Macro Ethnography and the Emplaced Field Method

Victoria Reyes, University of California, Riverside

In this paper, I put forth a new type of ethnography: macro-ethnography. Macro ethnography bridges together debates on ethnographic methods on how to study the macro-micro link, the role of place in ethnography, and whether to focus on structure/processes, agency/people, or relationships/situations (e.g., Desmond 2014, Burawoy 2017). It does so by privileging both structure and relationships and by seeing history as living and breathing, rather than a preamble to the present (see Reyes 2019). There are three tenets to macro-ethnography: variation, melding of the historical and contemporary ethnographic, and centering the place and country of study – and decentering the U.S. as the point of reference – in the global political economy. In doing so, it blends together, and extends, work on triangulation (Denzin 1989), historical ethnography (Vaughan 2004) and global ethnography (Burawoy et al 2000). One way to conduct macro ethnography is what I call the emplaced field method. If the extended case method emphasizes global processes or “tracing the source of small differences to external forces…[to] make each case work in its connection to other cases” (Burawoy et al 1991:19) and extended place method examines the institutions, people and places that shape the lives of primary participants (Duneier 1999), the emplaced field method focuses on how processes and forces shape varied aspects of social life across different emplaced fields within a given location.

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 Presented in Session 5. Reimagining Research Traditions: New Approaches to Method and Measurement