Abstract
For a long time, the business of anthropology was tied to deep ethnographic research in a single location, sticking around long enough to slowly understand the microcosm of a local community. Since the early 1990s, a growing number of scholars has argued against the shortcomings of such single-sited ethnography with all its sedentarist connotations and inherent isomorphism of place and culture. A multi-sited practice of ethnographic research has now become mainstream, and with it concepts of mobility, transnational diaspora, flows and networks that are arguably better suited to capture the manifold and asymmetric connectivities of our current era. Taking a cue from Tim Ingold’s critique of space and his distinction between meshwork/network and wayfaring/transport, I suggest a third approach to study mobile lives and the work of making community – an approach I would like to call co-itinerant ethnography. Based on research in the Himalayas and the Pamirs, I develop the notions of place-knots and pathways to understand the particular form of translocality at stake in these contexts.
