Finding the Field: Notes on the Ethnography of NGOs Available to Purchase

Studying globalization challenges disciplinary traditions that implicitly privilege a geographically demarcated field and classic models of ethnographic fieldwork. Understanding transnational processes calls for innovative, multilocal research strategies that both capture people's perceptions of change and analyze the interconnecting systems. Although the study of large, "southern" NGOs that link international donors and community-based groups offers one such strategy, it also generates a series of methodological complications associated with discerning the contours of the ethnographic field itself and the researcher's position in the volatile NGO sector. These issues are addressed in relation to the author's current fieldwork in Andean southern Peru.