In Multisituated: Ethnography as Diasporic Praxis (published by Duke University Press in 2021), Kaushik Sunder Rajan beckons our attention to some of the fundamental ‘problems, paradoxes and politics’ which animate the contemporary contours of anthropological knowledge and ethnographic practice. At the core, this book is an incisive investigation of anthropology’s ‘inheritances’ alongside its emergent ‘aspirations,’ as emerging from and within the metropolitan research institutions, its pedagogical practices, its predominant diasporic graduate student body, and from ethnography’s inevitable interest in as well as intentional and painstaking challenging of, the ‘an-other.’ While admittedly “an anti-Malinowskian book” (23), Rajan clarifies that neither is this “a polemic against fieldwork,”, nor an alternative fieldwork manifesto which would magically fix its troubled legacies. Instead, Rajan argues “for an imagination of the fundamental method of ethnography as being something other or more than participant observation,” grappling with questions such as: “How to study complex systems and structures using experience- proximal practices? How to do so at a moment of becoming- a diasporic of the discipline and the metropolitan university? How to decolonize a practice that is dependent on the native informant, who is fundamentally constituted through colonial epistemic genealogies?”(24).

Rajan describes this book as written like a ‘seminar’ (12), and frames it around four distinct “elements of ethnographic practice” (27): scale; comparison; encounter; dialogue, deliberately “stay[ing] with the trouble” (181) of these elements as contesting one another.

Rajan introduces the “idea and ideal of multi-situatedness” as a conceptual topology; as a “stance” rather than a methodological invocation or toolbox (31). Confronting head-on the disciplinary anxieties stretched across the essence of ethnography as rooted in its “intimate, small-scale encounters” (32), and the postcolonial and feminist assertions around politics of representation, subaltern peoples and cultures, the figure of the native informant and the structures of ethnographic authority, Rajan argues that the contemporary stakes of anthropology reside not in resolving these dilemmas, but instead, in how these varying elements, multiple modes of inquiry, and contending stakes of ethnographic praxis are activated and shaped by (and are in turn shaping) the ethnographer.

Reading key ethnographic texts such as Biehl’s Vita (2005) and Fortun’s Advocacy after Bhopal (2001), Rajan demonstrates how the agency can be elucidated “without giving voice… [and with] a crucial dialogic element…which goes beyond the ethnographer “getting” the story of another in an act of appropriation” (42); by “displacing the ethnographic object” from something singular and subjective to something global and circulating, which affords upon the ethnographer a multi-sited mode of inquiry and praxis, rather than this being a mere methodological “choice” (45).

Rajan intervenes in the ethnographic praxis in two particular ways:

First, he suggests a conceptualisation of ‘other’ kinds of comparative anthropology which entails an “epistemic unsettlement” by carefully attending to the question of “who gets to compare, on what basis, upon what grounds, which elements of a comparison are deemed normative and which others exceptional” (60) – a question which is as much political as it is conceptual and methodological. Reading Spivak, Rajan outlines a “deconstructive modality” (70) of the comparative project, where the “objectifying and textualizing gaze is consistently turned on instruments and institutions of power rather than on the subaltern” (89). Of course, the conventional comparison of the ‘other’ with our ‘own society’ is unsettled within the increasingly diasporic anthropological praxis, and the very configuration of the strange and familiar begins to change shape as the diasporic anthropologist moves across different worlds as a student, as an ethnographer, as a writer, and as a teacher.

Second, Rajan conceives ethnography “as an intimate praxis of encounter” (90),necessarily implicated by the ethnographer’s autobiographical traces “which bleed into and exceed any “objective” sociological account” (95). Staying with Spivak, Rajan inserts in his analytical field the ‘reader’ and the “evocative function” of reading and writing (96). Drawing on auto-ethnographic works by Schwab (2010), Jain (2013) and Wally (2013), who reposition the stakes of authority, intimacy and personhood in ethnographic praxis, Rajan demonstrates how “look[ing] Otherwise” (99) is importantly constitutive of one’s ‘autobiographical traces’. This plural form of traces signals that “something other than or beyond just identity is at stake here…the question of how one might see Otherwise is riven and undercut through multiple axes of identification that do not sit easily with one another” (131).

Rajan frequently indulges in a “reading of a reading” (81), as he reads texts alongside the readings of his graduate students and their diasporic itineraries, fashioning a writing style acutely alert to the pedagogical and dialogic stakes of anthropological knowledge production and circulation. Engaging a student response on Smith (2013), which draws “the intertwined stories of Malala and Nabila, the girl who fought for education and the girl whose family was bombed by a US drone strike respectively” (133), Rajan poignantly extends Spivak’s classic interrogation of the “white man saving the brown woman from the brown man”, to asking which brown women are being ‘saved’, which are not being saved, and which are being crushed in the very act of the saving.

Finally, Rajan “consider[s] multi situatedness as an explicitly dialogic practice, one that necessarily goes beyond the sociological monograph,” encompassing not only “the question of…whom one is conversing with, but also of where one is conversing from” (139). Through Holmes and Marcus’s (2005) project of ‘para-ethnography’, Rajan extends a “promissory call” (and not a “solution”) for an ethnographic praxis which emphasises a “conversational modality of ethnography” (141), and re-scripts the ‘native informant’ as an interlocutor, and the ethnographer herself as beyond a “fly on the wall”, and as fully and consciously attuned to how she “ought to” intervene in the systems that she studies (141). While dwelling on the ‘para-site’ and ‘third-spaces’ as one such “mode of situated dialogic engagement” (165), which allowed him in his research “a simulation of epistemic equivalence among the different invited actors” (150), Rajan ultimately leaves us with the following provocation: “What is the horizon for conceptualising ethnographic praxis beyond creating occasional spaces and forums for dialogic and collaborative reflection with one’s interlocutors?” (166).

We meet some of the major social theorists in this book via Rajan and his graduate students, such as Geertz, Derrida, Barthes, Fanon, Haraway, and Spivak; in the conclusion, we finally meet Rajan himself and his own “diasporic itinerary” (171), his field notes and his inward reflections as a researcher, a writer, a teacher, an immigrant and a citizen, and his multiple journeys which have constantly attuned him to the mode of a multi situated ethnography. In the final pages of the book, Rajan foregrounds the question of inheritance as central to understanding how we as ethnographers see the world, invoking Haraway’s influential assertion which he admits continues to haunt and shape his praxis: “with whose blood were my eyes crafted?” (183).

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Arushi Sahay is a PhD Candidate at Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID).