How does ethnography come to terms with our current global condition? Being a method characterized by its in-depth knowledge of a bounded space, how does ethnography cope with a world scale? How does the global condition affect the definitions of key ethnographic concepts? In this article, I first reconstruct ethnographic debates regarding the status of the global, showing how ethnography can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the binary global/local. Then I review two projects that study global processes from an ethnographic point of view: multi-site ethnography (Marcus 1995) and global ethnography (Burawoy et al. 2000). I compare these two approaches along four dimensions: site, context, research design and reflexivity. I argue that while multi-site ethnography and global ethnography are often used interchangeably, each ultimately presents distinctive answers to key questions for the ethnographic study of global processes.
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