The Multi-Sited Self: Toward a Phenomenological Paradigm for Autoethnography

Anthropology has traditionally privileged the study of the “other” in bounded field sites, with the ethnographer positioned as an external observer. Yet in a globalized and increasingly individualized world, the boundary between the culture of one’s own and that of others is increasingly blurred. For transnational and multilingual subjects, the question of what constitutes the “culture of my own” becomes particularly problematic. Multi-sited ethnography emerged as one response, expanding the field to trace people, objects, and ideas across dispersed contexts. However, this approach is limited when the researcher cannot accompany participants along all their trajectories. This paper extends the move inward: from multi-sited ethnography to the multi-sited self.

Drawing on a phenomenological understanding of selfhood as embodied, interpretive, and shaped through everyday encounters, this project treats the self not as self-evident or fixed but as a being thrown into the world, lived through the body, and mediated by interpretation. Autoethnography provides a rigorous methodological framework for studying the fragmented, multilingual, and transnational self as an ethnographic field in its own right.

Preliminary findings illustrate how this approach captures the dynamics of the multi-sited self: for example, shifts in voice and narrative stance when moving between multiple languages; changes in bodily comportment across national and institutional settings; and moments when conflicting cultural frameworks generate rupture, hesitation, or reinterpretation. These observations show how the phenomenological lens makes visible forms of mobility and fragmentation that traditional ethnographic methods struggle to apprehend.

Theoretically, this study advances a paradigm in which the self becomes a legitimate site of ethnographic knowledge production. Practically, it offers a methodological pathway for researchers working under conditions of global mobility—those who cannot track participants across all settings yet experience transnational movement, multilingualism, or identity multiplicity themselves.