Re-locating the Ethnographic Field: From ‘Being There’ to ‘Being There’

When considering the ethnographic field, language-use has been of continued anthropological concern. Traditional approaches to the field have associated language-use with concepts such as place, territory and ethnicity and have tended to bound them within a single site. However, in conditions of increasing globalized mobility, approaches to both fieldwork and language-use within the field are changing. Using existing scholarship on minority-language communities in Europe alongside original fieldwork with Somali migrants in Glasgow, this essay considers the dynamics of that relationship within the contexts of single-sited, multi-sited and online fields. It finds that, for an inquiry focused on both language use and mobility, established modes of thinking about the field are a methodologically restrictive practice on ‘being there’. Instead, the authors argue for rethinking the field as a “spoken” one where, with language at the fore, emphasis is placed on ‘being there’.