“As a heuristic device, the arbitrary location is perhaps best understood as the symmetrical inversion of the ‘ideal type’. Weber’s ideal type was an abstracted notion, nowhere existing and for that very reason easily definable, a notion which served as a ‘control’ for comparative analysis of actually existing instances (Gerth and Mills 1948, 59ff). The arbitrary location, by contrast, is the actually existing instance, whose messiness, contingency, and lack of an overarching coherence or meaning, serves as a ‘control’ for a broader abstract object of study. It is ‘arbitrary’ insofar as it bears no necessary relation to the wider object of study (‘Nuerland’ to ‘politics’, the Trobriand islands to the Oedipus complex). While the ideal type allows one to connect and compare separate instances, the arbitrary location allows one to reflect on and rethink conceptual entities, to challenge their coherence and their totalizing aspirations. If the ideal type is meaning which cuts through space, the arbitrary location is space which cuts through meaning.”
This article was republished with a new afterword which addresses some early critiques of the argument, in a volume on multisitedness edited by Mark-Anthony Falzon Arbitrary Locations: In Defence of the Bounded Field-site (with a new afterword)
The article also sparked a vibrant discussion on alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between sites and concepts, including the notion of ‘equivocal locations’ (Heywood 2015) and ‘un-sited fields’ (Cook, Laidlaw and Mair 2009).
For an extension of the argument into the temporality of fieldsites, see The Fieldsite as Device