Conclusions

Abstract

Embodiment and emplacement work together to produce identities. The construction of a sense of place depends on human experience, and is strengthened by rituals and through structures of kinship. People move around also and create experiences of transplacement. Multi-site fieldwork involves the anthropologist in a matrix of changing embodied emplacements. We stress the people’s own creativity in dealing with natural disasters, as in Taiwan. Long-term multi-site fieldwork leads to complex perspectives on comparisons, which can involve finding similarities across obvious differences, or differences between cases that share many similarities. Productive analysis must often cross-cut putative divides. We call this process ‘breaking the frames’. We argue that the process must take the fieldwork experience as a fertile source from which such advances in theorizing can occur.