The Construction and Negotiation of Diasporic Identities

Abstract

Social scientists have used ethnography in order to understand the subjective meanings of social actors. Gille (2001, p. 321) reminds us that ‘doing ethnography is a commitment to study an issue at hand by understanding it from the perspective(s) of people whose lives are tied up with or affected by it’. Recently, scholars have problematized how ethnography can remain useful in an age of globalization and transnationalism in which the assumption of a well-bounded site is harder to maintain than ever (Fitzgerald, 2006; Gille, 2001). For instance, Fitzgerald (2004) asks how one might go about doing ethnography of transnational migrants without misrepresenting them when starting and ending in one locality. Concepts such as ‘global ethnography’ and ‘multi-sited ethnography’ have been introduced to challenge the ‘narrow boundaries of the traditional ethnographic “site” as conceived by the Chicago school’ (Gowan and Riain, 2000, p. xii; Marcus, 1995). The new concepts are perceived as useful in understanding the relations between the local, the transnational and the global.