Marcus reformulates ethnography for objects of inquiry that cannot be contained within a single locality. His decisive operation is tracking: following people, things, metaphors, stories, conflicts and biographies across dispersed sites rather than treating the field as a bounded container. Multi-sited ethnography therefore displaces the classical opposition between the local lifeworld and a larger abstract system, making their connection itself empirically observable. The methodological gain is mobility, but the epistemic cost is equally important: as the field expands, depth, positionality and the authority of situated participation must be renegotiated. Marcus’s “circumstantial activist” captures this altered researcher position, implicated in heterogeneous arenas without assuming a sovereign overview. The work became foundational for mobile and relational field methods because it defines comparison as something produced by tracing relations across locations, rather than by placing already completed cases side by side.
