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To cite this Article Marcus, George E.(2006)'Where have all the tales of fieldwork gone?',Ethnos,71:1,113 \u2014 122
To link to this Article: DOI:10.1080/00141840600603244
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new terrains of interdisciplinary research in which anthropology prominently participates, terrains explored in the name of the usual terms of anthropology\u2019s distinctive tradition of ethnographic research, but which demand changes in this tradition that are not well articulated. To gauge where anthropology is moving, there is no better available source. However, rather than to review its contents in this brief essay, I want to go backstage, so to speak, to the conference occasion which produced this volume (a very memorable occasion which I attended in Prague, in April, 2002) and specul- ate broadly on a curious aspect of the professional culture of anthropology that I \ufb01rst noticed on the occasion that gave rise to Global Assemblages, but have since perceived elsewhere.

I want, namely, to speculate on a certain reticence that I have noted sur- rounding the telling of \ufb01eldwork experiences. This is the so-called corridor talk, the informal lore and discussion of \ufb01eldwork experience that has always been endemic among anthropologists and has created strong professional solidarity and identity among them. Beginning in the 1960s, and then re- inforced by the \u2018Writing Culture\u2019 critiques of the 1980s (Clifford & Marcus 1986), which established re\ufb02exive genres of ethnography, \ufb01eldwork accounts became an open, even

Then suddenly, or I should say more recently, as at the Global Assemblages conference, I have perceived the absence of this kind of self-identifying talk, and witnessed instead a reluctance to discuss \ufb01eldwork experience. This is

especially true of the new research domains that are rapidly gaining impor- tance in the numbers of researchers carrying out projects within them \u2013 the study of global organizations and processes, of new media, of science and technology, of corporations and bureaucracies, of markets, of policy proces- ses and their effects on populations and communities \u2014 domains that I have conceived as multi-sited in character and that pose unresolved challenges to deeply engrained assumptions surrounding method in anthropology.1

For example, I more recently attended a conference at the University of California, Irvine, entitled \u2018Lively Capital,\u2019 that brought together a group of both younger and older anthropologists, noted for their work in the realms of new technologies, scienti\ufb01c process, and \ufb01nance capitalism (the sort of work, for example, that the recent trajectory of Marilyn Strathern\u2019s research exempli\ufb01es, e.g. Strathern 2004). The conference brief was to discuss problems of method in these domains. I was struck by how dif\ufb01cult it was to develop these discussions. Discussions of the theoretical or conceptual frameworks of these projects, their implications, their critical and moral import, how they related to other processes beyond their purview were easy and readily available. Discussions of the \ufb01eldwork that produced them were not. To be sure, researchers would answer questions about \ufb01eldwork, but there was no sustaining context for this. The pleasure and interest in telling about \ufb01eld- work experience that are the background for anthropological discussions of method and ethnographic writing were noticeably lacking. Why this reticence?

In ethnographic writing on topics of science and technology, media, cor- porations, markets, and so on, \ufb01eldwork accounts are still included, usually in order to set the mythic \u2018scene of encounter\u2019 (\u00e0 la Malinowski or Boas), so essential to the claim of ethnographic authority. Yet, compared to re\ufb02exive accounts of the conditions of ethnography pursued in the traditional set- tings of community and village, and on which so much of the mechanics of narrative, analysis, and evidence depends in anthropological writing, the telling of \ufb01eldwork experience in the new domains seems, after some initial enthusiasm (see the Appendix), to be muted. Perhaps this indicates that while the ethos of, and identi\ufb01cation with, the \ufb01eldwork process remains vitally important in projects of multi-sited ethnography, the long-standing tropes for narrating it, both in informal professional culture and in publication, are somehow inadequate to the task. The scene of encounter remains symbolic- ally potent but perhaps it no longer suf\ufb01ces to frame accurately our imagined narratives of the ethnographic research process.