(re)Negotiating Boundaries When Researchers Return “Home” for Research

As always, I was crossing another boundary. This time the spaces were less than a kilometer apart; however, the difference in material conditions could not have been greater. I was going from a posh South Delhi neighborhood Asha Farms to Baadli, a small urban village situated behind the farms. Sitting in an auto-rickshaw, slightly hunched over so I could see the shifting scene, we drove past gated farmhouses with guards outside and then slowly moved behind the farms where I could see the backs of tall cement walls topped with barbed wire fencing. I knew I was approaching Baadli when I saw the open dumpster on the right where the trash of the privileged and the not-so- privileged mingled to produce food for the crows and stench for both neighborhoods. This boundary crossing was marked by sensory cues, while other crossings were embodied practices that situated me as an Indian woman living in the United States for the past twelve years, who was now also a graduate student returning “home” for research.

New nature of fieldwork: Researchers come "home" to computers and virtual worlds beyond geographic boundaries. Here, the author enters her notes at the end of a long day of fieldwork. Photo courtesy Nayantara (Tara) Sheoran

Starting fieldwork in India required multiple boundary crossings. Spatial crossings from Washington, DC to the New Delhi; personal crossings which shifted the “single independent woman” label to read “unmarried daughter;” and above all an academic boundary crossing where as a cultural studies scholar (albeit trained under anthropologists) I was going to engage in ethnographic work that was anthropologically engaged. Having conducted pilot studies in India, I thought I had enough practice negotiating these boundaries. However, it was only when I started my longer fieldwork that, I started being confronted with statements like “Oh, you are like my daughter and I would love to help” or “You will never understand our situation, you don’t know how it is here.” And sometimes, these divergent sentiments would be from the very same person. These paradoxical statements made me reflexively examine my role as a privileged woman researcher living in the United States, who was at the same time an insider (I am originally from India) and an outsider (I had been removed from the everyday life in India for over a decade). These statements and sentiments started to make me question the native status of researchers when they/we return “home” for fieldwork.

When writing for this series on boundaries, I reviewed my fieldnotes and started to think about the various boundaries I had negotiated for my research, and came to the realization that my position as a “native” scholar was of little bearing but my ability to be a native in multiple locations in multiple ways allowed me to negotiate fieldwork in contemporary India. Kirin Narayan writes against an essentialist “native” versus “non-native” trope in “How Native Is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” (American Anthropologist 95[3]). In it, Narayan suggests, “at this historical moment we might more profitably view each anthropologist in terms of shifting identifications amid a field of interpenetrating communities and power relations.” (671) In this brief fieldnotes essay, I wish to suggest that fieldwork in contemporary societies at this historical moment requires researchers to navigate multiple boundaries, sometimes on a daily basis. And it is the ability to do so seamlessly, and the willingness to be an insider and outsider simultaneously for our respondents, that allow for more engaged fieldnotes (and ethnographic texts). In particular, when researchers return “home” after having been away for a while, we might have to be willing to be dubbed insiders or outsiders by our respondents and instead of fighting those labels, we use that labeling moment to understand our research subjects and ourselves better.

This was made explicit to me over the course of fieldwork and I draw on my notes for one particular day to lend to this understanding. I had crossed Asha Frams and was now in Baadli to meet up with Rupa didi (didi is the Hindi word for older sister, but is also used to address older women respectfully) outside of her work. I had met Rupa didi at the leather factory, where I was “hanging out” with thirteen women that worked in the finishing and packaging department. It was the smallest and only department within the factory where women worked. It was removed from the rest of the factory (and men’s work spaces), and in essence was a large warehouse where the leather products were cleaned, finished, and packed by the women workers. I was seeing her on a weekend, as she had invited me to her house to meet her children. It was earlier in the week when I had asked her to introduce me to other women in her neighborhood, outside the factory, when she said, “Oh, you are like my daughter and I would love to help.” Her daughter, Sheela, who she was comparing me to, was taking classes to train to be an accounting secretary. Sheela was a twenty year old young woman who was curious about my research and but more so about my life in America.    

The more Sheela asked about my life in America and my graduate school experiences, the quieter Rupa didi became. At the factory, I had mentioned my research to the women and my background, and most women there enjoyed having a doctoral student like me, an unmarried Indian woman from an upper-class family, sit with them on the factory floor. They constantly offered me cushions or chairs to sit on, but I always chose to sit right next to them to chat about emergency contraceptive advertisements and see their work. Initially they found this amusing and protested often, but eventually accepted it. Unlike Dorinne K Kondo’s respondents in Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (1990), my women did not try to re-cast me as an “Indian” because I already was clearly Indian, yet an Indian that was removed from their Indianness by many boundaries. In the factory, sitting on the floor was my way of negotiating a boundary in which I did not wish to be situated on the outside because of my subjective position, even though it was clear I was an outsider as I sat with recorder and notebook while they diligently worked on finishing pieces of leather furniture. However, here in Rupa didi’s house, a new boundary had to be negotiated.

Here, I was trying to situate myself as somebody that was “like her daughter,” so she could continue to see me as such. However, as the afternoon progressed, Rupa didi stopped viewing me as the Indian woman that was a student just like her daughter, but rather somebody who was removed by many degrees from her reality. It was later in the day when I asked, about emergency contraceptive advertising and why Rupa didi did not think Sheela should watch those advertisements that she replied, “You will never understand our situation, you don’t know how it is here.” While I wanted to say, but yes, yes I do understand your notions of propriety that want to prevent you from letting Sheela watch these ads, I said nothing. As a “good Indian girl” I knew when an elder didi was troubled by something and knew that it was my cue to leave soon. Over the next few days, things did go back to being normal in the factory and also in my visits to Rupa didi’s home, but I was always aware of constantly navigating boundaries between being an insider and outsider.

This is only one of many examples, where the boundaries for belonging and knowing were constantly redrawn as my interlocutors guided me though my fieldwork, and I was asked to justify my research and presence. While being a native has its advantages for research, it also proved perilous when new boundaries were established to deal with the novel situation of an insider/outsider. Before starting fieldwork I had believed that once you were an insider, you would always remain an insider. However, my experiences in the field have led me to believe that as ethnographers crossing multiple boundaries for research we become insiders once or twice, but are always already outsiders because we cross back those boundaries to return to our spaces. Spaces outside of our subject’s lives, spaces that range from our secluded rooms where we write fieldnotes to spaces where we open up our computers and log onto facebook to see photographs of friends using measuring tapes to indicate the hourly accumulation of snow outside their patio doors in Washington, DC. We return to spaces, where we might not see, feel, or smell the boundaries but where we think and write about them.

Author’s note: Pseudonyms have been used for all localities and respondents.