No abstract

This article analyses the phenomenon known as social networking services (e.g. websites such as Facebook and MySpace) with anthropological theory deriving mainly from Melanesia. It is argued that these websites engender what in Western countries is a new form of presentation of self‐ and personhood that focuses on the social relations of the person rather than the person as an individual. In this way, the article discusses consumption in cyberspace and the production of differentiation, rank and hierarchy on the Internet in relation to social identity.

Prompted by the postmodern turn in anthropology, ethnographic fieldwork has been subjected to considerable analytical scrutiny. Yet despite numerous conceptual facelifts, definitions and demarcations of 'the field' have remained fundamentally anchored in tropes of spatiality with the association between field and fieldworker characterized as being maintained by distances in space. By exploring and unfolding the temporal properties of the field, anthropology can favorably complement and extend the (spatially anchored) notion of multi-sited fieldwork with one of multi-temporal ethnography. This approach implies not only a particular attention to the methodology of studying local (social and ontological) imaginaries of time; it furthermore unpacks the (multi-)temporality of the relationship between fieldworker and the field. This special issue may thus be taken as a fresh invitation to a temporally oriented ethnography.

No abstract

No abstract