I was just reviewing Wikipedia's entry on cultural anthropology and had a thought that ties together two of my favorite things -- anthropology and the movies. Here it is. In the old days, the bread and butter of anthropology was the ethnography, where the anthropologist went and lived with one circumscribed group of people for an extended period of time (generally two years) and then wrote up the results. That's where we get works like Evans-Pritchard's "The Nuer" and Firth's "We, the Tikopia." While, to the best of my knowledge, getting a doctorate in the field still more or less requires the completion of a traditional ethnography (and, oh, about a decade of your time), there's a new trend mentioned in the Wikipedia entry toward what's called 'multi-sited ethnography,' where the anthropologist tracks something -- like an idea or a commodity -- from one place to the next. Wikipedia cites this example, of a study that tracked human organs as they move through the black market.  All in all, a positive trend in the field, I'd say, that frees anthropologists to address more interesting and relevant questions. A trend in anthropology and a nascent trend in cinema, I think. I'm thinking about movies like Traffic and Syriana (both Gaghan films). Though I enjoyed neither immensely, I love how they tried to tell their stories by tracking a broad theme -- drugs in the former, oil in the later -- from place to place and through the perspective of the folks involved. In both anthropology and the movies, I think that we could do worse than to popularize this 'multi-sited' approach. For my money, it's a powerful way to tell enjoyable stories about complex stuff.

(By the way, the title of this post is a weak joke. Every emerging sub-field these days is called "toward an anthropology of" something or other, like "toward an anthropology of the Internet." Anthropologists don't like to be presumptuous.)