Fieldwork in South Asia
Memories, Moments, and Experiences
- Sarit K. Chaudhuri - Head, Department of Anthropology, Rajiv Gandhi University, Arunachal Pradesh
- Sucheta Sen Chaudhuri - Head, Centre for Indigenous Culture Studies, Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi
Fieldwork in South Asia is a valuable attempt to listen and learn from the memories and significant moments of fieldwork done by anthropologists, sociologists, and even historians from South Asia. The essays lead towards a deeper understanding of concerns of fieldwork located in various field sites across South Asia without assuming or applying fixed normative rules for the whole region. In the process, the volume allows the reader to have an option to locate or relocate ethnographic or other forms of texts in the context of growing methodological contours and dilemmas in the social science.
Above all, this is a book about relationships—multi-layered relationships among people encountered in the field, the ethnographic relationship itself, with all its personal raw edges, and relationship with the land and even non-human realms.
The most valuable reflection on one of the central concerns of contemporary anthropology: to rehabilitate fieldwork as the essential core of the discipline’s specificity. The contributors vividly account how field immersion is always an arduous and delicate undertaking and how for the same reason it cannot be substituted by any expedient.
This remarkable volume brings together established as well as junior scholars to remember and reflect upon their field experiences, but what makes it truly fascinating is that it addresses South Asia as a whole. We learn how the national, cultural, and bureaucratic context in which fieldwork is conducted differs from country to country; how anthropologists have negotiated their relationships with their informants over time; how fieldwork can be carried out under dangerous conditions; and how serendipitous encounters generate new discoveries. This is a valuable addition to the range of volumes in and on the “field”.
This edited volume, containing a collection of essays from established and new scholars, provides multiple dimensions to the understanding of fieldwork... [It] has some chapters that are absolute gems, raising crucial? questions about understanding fieldwork.??
