In an increasingly urban world, the places where anthropologists work and the subjects they study have undergone significant tranformations. Anthropologists today find themselves working in cities and in sites of advanced technological production, studying urban elites and scientific experts, and pushing the bounds of ethnographic practice “beyond the human.” As a result, the village, once the site par excellence of the ethnographic encounter, has largely disappeared from view in anthropological writing. In this introduction, we examine the underlying shifts in modes of anthropological investigation that have produced this outcome, paying special attention to the emergence of multi-sited ethnography and the reaction against earlier framings of villages as bounded and coherent social wholes. Along with the other contributors to this Special Issue we raise the question of what has become of the village as a site of ethnographic analysis, and argue that we have much to gain from a re-engagement with village worlds.
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