Multi-locality, Historicity and Re-structuring of the Social: Theoretical and methodological conditions of the ethnographic field research

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE is written οn two interrelated levels - a theoretical and an ethnographic. Ιn relation to the first, Ι attempt to analyze the aftereffects of the increasing complexity of the world, which is the consequence of the rapid involvement of 'local communities' in inter-local networks and of the continuous geographical mobility of subjects, in the epistemological restructuring and the methodological approach of the 'ethnographic field' Recognizing the multilocality of social and cultural phenomena in the modern world has resulted in re-evaluating participant observation. Indeed, it has often led to disputes about, or even rejections of, this particular research method within the context of a general 'anti-empiricist' social and cultural relativism, that was dominant in anthropology during the previous decades.
Using ethnographic material from a multi-local empirical research in the geographically dispersed community of the Vlachs, particularly the Gardikiotes, Ι argue in favor of ethnography as a valid method of production of scientific knowledge, according to the standards of the social sciences. Focusing οη the uses and exchanges of material and visual objects, Ι try to illustrate the processes that account for the (re-)production of hegemonic symbolic sites of cultural identity and social agency. Within this perspective, Ι give particular emphasis to the historicity of social phenomena, in this case the community under study, which, even when they are integrated into larger realities, they continue to maintain their analytical autonomy, and thus their epistemological validity as sites of ethnographic research. 
Historicity serves as a compass that directs the ethnographer in his/her search for advantageous pathways and sites of observation, allowing, among other things, for the conceptualization and interpretation of integrative processes into larger contexts of social and cultural relations.