Multisituated

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is author of Pharmocracy: Value, Politics, and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine and Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life and editor of Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets, all also published by Duke University Press.

In Multisituated Kaushik Sunder Rajan evaluates the promises and potentials of multisited ethnography with regard to contemporary debates around decolonizing anthropology and the university. He observes that at the current moment, anthropology is increasingly peopled by diasporic students and researchers, all of whom are accountable to multiple communities beyond the discipline. In this light, Sunder Rajan draws on his pedagogical experience and dialogues to reconceptualize ethnography as a multisituated practice of knowledge production, ethical interlocution, and political intervention. Such a multisituated ethnography responds to contemporary anthropology's myriad commitments as it privileges attention to questions of scale, comparison, and the politics of ethnographic encounters. Foregrounding the conditions of possibility and difficulty for those doing and teaching ethnography in the twenty-first-century, Sunder Rajan gestures toward an ethos and praxis of ethnography that would open new forms of engagement and research.

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction. A Problem, a Paradox, a Politics . . . and a Praxis  1 1. Scale  29 2. Comparison  57 3. Encounter  91 4. Dialogue  136 Conclusion. Toward a Diasporic Anthropology  169 Notes  189 References  229 Index  245