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Ethnohistory 47.3-4 (2000) 842-844



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Book Review

Ethnography through Thick and Thin


Ethnography through Thick and Thin. By George E. Marcus. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 275 pp., introduction, bibliography, index. $11.95 paper.)

Ethnography, understood as fieldwork and the writing that it engenders, has been the key research method of cultural anthropology in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, since the 1980s the established practice has been severely criticized by scholars inspired by literary criticism and philosophy. These authors have become known as “postmodernists,” although many of them do not use this label for themselves. They have questioned, [End Page 842] among other things, the authority of the ethnographer, who has generally produced a “unitary” text actually composed of the many perspectives that emerge from fieldwork. What is more, according to the critics, the ethnographer does not produce “the” valid description of a tribe, people, or culture based on the immediacy of his experience in the field but only what James Clifford has called “partial truths.” Being inherently incomplete and influenced by the personality of the fieldworker, power relations, and so on, ethnographies are seen by postmodernists not as representations but as inventions of cultures.

This may seem a commonplace to anybody acquainted with the historian’s key method—the criticism of sources. But the postmodernist critique makes further important points. It makes it clear that culture is not an object to be described but temporal, and is frequently contested by outsiders as well as insiders. Men, for example, may give a different picture of their culture than women.

In addition, postmodernists, as well as a number of other authors who have written what Marcus calls “resistance and accommodation studies,” recognize that the processes in “local-worlds” (tribes, villages, etc.) that have generally been the object of ethnography cannot be studied without reference to an encompassing macro-world, “the system” (the state, capitalism, the world-system).

In Ethnography through Thick and Thin, George E. Marcus not only summarizes the critique of “traditional” ethnography outlined above. He also wants to overcome the limitations of resistance and accommodation studies, which have specialized in the manifestation of local struggle with the world-system. He criticizes this sort of ethnography for having a personified, monolithic vision of capitalism rather than a “historically nuanced and diverse notion of capitalism” (44). Marcus, in contrast, pleads for a type of ethnography that seeks to represent “something of the operation of the system itself rather than to demonstrate continually and habitually in the spirit of pluralism the power of local culture over global forces of apparent homogenization” (34). Based on studies of recent changes in world capitalism (disorganized capitalism, globalization), he argues that major processes are no longer distinctly place-focused. Thus, he wants to overcome the macro-micro dichotomy itself and establish a “multi-locale, system-directed ethnography of complex connections” that is places- rather than place-focused (50). The objects studied should be phenomena like markets, media, social movements, wealth, and crises, rather than villages, social structures, neighborhoods, and the like.

“Multi-sited research,” Marcus argues, “is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the [End Page 843] ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography” (90). Accordingly, the researcher may, for example, follow the circulation through different contexts of a person, a material object, a symbol, or a metaphor. One may study the parties involved in a conflict or the life of a person.

Ethnography through Thick and Thin consists of ten essays (nine of them previously published between 1989 and 1997) and an introductory chapter. It provides a valuable overview of the thinking of one of the most prominent critics of “traditional” ethnography. Most chapters are written on a high level of abstraction, and sometimes the half-cryptic language typical of many postmodernist texts is used. The empirical examples Marcus employs to illustrate the type of ethnography he has in mind (his work on Tongan elites in chapter 5, the dynastic wealthy...

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