6.

SHIFTING BOUNDARIES OF A COASTAL COMMUNITY: TRACING CHANGES ON

THE MARGIN

Marianne E. Lien

Anthropology, known by disciplinary neighbours for dealing with practically every aspect of
human society, has been remarkably slow in coming to terms with global forms of
connectedness. This is in spite of a recent theoretical turn in the discipline away from the
idea of what Gupta and Ferguson (1999) call the paradigm of ‘peoples and cultures’, and in
spite of analyses that convincingly demonstrate the salience of transnational connections
historically and today (e.g. Mintz, 1985). The implications of such insights for anthropological
research practice, however, remain unclear. Anthropologists’ unease in relation to global
connectivities clearly may be understood as a result of the way anthropology has traditionally
delineated its object of study in time (synchronic studies, ethnographic present) and in space
(a community, a culture): a discipline which builds its epistemology on immersing oneself in
a single place (over a period of a year or more) is hardly well-suited for dealing with global
connectivities and transnational flow. This methodological disadvantage becomes no less
problematic when the most privileged places or regions within our discipline are those that
have traditionally been made to appear stable, homogeneous and thus ’unaffected’ by the
heterogeneity that is brought about as things, ideas and people move.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1992) has addressed similar issues in his writings on the
Caribbean. According to Trouillot, historicity and heterogeneity are both crucial dimensions
for an understanding of the Caribbean region, but at the same time, they are the very
features that have made the encounters between Caribbean studies and anthropology
uneasy. The unease that he describes in the encounter between anthropology and the
Caribbean appears to have much in common with the unease of the encounters between
anthropology and the topic of globalisation.
As has been pointed out by several scholars recently, an understanding of
globalisation requires a reassessment of the value of the anthropological method. We need
to rethink the role of fieldwork in defining our discipline, the kinds of places we choose, and
also the basic idea in anthropology that one single place must be chosen. Alternative
approaches to constructing the field have been suggested, offering various strategies for
combining the advantages of intimate knowledge and face-to-face social interaction with
enhanced attention to global connectivities (see for instance Gupta and Ferguson, 1997,
1999; Hannerz, 1996; Hastrup and Olwig, 1997; Kearney, 1995). Among the more
controversial proposals is George Marcus’s concept of multi-sited ethnographies. According
to Marcus, this approach ‘moves out from the single sites and local situations of conventional
ethnographic research designs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and
identities in diffuse time-space’ (1998: 79). Launching the concept of multi-sited
ethnographies, Marcus moves beyond the strategies applied in anthropological studies of
history and material culture that literally ‘follow the thing’ (Appadurai, 1986; Mintz, 1985).
While these approaches, according to Marcus, represent the ‘obvious cases’ of multi-sited
ethnographies, the more radical approach that he advocates are the ‘cases where there is
very little actual contact or exchange between two sites but where the functioning of one of
the sites depends on a very specific imagining of what is going on elsewhere’ (1999: 7).
Central to Marcus’s argument is the notion of actual ‘empirical changes in the world’,
expressed as ‘transformed locations of cultural production’ and the need to construct
multisited ethnographies to deal with such changes. In other words, empirical changes are to
be discovered by looking more closely at discontinuties in space, that is, by juxtaposing
different ‘places’ (or field-sites) with little actual contact.
In this chapter, I shall explore a methodological strategy that literally inverts the
approach advocated by Marcus, but nevertheless remains close to the overall aim of
situating the ethnographer in a position of an enhanced awareness of connections between
a chosen locality and the rest of the world: rather than arguing for multi-sitedness, I shall
suggest an approach to the field based on multi-temporality. Instead of juxtaposing field-sites
that differ in space, I juxtapose the configurations of a single field-site as it differs over time.
The idea of ‘going back to the field’ is by no means a novel idea.3 I will argue,
however, that it is particularly well-suited to deal with epistemological and methodological
challenges that anthropology currently faces. What I suggest is, in a sense, an old solution to
a novel range of problems. These problems relate to the challenges of grasping what I will
refer to as the transformative potential of transnational flow.