How Have Fieldwork Strategies Changed in Response to Globalization?

CHANGES IN PROCESS

Changes in communication and transportation have altered the ongoing relationship between the anthropologist and the community being studied. Global communication allows the fieldworker and the community to maintain contact long after the anthropologist has left the field, facilitating a flow of data, discussions, and interpretation that in the past would have been very difficult to continue. The expansion of global transportation networks further increases the opportunities for personal interactions between an anthropologist and someone from the researched community outside the original research setting.

RISE OF DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY

Before COVID-19, only a small percentage of anthropological research projects focused on digital worlds, including online gaming, virtual communities, and social networking sites. For example, in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, anthropologists Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa (2015) explored the use of social media as a powerful platform for political activism. What they described as “hashtag activism” on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Vine created shared digital moments across a large and disparate population of activists and helped document and challenge police brutality and the misrepresentation of Black bodies in the mainstream media.

In an era of intensifying globalization, most ethnographic projects have included at least some digital component, as our interlocutors send texts, post on Facebook, and send money online. But COVID-19 upended anthropological research by limiting our primary research methods, including in-person participant observation and interviews. Research strategies requiring social proximity became not only impractical but also potentially dangerous for those we work with. The global pandemic has pushed us to further adapt our research strategies to include digital components like Zoom interviews; participant observation in online chat groups, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds; and observation of online communities and virtual activism even from halfway around the world. The extent and durability of these shifts over time is still uncertain.

CHANGES IN CONTENT

Globalization has also deeply affected fieldwork content. No longer can an anthropologist study a local community in isolation from global processes. As even the most remote areas are affected by intensifying globalization—whether through media, tourism, investment, migration, or global warming—ethnographers are increasingly integrating the local with the global in their studies. In some cases, particularly in studies of migration, ethnographic fieldwork is now multisited, encompassing research in two or more locations to more fully represent the scope of the issue under study.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s career reflects many recent changes in ethnographic fieldwork. Her earliest research, introduced at the beginning of this chapter, focused on local life in the Brazilian shantytown Alto do Cruzeiro. She has carefully monitored changes in the community in the ensuing years, including dramatic recent improvements in infant mortality rates stemming from Brazilian economic growth and direct government promotion of local health-care services (Scheper-Hughes 2013), and she is reporting these changes in a revised and updated version of her classic ethnography Death Without Weeping.

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A man in a white tank top stands beside two young Filipino men holding up their T-shirts to show scars on their abdomens. In the background are people and trees.

Scheper-Hughes’s other recent work places Alto do Cruzeiro in the middle of an illicit global trade in harvested human organs (Scheper-Hughes 2002). While she continues to explore the richness of local life in Brazil, she has expanded her scope to examine how the experiences of the poor in one community are mirrored in the lives of poor people in many other countries and are linked by a gruesome global trade driven by demand from the world’s economic elite. Scheper-Hughes first began hearing rumors while working in northeast Brazil: rumors of the abduction and murder of poor children, whose bodies—minus heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, and eyes—would later be found on roadsides, in sugarcane fields, or in hospital dumpsters. Later, as she began writing articles about these organ-stealing rumors, other anthropologists reported similar stories of organ theft in Central and South America, India, Korea, Eastern Europe, and many parts of Africa.

Reflecting on the meaning of these stories, Scheper-Hughes writes, “To the anthropologist . . . working closely with the urban poor, the rumors spoke to the ontological insecurity of people ‘to whom almost anything could be done.’ They reflected everyday threats to bodily security, urban violence, police terror, social anarchy, theft, loss, and fragmentation. Many of the poor imagined, with some reason as it turns out, that autopsies were performed to harvest usable tissues and body parts from those whose bodies had reverted to the state” (Scheper-Hughes 2002, 36).

As an engaged medical anthropologist, Scheper-Hughes has spent countless hours investigating the extensive illegal international trade in smuggled human organs. Contemporary globalization, especially the time-space compression of transportation and communication, enables trafficking networks to spread across national boundaries and around the world. These same cornerstones of globalization have allowed Scheper-Hughes and her organization, Organs Watch, based at the University of California, to develop an extensive global network of anthropologists, human rights activists, transplant surgeons, journalists, and government agencies that have collaborated to address issues of human organ trafficking in India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, Turkey, Moldova, Brazil, the Philippines, and the United States.

As a member of two World Health Organization panels on transplant trafficking and transplant safety, Scheper-Hughes has seen firsthand the global search for kidneys: the often-poor kidney sellers, the kidney hunters who track them down, and the kidney buyers willing to cross borders, break laws, and pay as much as $150,000 in advance to the organ brokers for a chance at a new kidney and a new life. In 2009, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested a Brooklyn rabbi who had been arranging kidney sales, highlighting the deep integration of illegal international organ trafficking into developed-country markets where, for example, more than 100,000 Americans linger on a kidney waiting list, struggling through dialysis to stay alive, and where the wait times for a donor in some parts of the country are as long as nine years.

The trajectory of Scheper-Hughes’s career from fieldwork in a small favela in Brazil to fieldwork in international organ-trafficking networks reflects many of the transformations that have shaped anthropological fieldwork over the last forty years. No local community can be viewed as isolated. Anthropologists must consider each local fieldwork site in light of the myriad ways in which local dynamics link to the world beyond. Today, fieldwork includes attention to global flows, networks, and processes as anthropologists trace patterns across national and cultural boundaries while keeping one foot grounded in the lives of people in local communities.