Laura Hirvi’s and Hanna Snellman’s edited volume, Where is the Field? The Experience of Migration Viewed through the Prism of Ethnographic Fieldwork, investigates the idea that field sites rarely if ever can be confined to fixed geographical locations. The book’s nine case studies illustrate this premise with a variety of ethnographic encounters taking place among Finns, Bangladeshis, Italians, and many more besides. Though culturally diverse, the groups discussed in this book tend to have one thing in common—few reside in their places of origin. The book’s secondary focus, migration, comes to light in this way.
When a field site is distinguished by migrant populations whose practices differ from the domestic culture, it behooves the ethnographer to move beyond geography as a presiding orientation. The authors respond to this call by introducing research foci that challenge the construct of single-site ethnography. Wendy A. Vogt examines what happens when ethnographers shift the emphasis from where they are doing their work to where the subjects of the study are having their experiences. Similarly, José Mapril frames migration, which is often characterized as flow among anthropologists and cultural studies researchers, as a bid at stability in a new place. And Lisa Wiklund shrewdly reminds readers that even Malinowski followed his informants across considerable distances to observe their activities.
The value of edited volumes like Where is the Field? is to illustrate the application of theory that has been introduced elsewhere. If contemporary anthropology is indeed the study of “conceptual motion” (Rabinow et al. 2008, 78-79), then the authors here track the concept of migration by allowing it to establish its own trajectory and following it into whatever realm it goes.
A memorable example describes the experience of the Central American migrant, whose northward journey is defined by a lack of geographical fixity. Vogt, mentioned above, recognizes the volatility of this field site both in terms of location—the point is to cross the landscape, not to dwell in it—and intercultural conflict—the Guatemalan migrants do not always get along with the Salvadorans, but both groups are sometimes forced to share space in Mexican shelters.
Vogt gets at these issues by taking transience as her focus, and by applying rich descriptions to the passing moments that seem to typify the migrant’s everyday life. For Vogt, the presence of a smuggler is not simply another piece of data. It is the appearance of a bejeweled benefactor whose offering of roast chicken and tortillas counterbalances the situation of the migrants, who are hungry, weary, and dressed in comparatively drab attire.
A secondary purpose of this book, as the editors note in their introduction, is to put into writing what is often relegated to informal conversation. Ethnographers are wont to discuss the details of their fieldwork in passing rather than in print. This volume is an attempt to lay open the sorts of choices that fieldworkers make while they’re performing ethnography.
In another format, Fran Meissner and Inês Hasselberg might have spent less time pondering the methodologies they used in prior projects. Here, however, they are able to devote an entire chapter to the ways that they found their field sites only after beginning their research among deportees from Britain and South Pacific populations in London and Toronto. Their reflections form a sort of meta-ethnography—a way of describing and explaining academic shoptalk in the formalized context of a book.
The prism is an apt metaphor for describing the field sites at issue here. The places, cultures, and expressions highlighted in these pages provide a kaleidoscopic view of how people make meaning out of their situations based on the resources at their disposal. As much as it is possible in 221 pages, this book provides a global look at the issue of migration. What is more, the authors re-orient their view of the field to account for conceptual sites like online social networks, diasporic religious communities, and imported foodways that serve as symbols of hospitality in the migrant group’s adopted country.
This breadth of coverage increases the book’s interdisciplinary appeal. Anthropologists will find purchase in its pages, but so also might cultural studies researchers, for whom transnationalism and globalization are well-worn vocabulary words; cultural geographers, whose studies of the landscape focus on the human agents living within it; and folklorists, who regularly take shared symbolic practice as a point of entry into a community’s collective identity.
While Where is the Field? breaks little new theoretical ground, its application of foregoing ideas—particularly that the field is a concept rather than a discrete physical location—is impressive in scope and depth. The book stands as a useful interdisciplinary resource and a worthy addition to Studia Fennica Ethnologica, an imprimatur of the Finnish Literature Society since 1992.
Work Cited
Rabinow, Paul, George E. Marcus, James Faubion, and Tobias Rees. 2008. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press.
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[Review length: 805 words • Review posted on November 17, 2015]