This article was originally written for the MED521 Digital Anthropology course by Erkan Saka at Istanbul Bilgi University.
This article focuses on George Marcus’s 1995 article, Ethnography in/of a World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Broadly speaking, the article explores the potential use of multi-sited ethnography in studies that adopt object-oriented ontology as a reference point. In traditional ethnographic studies, research sites are treated as isolated, single regions; local conditions are understood solely through knowledge gathered within these confines. Conversely, the multi-sited ethnography proposed by Marcus steps beyond the local to examine the circulation of objects, identities, and various cultural meanings across different times and spaces (Marcus, 1995, p. 96). Marcus argues that the single-site structure of ethnography is insufficient for grasping the complexity of the world system. He advocates for the necessity of multi-sited ethnography to trace cultural formations (Marcus, 1995, p. 95). This form of ethnography presents five concrete modes of construction: follow the people, follow the thing, follow the metaphor, follow the plot, story or allegory, follow the life or biography, follow the conflict, and the strategically situated ethnography (Marcus, 1995, p. 105). It is evident that the “local” is no longer an isolated territory. Instead, it has morphed into a complex structure, intertwined with multi-layered digital and global processes such as media, migration, and technology.
The other theoretical dimension of this report is object-oriented ontology (OOO). According to Graham Harman, author of Object-Oriented Ontology, everything is an object, “regardless of whether they are human or non-human, natural or cultural, real or fictional.” Harman defines an “object” as something that cannot be reduced to its relations or components (Harman, 2023, pp. 29, 30). Proceeding from this premise, object-oriented ontology acknowledges the diversity of human agency. However, it does not rely on designating humans as “active subjects” occupying fifty percent of ontology, while squeezing all non-human entities into the remaining fifty percent as “passive objects” (Harman, 2023, p. 64). This implies that objects, like humans, have specific life cycles. They can be affected by environmental weather conditions. They can interact with one another and alter each other’s physical properties. In short, they can exist autonomously from humans. An ethnographic study taking object-oriented ontology as a guide can investigate the process an object undergoes, from production to becoming scrap. Here, we arrive at the point of alliance with Marcus (1995): the researcher conducting object-oriented ethnography follows the objects—one of the construction modes mentioned by Marcus.
In the remainder of this report, I will discuss the relationship between ethnographic research using object-oriented ontology as a guide and Marcus’s multi-sited ethnography. Marcus’s emphasis on following the global to analyze a local situation broadly bears a resemblance to posthumanist studies that trace the processes of objects constituting an artwork. Bahadır Yıldız’s Psychic Defense Strategies (Psişik Savunma Stratejileri) series can be considered in conjunction with Marcus’s follow the thing mode. To produce the sculptures in this series, Yıldız follows sandpaper. He goes to the sandpaper factory. He coils the sandpaper he collects from bottom to top in his studio to create circular forms. Since this coiling action involves layering the sandpaper, Yıldız tracks the traces interacting objects leave on one another, as well as the effect the sandpaper has on his own hands. The question arises: Does every work of art possess a dynamic of following the object? I answer this in the affirmative. Observing the results of paint meeting canvas, a stone plate meeting ink, or the artist’s hand meeting clay also exemplifies a mode of following the object.
Conducting multi-sited ethnography is an act of boundary crossing. It steps outside the structure of single-sited ethnography, which is confined to an isolated location. We encounter this same transgression in feminist art studies that take posthumanism and object-oriented ontology as their guides. The traditional framework often views feminist art merely as “women artists recounting the female experience.” However, an artist showing care for their object—regardless of gender or sexual orientation—can serve as a new source of inspiration for feminist art. This means refusing to instrumentalize the object for the sake of achieving a specific result. What I mean is that a feminist art practice grounded in a posthumanist approach can transcend the boundary that limits feminist art to being perceived solely in relation to women.
In the multi-sited ethnography methodology proposed by Marcus, the researcher adopts different identities across different sites. They are not a neutral observer; on the contrary, they must constantly negotiate between their shifting identities and the political stance of those identities (Marcus, 1995, p. 113). There is no “God Trick” here; knowledge is situated (Haraway, 1988). The ethnographer attempts to make the invisible aspects of the system visible by mapping the information gathered from various fields. This is a political stance.
In artworks that take object-oriented ontology and feminism as a reference guide, care is not perceived as a responsibility attributed solely to women. Care is a relationship established with non-humans, and this relationship recognizes no gender. This approach abolishes the gender-based division of labor imposed by capitalism. I believe there is a political similarity here: on one side, we have the ethnographer’s political stance in mapping via different identities in multi-sited ethnography; on the other, we have a posthumanist understanding of care that dismantles the gendered division of labor.
What I am attempting to express in this report is that there is a political connection between ethnography engaging with the complexity of global networks and art moving away from anthropocentrism—as well as feminist art moving away from women-centrism. While multi-sited ethnography strives to “represent” its interviewees in an isolated field, the researcher conducting multi-sited ethnography seeks the underlying causes of the current state of the person or community they are studying in different, connected people, places, lives, and objects. This is just like seeing the objects that constitute an artwork not as tools, but as agents in their own right.
When multi-sited ethnography and posthumanist approaches in art are considered together, the subject of inquiry—whether a community or an art object—is liberated from being a passive object. The object, which possesses its own life cycle as envisioned by this approach, becomes part of a collaboration. Multi-sited ethnography and object-oriented ontology point to a mode of production based on selflessness, compassion, and situated knowledge.
References
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Harman, G. (2023). Nesne Yönelimli Ontoloji (O. Karayemiş, Çev.). Tellekt Yayınları.
Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology , 24, 95–117.