Para-site Experiments as a Bridge Between the Desire for Usefulness and the Micro-Macro Politics in Ethnographic Research, George Marcus

I want to explore how political stakes arise in the course of ethnographic research projects today. While these politics originate within the purely "academic" purposes of inquiry and are 'micro' or granular in the circumstances of every fieldwork project, they also scale up, gradiently, to the most macro and pressing political issues at stake in larger public spheres. As an anthropologist with an ethnographic interest in anthropology itself, I am interested in how the micropolitics of research defines processually anthropology as a public discipline, through the tropes of collaboration, reflexivity, ethical concern, or activist desire that ideologically define ethnographic research today. To understand this processual emergence of public anthropology from its research practices requires experiments with forms in relation to the wonderfully open (for the individual anthropologist) yet mostly private (to the anthropological community) research process that anthropology licenses as its emblematic method. One such experiment with innovation in form in the ethnographic research process is the staging of 'para-sites' within or alongside fieldwork, encouraged at the Center for Ethnography (University of California, Irvine; www.socsci.uci.edu/~ethnog). These stagings are proposed as a mode to understand and develop the political dimensions of the reflexive function of fieldwork research as it unfolds under the increasing imperative of collaborative norms. This is a form for both understanding and realizing the way that particular projects of ethnographic research take on public import in their doing-- and thus how granularly anthropology overall is becoming a public discipline.