Ethnography of Open Cultural Production: From Participant Observation to Multisited Participatory Communication

Abstract

This chapter engages in an in-depth discussion of the ways in which ethnography could be adapted to understand creative practices that are scattered over multiple spatial, temporal and communicative contexts. Starting with an overview of some of the important debates about the relevance and nature of ethnography in contemporary media practices, it proposes multisited participatory communication as an efficient modification of fieldwork that reconciles two disparate fields: anthropology and development communication. The approach is exemplified through a case of a Siberian open-source animation film project. It demonstrates how using participatory communication across multiple sites, such as Skype, online training platforms, specialized community conferences and fieldwork, allows the creation of more holistic and egalitarian research frameworks.