopolizing knowledge about 'the native', anthropologists had to seek out their own niche of expertise, which they found in the careful, systematic and prolonged observation of indigenous peoples in a single place. This professionalization of fieldwork led to its circumscription, its concentration on dwelling rather than traveling. In overlooking the vast web of Empire, the multiple and asymmetrical connections between metropolis and colony that made focused field research possible, anthropology bracketed its own global underpinnings.