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20 Consuming Media

‘field’, a geographically isolated and culturally bounded location. Certain character-
izations of the field persist, however, and continue to have consequences for the ways
ethnographers think and work. Akthil Gupta and James Ferguson describe, for
example, the value that continues to be placed on detailed description and contin-
uous face-to-face interaction. These are factors that depend on a particular kind of
place and a group of people with a common culture who inhabit it. This in turn
generates a concept of what constitutes a field, a concept that privileges certain kinds
of knowledge and obscures others. Ethnographic knowledge, as Gupta and Ferguson
note, is highly dependent on the presence and experience of the participant observer,
securely grounded in a local setting. 52
In the meantime, anthropologists have struggled with the growing multiplicity of
locations of the phenomena they study, and many address the dilemma through
‘multilocal’ fieldwork, for example in studies of professionals who work internation-
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ally. In migration studies, anthropologists often carried out fieldwork in at least two
sites, long before the concept of multilocal fieldwork was established. Hannerz has
suggested the alternative term ‘translocal’ to describe the character of these studies, in
order to emphasize not only that the fieldwork is carried out in several different loca-
54
tions but also that the places are structurally related to each other. Another research
model is to select a place that can simultaneously provide access to a number of
different sites, in order to employ a translocal perspective with a single strategically
chosen location as the point of departure. 55 This is in effect the strategy we were
using when we selected Solna Centre for a broader study of media consumption. At
the same time, it landed us in the middle of a paradox. On the one hand, it was all
too clear that Solna Centre, like many other significant sites of late modernity, is a
far cry from the traditional anthropological ideal of a small community, isolated from
the surrounding world, where people share a common, autonomous culture. Indeed
the characteristics that distinguish Solna Centre from this ideal are precisely the
reasons we were drawn to the place. On the other hand, many of our research
methods seemed to demand a kind of contact that was for the most part unattain-
able there. The transitory and translocal phenomena we were studying were difficult
to capture, no matter how much time we spent in the shopping centre or how many
interviews we did there. 56 We addressed the problem continually, if implicitly,
through the forms our collaboration took and the methods we developed.

INTERSECTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY
The task of investigating contemporary and spatially situated media practices
demanded methodological innovation. We could for instance not rely on established
models of audience or reception research. Three main cues guided our work. First, it
was necessary to approach our complex field collectively, not by just adding indi-
vidual studies, but by developing a tight interaction between the researchers involved.
Each could only capture certain aspects and parts of the media practices in the centre,
but in close dialogue with each other, we had to cultivate a shared knowledge.
Second, our work had to be inter- or cross-disciplinary, making use of a wide set of