October 2009 • Anthropology News 27 KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE Multi-Sited Anthropology and New Media Journalism A F UC L A For the last three summers, I’ve made several short television videos on divided cities where urban ethnic and religious tensions are compounded by walls made of concrete and barbed wire. In 2007 and 2009, I was in Cyprus, where the island and the city of Nicosia are split between the Republic of Cyprus and a Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Also in 2007 and 2009, I worked in East Jerusalem, in a section of the city with massive walls separating Palestinian refugees from Israeli settlers. In 2008, I was in Belfast documenting the Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods fenced apart by Peace Lines. My dissertation research is about the methods of new media journalists, the creative industries built around them, and the practice and rhetoric of democracy that these journalists and indus- tries reflect. In the course of working on the divided city project, I began to understand how new media journalists and multi-sited anthro- pologists share work practices. For anthropologists working in multiple loca- tions, with mobile subjects, where access is diffi- cult and funds are tight, an expedient journal- istic methodology has become necessary. I do see the perils of using an often shallower meth- odology, but I also see this as an opportunity to create new field tools to effectively examine the lives of knowledge workers. For these reasons, the methods anthropologists and journalists share should be critically examined to discern overlapping multidisciplinary spaces. Funds for the divided city project come from UCLA and Current TV, an Emmy winning cable network started by Al Gore and dedi- cated to mainstreaming citizen journalism. Each funder has distinct expectations that I must satisfy. Current TV wants me to be a journalist, producing short documentaries for television and the Internet, consisting of interviews and aesthetically graphic moving images. UCLA wants me to be an anthropologist, combining interviews, participant-observation and spatial analysis with anthropological theory, and trans- forming disparate data into publishable texts. The methods are similar but the final products are quite distinct. Due to little funding, particularly for such a multi-sited project, I cannot stay long in any one city. With such time constraints, my work consists of targeted interviews with activ- ists, politicians and affected citizens, and video recording of the walls themselves. By many defi- nitions of “fieldwork,” the reliance on interviews and the absence of long-term participant-obser- vation would exclude my work from the rigid definition of “ethnography.” I am committed, however, to making this project anthropological. Can such a project, in three cities, asking informants anthropologically-informed ques- tions, with analysis guided by anthropolog- ical theory be anthropology? Can our disci- pline, following the mandate for anthropological accounts of global flows, make room for such short-term multi-sited research? As anthro- pologists continue to study mobile informa- tion producers, traditional strict definitions of “ethnography” might be revised. Anthropology and journalism have many similarities. Reliance upon interviews and close prox- imity to our subjects are essential methods. The best from both disci- plines tie living details to social trends in cultural practices and history. All of the above is true for journalists and anthropologists working with video, who also try to visually record events that illustrate patterns or ground theories to vivid personal details. Anthropologists and journal- ists share the same stratigraphy of cultural capital. Graduate degrees are manda- tory in anthropology and increasingly common in journalism. We are reliant upon the privileges of cosmopolitan travel. We are usually from the West and studying an ethnic other. Affiliated with institutions of weak economic and persua- sive capacities, anthropologists and journalists often work under the radar of governments. However, sometimes we are both seen by the despotically powerful as identifying with the less powerful and therefore threatening. In both disciplines, race, gender and which passport one carries are important factors in gaining access to informants. Anthropologists and new media journal- ists’ independence and solitary mobility create opportunities for the collection of new details about work lives. Our capacity to move trans- nationally helps in the production of multi- sited investigations of a globalizing world. The absence of powerful credentials and institu- tional affinity increases intellectual indepen- dence. However, anthropologists and journalists are usually affiliated with institutions that struc- ture planning, fieldwork and publication. The impact of our work is constrained and shaped by these funding and distribution institutions. Journalists know how to collect visual or textual data in a globalized knowledge economy. They have a tradition of working quickly, with emergent technologies, from one site to another, on limited budgets, in the production of critical and timely information. Anthropologists have been slower to respond technologically and meth- odologically to making sense of a global world and generally do not engage with the same immediacy to current events. On the flip side, although traditional anthropol- ogists stay longer and collect enough fine- grained information for a book-length manu- script instead of a newspaper column, only a few journalists stay with a population long-term. Journalistically collected data can be used in the course of anthropological theory-building and might need to be when studying knowledge workers in a global world in an economic crisis. With the high prices of global travel associ- ated with multi-sited research, anthropologists might have to accept shorter field excursions. Economic constraints often mean prioritizing expedient interviews over participant-observa- tion. Further, for those of us studying the work lives of transnational knowledge producers like journalists, a mobile and temporally transient methodology itself functions as a type of partic- ipant-observation. A short-term and globally distributed methodology mimics the cosmopol- itan and multi-sited work life of journalists. This new type of participant-observation is alocal and exists not only in person-to-person interac- tions, but also within the information and social networks of our subjects. We should be wary of an anthropology that acts like journalism, as such work might lack depth, background research, critical analysis and theory. Journalistic methodologies should never replace in-depth ethnography. However, as research questions requiring multi-sited undertakings continue to arise within anthro- pology, journalistic methods appear to have increasing importance in anthropologists’ tool- kits. Considering this, the most important ques- tion to ask is how we might combine knowledge gained through anthropology’s rich theoretical, scholastic and analytical tools with these more fleeting field observations. Adam Fish is a PhD student at UCLA and video journalist. Some of these ideas first appeared in the part-anthropology and part-journalism blog Savage Minds (www.savageminds.org). You can see his split cities documentaries at Current (http://current.com/users/rawbird.htm). FIELD NOTES As anthropologists continue to study mobile information producers, traditional strict definitions of “ethnography” might be revised.