Paper short abstract:

This article starts with the question – is thick description enough? We argue that in order to fully realize the radical promise of multi-sited ethnography to produce a new understanding of ‘local’, we must also expand our notion of ‘thick description’ to incorporate a broader set of textual and non-textual practices. We call this newly expanded form of ethnographic practice: “thicker description”. We draw on our own personal evolution of thicker description from our earliest ethnographic collaborations to our current projects, charting the rise of some of the more salient thicker description practices – inter-textuality and ethnographic portraiture.

Paper long abstract:

: In this article we suggest that what was missing from Marcus's (1995) call to arms to move beyond single sited fieldwork is a sense of the ways in which new methodological and epistemological directions might also necessitate shifts in the traditional anthropological practices of representing research. Producing ethnography in or of the world systems might well require a critical reappraisal of what it is that we do when we are done with fieldwork. This article starts with the question - is thick description enough? We argue that in order to fully realize the radical promise of multi-sited ethnography to produce a new understanding of 'local', we must also expand our notion of 'thick description' to incorporate a broader set of textual and non-textual practices. We call this newly expanded form of ethnographic practice: "thicker description". We draw on our own personal evolution of thicker description from our earliest ethnographic collaborations to our current projects, charting the rise of some of the more salient thicker description practices - inter-textuality and ethnographic portraiture.