Area (2009) 41.1, 19–25 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2008.00847.

Ethnography, space and politics:

Blackwell Publishing Ltd

interrogating the process of protest in the

Tibetan Freedom Movement
Andrew D Davies
Department of Geography, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZT
Email: a.d.davies@liv.ac.uk

Revised manuscript received 8 May 2008

This paper examines the ability of ethnographic research methods to effectively study
spatially extensive political activity. It argues that traditional ethnographic methods of
sustained engagement with spatially bounded sites are not adequately suited to dealing
with contemporary spatially extensive political movements. It argues that contemporary
attempts to bridge this impasse have emphasised a dichotomy between global and local
that ignores the connections, disconnections and process that occur between places. The
paper argues for a critical ethnography that is based on a relational understanding of
space emphasising Gillian Hart’s conception of the interconnected nature of the ‘site’.
Taking a single demonstration against the Beijing 2008 Olympics conducted by UK-based
Tibet supporters, it examines how the site of protest was closely linked to a variety of
other places. Interrogating the processes of connection and disconnection brought about
through the protest creates an ethnographic account that, while partial, develops an
engagement with the heterogeneity of contemporary political action.

Key words: Tibet, politics, ethnography, networks

embassy. This was a typical protest by the Tibetan

Introduction
On 8 August 2007, I watched as the UK’s contingent
of ‘Team Tibet’ was unveiled in Trafalgar Square,
London. These four athletes wore a uniform of a
black tracksuit bearing a logo and team name. By
taking part in this event, the athletes were hoping to
be a part of an official application to compete in
the 2008 Beijing Olympics by the newly created
National Olympic Committee of Tibet. Having been
volunteering with a UK Tibet Support Group (TSG)
earlier that day, I found myself holding onto a bag
filled with campaign leaflets and a bundle of
Tibetan flags. While the athletes performed a series
of exercises, the 50 or so Tibetan and non-Tibetan
participants were closely monitored by the Heritage
Wardens who police the square. Later I stood as
these activists demonstrated outside the Chinese
community in the UK and its supporters – some
Tibetans dressed in traditional costumes, other people
waved flags and wore masks. Standardised chants
such as ‘China! China! China! – Out! Out! Out!’ were
constantly repeated. The only material difference to
many other Tibetan protests was the ceremonial
lighting of two torches, intended to symbolise the
desire of Team Tibet to compete with other nations
in the Olympics.
The protest event was aimed at the Chinese Gov-
ernment, the Organising Committee of the Beijing
2008 Olympics and the IOC who were marking the
one-year countdown to the start of the Games with
a series of showcases. At the same time, a number
of events organised by different parts of the Tibet
Movement were taking place around the world to
mark the start of the countdown, of which the London

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20 Davies
events were one. In the days prior to 8 August,
activists from the UK, US and Canada had hung
banners from the Great Wall of China and posted
images and video of the protest on various websites.
Two other activists, one a Tibetan-Canadian, the
other a British citizen, had been posting blogs from
Beijing about the city in the build-up to the Olympics.
All had been detained by the Chinese authorities.
This information emerged on the blogs nearly simul-
taneously with the events themselves – one posting
by the Beijing activists was uploaded while they
believed Chinese police waited outside their room.
On 8 August itself, the largest-ever gathering of Tibet
supporters took place in New Delhi in a ‘mass-
movement’ of 20 000 exiled Tibetans (14 on hunger
strike) and their supporters. A number of protests
took place worldwide, many involving a similar ‘Team
Tibet’ announcement.
This series of events brings into focus the simulta-
neous nature of contemporary transnational politics.
In various places, in a short period of time, events
impacted upon one another, and the speed of
communication between places allowed a degree of
coordination to occur. However, there remains the
issue of how I, as ethnographer, could speak effec-
tively about these other events and their connections
to this particular site. This paper focuses on networks
and how, to paraphrase Marcus (1995), ethnography
can attempt to be in and of a global system. It is
widely recognised now that there is something of a
tension between the traditional construction of
anthropological fieldwork as needing to involve
‘deep’ encounters over prolonged periods of time
with a community, and the ability of ethnographic
methods to cope with a multiplicity of sites and
events in transnational politics. As Hendry has
remarked
To examine global networks and transnational
communities it has become important to be able to
follow the people or the issues concerned, and carrying
out research in different areas has become a vital part
of the project. (2003, 498)
Following the ‘thing’ can therefore become an
effective methodology to uncover movements in a
global system. However, in certain cases this ‘following’
still leaves us disconnected from events that occur
outside the immediate realm of the site. The concept
of space as a relational encounter is well documented
within geography, but what happens if our notions
of the locality become stretched beyond the spaces
Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2008
we can intimately connect with as ethnographic
researchers? How can we actually examine these
global processes and explore them as relational
encounters? I focus here on one set of attempts to
address these questions, which has developed from
what Marcus (1998) terms multi-site ethnography.
More recently work has emerged that attempts to
think critically about ethnography and its role within
contemporary politics, from Burawoy et al.’s (2000)
‘Global ethnography’ project, to Hendry’s (2003)
calls for a ‘Globography’ to replace our concepts of
ethnography.
These attempts to rethink how we can situate
ethnography more effectively still rely upon a curious
dichotomy between ‘local’ and ‘global’. This paper
attempts to go further than these interrogations,
arguing for an ethnography that avoids macro- and
micro-thinking about contemporary politics, instead
aiming for an analysis that attempts to grapple with
the networks and systems of power that operate
across contemporary society. First, I assess some
accounts of how ethnography attempts to cope with
large systems that extend beyond a locality. I consider
how a networked understanding of space can
interrogate some of the gaps left by a global/local
binary. I then show how the Tibetan political activities
described above occur and create an arena of
connection/disconnection that shifts the site beyond
the ‘local’ of the events themselves.
Networked ethnography – spaces and
sites of action
Ideas about the role of networks as key components
of society have been prominent since the late 1970s.
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) work on assemblages
and rhizomes remain important and provocative.
More recently, the notion of the network has emerged
with increasing frequency, particularly through the
subtle accounts offered by Actor-Network Theory’s
(Latour 2005; Law 2004) version of the social realm
as a flattened network of ‘materially heterogenous’
(Law 1994, 2) relations. These, together with the
earlier writings by Deleuze and Guattari, have
formed the more influential accounts of theories
of a networked society. These flattened accounts
of space have influenced a recent debate started
by Marston, Woodward and Jones, around the
‘flattening’ of space and the reworking of the site
and hierarchical scale done by these networks (see
Marston et al. 2005; Jones et al. 2007). To Marston
et al. the site is
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a material location characterised by differential
relations through which one site is connected to other
sites, out of which emerges a social space that can
be understood to extend, however unevenly and
temporarily, across distant places. (2007, 45)
Thinking about ethnography in this way can situate
the site as a much more fluid and vibrant source of
engagement. Here, I follow Steve Herbert (2000) in
thinking about ethnography as a research method
that relies upon the process of participant observation,
with themes emerging from this participation,
combined with periods of reflection. Through
ethnography then, we attempt to uncover differential
relations, the bindings that hold these relations
together, and the way they are also fragile and
can fall apart. Indeed understandings that place
ethnographic explorations of the local as being at
the heart of extensive spatial systems are not new.
Vincent (1990) and Clifford (1997) have shown that
ethnographers traditionally placed the people they
study within such systems, but the disciplining of
‘academic’ anthropology in the post-Second World
War period led to a closing off of these areas,
instead replacing them with in-depth studies of
localities. This is not to say that ethnography, and its
close relation anthropology, has not engaged with
the idea of ‘the global’ more recently. Anthropology
has long been concerned with ethnographic methods
and their relevance to ‘the site’ and how wider
global systems can be interpreted through ethnographic
methods (Appadurai 2000). There is obviously more
to anthropological field work than ‘classical’ studies
involving years spent in a particular community
(Dresch and James 2000, 22), and there is a tension
inherent within anthropology in general and
ethnography in particular as to what the ‘field’ is
and what its limits are (Gupta and Ferguson 1997;
Amit 2000). These have unpicked how ‘being in the
field’ is not simply a matter of being outside one’s
usual space, but involves a disciplining of the
researcher as they exist both within and around the
field, and also how they reflect upon ‘the field’ when
outside it (for an explicitly geographical account see
Powell 2002).
Ethnographic studies of the political have also
become increasingly visible (Blom Hansen and
Stepputat 2001 2005; Vincent 2002; Joseph et al.
2007). These include studies of politics within specific
localities, but have also attempted to address the
spatially extensive nature of politics. There are many
attempts to capture a wider ‘global’ system within
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Ethnography, space and politics 21
an ethnographic study, but I focus here on one of
the more popular recent series of attempts, that of
multi-site ethnography, made famous by Marcus
(1998), which has attempted to address some of
the problems of doing a postmodern/postcolonial
ethnography in the present funding climate.
Multi-site ethnography is an attempt to approach
our subject as it appears in various places, studying
it in the multiple sites that it emerges in. In this way,
the subject is more readily visible to the researcher,
and its tale of how it fits into the larger system
around it can be told. There are problems here – the
limited time spent engaging with a topic in its
multiple environments can be critiqued as anathema
to the ‘traditional’ type of anthropological study that
involves prolonged engagement with a subject. The
very imagining of these topics as readily accessible
and describable is also problematic, as Cook, one of
geography’s advocates of following ‘things’ through
global supply chains, has argued
A good following story has a clear focus. Like a
chicken. That never goes out of sight. But anything
and everything that’s in and around it (throughout its
conception, birth, life, death and travels) could
become part of that story. But where exactly are the
beginnings and ends of such a story? (Cook et al.
2006, 657)
Although Cook’s work on following global food supply
is only a fraction of what could be considered
multi-site ethnography, these points are especially
valid as they raise considerable issues – if we
engage with objects and people in multiple places/
spaces, how do we adequately treat each scenario?
As what we follow becomes in/visible, how do we
account for this and describe it adequately? This is
more than advocating an ethnographic method that
simply jumps from site to site; instead it remains a
problem of how we can relate our understandings of
seemingly small scales to larger fields. How can the
mess of everyday existence be adequately understood
given our fleeting glimpses of it? There are examples
of good multi-site ethnographies that attempt to
stitch together global processes from a series of
encounters (see Scheper-Hughes 2004), but there is
still a tension between empirically grounded, local
examples of a global system that remains abstract.
One of the more explicit attempts to develop
these ideas comes from Burawoy et al.’s (2000) ‘Global
ethnography’ – a subtle type of multi-sitedness
that allows us to visualise the effects of the global
system in a variety of places by comparing lots of
22 Davies
different ethnographies and attempting to draw out
their linkages to an overarching system of capital
circulation. This approach produces a series of
localities, pulling them together as subjects of a
wider global system, and thus leaves us in a similar
global/local dichotomy. Burawoy (2001) has more
recently recognised a need for a more spatially
nuanced ethnographic account of globalisation, but
there remains a fundamental tension here.
In another attempt to situate ethnography globally,
Joy Hendry calls for a ‘globography’ (2003) that
argues for an interpretation of how society and
culture are influenced by icons and objects from
elsewhere. Thus her study of Japanese theme parks
looks at the translations that happen between cultures.
This allows a greater degree of understanding of
the connections between places – how cultures are
constructed and represented by others and how
these flows of ideas and knowledges actually play
out. Ultimately these attempts to integrate the local
of ethnography within a larger system still rely on a
dichotomous construction of local relations structured
within a global system.
If we are spatial specialists, how can we extract
something worthwhile from this seeming intractable
opposition? Calls for the increased use of ethno-
graphic methods as a geographical research tool
(Herbert 2000; Megoran 2006) are echoed by Gillian
Hart’s (2004) attempt to think about the role of a
‘critical ethnography’ that is able to move beyond
the global/local dichotomy. To Hart, ethnography
should be able to draw upon work by the likes
of Massey (1994) to think about role of place as a
nodal point in a larger, socially produced, space.
Following from here, engaging spatially with eth-
nography is particularly useful, especially concerning
accounts of the relational and networked nature of
political action.
Geographers have made important contributions
to thinking about the nature of politics and spatial
relations. Accounts by Lester (2001), Ogborn (2002),
Lambert (2005) and Featherstone (2005 2007) have
attempted to show how materially heterogeneous
relations were of crucial importance in producing
hegemonic or counter-hegemonic alliances in history.
Most recently Routledge with others (Routledge
forthcoming; Routledge et al. 2007) has applied
ANT to contemporary political networks. Particularly
useful here is his concept of ‘imagineers’ – individuals
who are more connected than their counterparts
within a network who act as nodal points, dissemi-
nating information and knowledge throughout the
Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2008
network. Crucially, these people do much of the
‘work’ of holding the network together by translating
objects/information for others’ use. They are also
useful in emphasising the unequal relations within a
network – even if we use the terminology of ‘flatness’,
there remain inclusions and exclusions to a network,
with distinctions of power and hierarchy being
played out within them. To think through some of
the problems that arise for ethnography as a result
of studying the connections between places/sites/
objects, I turn back to my fieldwork.
Tibetan political networks
This research focused on how relationships between
people and things form the Tibet Movement. This is
an avowedly transnational movement despite local
areas being important in building its foundations.
Rather than following one particular aspect of the
Tibet Movement, I followed the networks of Tibetan
activism, attempting to give them a degree of
prescience in my work. It was as a part of this act of
following that I arrived at the protest events mentioned
in the Introduction. Having been working in an
office of Tibet Support Group that day, I attended the
protest, which was not particularly well advertised
and which I would not have attended had I not
been ‘in’ the network that day – the protest was thus
one particular site of many within ‘the field’ of my
research. I want to think in more depth here about
the processes of political action within the Tibet
Movement and how they occupy spaces that are
neither exclusively global nor local. To clarify these
processes, I categorise them in two overlapping
streams: those that fostered connections and those
that created disruptions.
Connections
The London event had a number of connections that
were seemingly local and readily visible: the ‘Heritage
Wardens’ who stopped people waving Tibetan flags;
the police who controlled the protest outside the
Chinese embassy; the different TSGs who took
part in the protest, each with their own discreet
agenda; the passers-by who were halted by the
protest and became targets for leafleting. Each of these
connections has its own spatiality and temporality.
Individuals evolved their own relationship with the
demonstration, not least my own connections as a
non-Tibet supporting researcher, embodying a protester
by wearing the T-Shirt proclaiming ‘I Support Team
Tibet’, dealing with curious members of the public
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whilst trying to write hurried fieldnotes. These were
relatively tangible linkages that were visible as an
ethnographer – by being there, seeing, participating
and noting down the events, I was mapping the
protest in a ‘traditional’ ethnographic way. More
interesting is how these events touch events
occurring elsewhere. If we are involved in trying
to understand the networks and flows that occur
between places, how can we effectively speak about
these connections and understand how they actually
‘work’?
The place here of people who take the role of
Routledge’s ‘imagineers’ is vital, as they transmit
their knowledge and awareness of the Beijing protests
and the Tibet Movement. As the British detainees in
Beijing were well known to many of the people at
the demonstration, phone calls were being made
between various ‘imagineers’. At the start of the
Trafalgar Square event, it was unknown precisely
what was happening to the people in China. There
was a degree of tension felt by some people, espe-
cially those who had personal relationships with the
detainees. However, by the time that the Team Tibet
event had moved to the Chinese Embassy, one of
the individuals there had been in contact with
another activist in Hong Kong, who had just met all
eight detainees at the airport where they had been
deported from China. As a result, the ‘imagineers’ of
the movement were able to quickly disseminate this
information around the protest.
In addition to the tensions described above, there
was also a palpable sense of excitement at the fact
that Team Tibet had been formed and that pressure
was being put on the Chinese Government by the
international coverage that the events in Beijing and
elsewhere had received. One activist told me ‘It’s
amazing. Canada is really kicking off about this –
there’s been loads of coverage over there.’ This was
the work of a series of connections formed around
these events. The two blogging protesters in China
had been interviewed by Canadian TV, and North
American TSGs had quickly posted details and videos
on the Internet of the protests in Beijing which
their members were involved in. August 8th was
advertised as a ‘Worldwide Day of Action’. Thus
people at the event were distinctly aware of how the
event was intended to reach out across space, with
this series of events capturing a national, and potentially
worldwide, audience. The different sites of protest in
early August 2007 highlight the nature of contemporary
spatially stretched politics. The relatively invisible,
to me as researcher, events in China and elsewhere
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Ethnography, space and politics 23
cannot be discounted as unimportant to the events
at which I was present; instead they play a central
role to the conduct of the event.
Disruptions
While these occurrences may be simultaneous, they
are certainly not productive of homogeneity – the
protest also produced ruptures and breaks within its
networks. Most clearly articulated tensions arose
as people’s everyday patterns were disrupted, from
commuters finding the street blocked to the car
carrying people presumed to be ethnically Chinese
at some nearby traffic lights, which was subjected
to more vigorous leafleting than usual. These were
people who simply refused or resisted being drawn
into the network and influence of the Tibet movement,
instead choosing to simply ignore it and limit its
potential spatial scope.
The Beijing protests that linked up across the
world were clearly the product of a communication
system that allowed a degree of simultaneity to
all the protests, and this could give the impression
of a degree of uniformity to the Tibet Movement.
Ethnographically, it also became clear that there was
a degree of difference between the many groups
present in London. For example, members of different
TSGs all wore different ‘Team Tibet’ clothing, as no
standard merchandise line between groups had been
organised. As a result the protest had a limited
uniformity, breaking up the visual spectacle of the
event. It is also important to understand the scale of
the Tibet Movement. On many occasions, people
have spoken about how small the movement is, and
here people told me about how they’d arrived for
previous protests expecting hundreds of people, but
had in fact been the only people to attend. Thus,
while it can claim to be a global network of organi-
sations, the actual numbers in the Tibet Movement
remain relatively small, and it is through the interaction
of these small numbers of people and their attempts
to keep the campaign a prominent issue that anything
happens at all.
These highlight the protest as a dynamic space,
and shows that the connections between groups/
areas/people/things are multiple as well. The con-
nective nature of the demonstration and its links to
Beijing show how, in part, the network was initially
under strain – the lack of information passing between
Beijing and London (due to both geographical
distance and the communication breakdown caused
by the detention of the protestors) created a break in
the network, this despite the emotional connections
24 Davies
that people felt to what had happened to their
colleagues in Beijing. Thus, while initially the path-
ways of information were shut down by the detention
of the protestors/bloggers, it was through the interac-
tion of other network components that this breach
was circumvented and connection re-established in
Hong Kong. This creates a dynamic notion of political
activity, where change and fracture can cause net-
works to disintegrate rapidly, but other networked
elements can re-establish connections that can serve
a similar purpose.
Conclusions
Doing a more networked, relational ethnography
implies exploring the routes of these networks. Multi-
site ethnography and its related forms acknowledge
spatial separation and attempt to overcome it by
the movement of the ethnographer to and from
these different places. This still does not allow for
an understanding of the simultaneity of events that
can occur within these geographies of activism and
protest. We can follow the thing, the issue or the
individual, but when lots of things are happening in
lots of places at the same time, ethnography struggles
to cope without a team of researchers at work.
Burawoy et al. (2000) attempt this, but this is not
realistic for most researchers, and even if it were it
does not necessarily give us a more nuanced picture
of events. This is one of the problems of doing
ethnography that must be worked around, as with
any other methodology. What is useful in flattening
these spatially extensive systems is the unravelling of
possibilities that is yielded. This brief exploration of
one event within the Tibet Movement has highlighted
the way in which politics is both intensive, yet spatially
extensive at the same time.
The events described happen beyond a purely
‘local’ or ‘global’ level, instead occupying multiple
spaces at the same time, and it becomes important
to look at how information unfolds from a place/
event. While the members of the protest were con-
nected with their friends and colleagues via phone,
there were also other networks at work here. The
posting of pictures and blogs on the Internet via
campaign websites and media outlets opens up the
Tibet Movement to a wider audience. These act as
further sites of dissemination, shooting out rhizomatic
connections in unpredictable ways that we will
never be able to fully track. It is possible to see how
the work of ‘being political’ is done in these spaces
– particularly, but not exclusively, by those we
Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2008
could term ‘imagineers’. Most of the people at the
protests had at least a working knowledge of what
was going on in Beijing. Remaining unseen here are
the people who looked at this information and were
drawn into the network for a short period of time, or
simply ignored the event but remembered it at a
later date. The protests themselves drew in a number
of passers-by, together with those people whose
engagement was simply irritation at having the
pavement blocked by a group of people waving
Tibetan flags and shouting at a nondescript building.
In this way, the networks and the site of this event
are much more fluid, offering possibilities that are
difficult to predict.
Our job then is to trace the possible nature and
potential power of these networks. Through this we
can uncover effective political activities, and how
even those which are numerically small, like the
Tibet Movement, can have an impact on a seemingly
large scale. Multi-sited ethnography and its variants
described in this article call for us to follow some-
thing tangible as we move between different sites/
spaces/places. In this case, I would argue that it can
be enough to attempt to ‘follow the networks’ – seeing
how people, information and objects are negotiated,
translated, accepted and disregarded becomes
important. In practice this can mean things becoming
invisible, moving in and out of view as we move
with them, but this does not make them any less
important to the practice of doing politics.
If we are to think relationally about space, it nec-
essarily implies an opening up and an unfolding of
ethnography – as Hart (2004) has argued, ‘place’ is
not ‘local’ – it also reaches out across space in
unknown ways. Rather than limiting ourselves to
the ‘traditional’ anthropological idea of the site as
container for our topic, we should instead move
towards the limits of ethnography by exploring how
place and space shape the wider political environ-
ment. As geographers we are particularly well-placed
to attempt to unpick these spatial threads and move
beyond an ethnography that is sometimes unable to
move effectively beyond a local/global binary.
Acknowledgements
This article was presented in earlier forms at the 2007 RGS-
IBG Conference in the session ‘Critical ethnographies:
interconnections, politics, methods’ organised by Richard
Powell, and in a Globalisation, Development and Place
research day in the University of Liverpool. Comments
made by the audience at both events and readings by Richard
Area Vol. 41 No. 1, pp. 19–25, 2009
ISSN 0004-0894 © 2008 The Author.

Phillips, David Featherstone, Ivo Wengraf, Fiona McConnell
and two anonymous referees have all helped to refine and
clarify the argument. Any significant errors remain my own.
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