Redefining ethnography «in the strict sense of the term»: Perspectives gained from non-standard, old-new fieldwork
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3520
Questo saggio riflette sulle conseguenze per l’etnografia dell’inversione di direzione dell’incontro antropologico – cosa succede esattamente quando antropologi e antropologhe provenienti dal Sud del mondo intraprendono un lavoro di campo tra popolazioni del Nord del mondo? Sosterrò che questo fatto non corregge solamente gli squilibri storici della produzione di conoscenza antropologica, cambiando in tal modo la sostanza di questa stessa conoscenza, sebbene certamente questo sia un obiettivo degno di essere intrapreso, come è stato sottolineato fermamente dalla critica alle pratiche egemoniche della disciplina da parte delle “antropologie del mondo”. Facendo riferimento al mio terreno di ricerca nella zona centrale degli Stati Uniti, dove ho realizzato il lavoro di campo negli anni 1989-1991, e poi ancora nel 2015 durante una “rivisitazione mirata”, suggerisco che le incomprensioni durevoli tra l’antropologo e i partecipanti alla sua ricerca rappresentino di per sé una ricca fonte di dati e possibilità umane. Ciò che sostengo è che il lavoro sul campo di questo tipo, non standard e a lungo termine, può contribuire a rivelare dimensioni della pratica etnografica che rimarrebbero altrimenti nell’ombra.
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Redefining ethnography «in the strict sense of the term»: Perspectives gained from non-standard, old-new fieldwork
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Chandana Mathur
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Redefining ethnography «in the strict sense of the term»: Perspectives gained from non-standard, old-new fieldwork
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                                          2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 119-131




Redefining ethnography «in the strict sense of
the term»
Perspectives gained from non-standard, old-new fieldwork
Chandana MATHUR
National University of Ireland, Maynooth




ABSTRACT: This essay reflects on the consequences for ethnography of the reversal of
the direction of the anthropological encounter – what exactly happens when
anthropologists from the Global South undertake fieldwork among populations in the
Global North? I will argue that this does not merely correct historical imbalances of
anthropological knowledge production, thereby changing the substance of that
knowledge itself, although of course that is a goal worth pursuing, as has cogently been
pointed out by the “world anthropologies” critique of hegemonic disciplinary practices.
Using insights drawn from my own research site in the US heartland, where I conducted
fieldwork initially in 1989-91, and then again during a “focused revisit” in 2015, I
suggest that lasting misunderstandings between the anthropologist and the research
participants are themselves a rich source of data and human possibility. My contention
is that non-standard and long-term fieldwork of this kind may help reveal dimensions
of the practice of ethnography that would otherwise remain obscured.

KEYWORDS: ETHNOGRAPHIC     FIELDWORK,   MALINOWSKI, US HEARTLAND, ANTHROPOLOGY       IN REVERSE,
FIELDWORK REVISITS.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Chandana Mathur
Redefining ethnography «in the strict sense of the term»: Perspectives gained from non-standard,
old-new fieldwork
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 119-131.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3520
120                                                            CHANDANA MATHUR



   On 9th November 2016, dejected and confused, I phoned the three people I
knew most closely from my 1989-91 fieldwork in Southern Indiana to make
sense of the outcome of the US election. Two of them were former coal
miners, one had been a social worker. They had all voted for Obama twice,
and were all sympathetic to Sanders. In the 2016 general election, however,
they had each voted for a different candidate. One of the out-of-work coal
miners had voted for Clinton in an attempt to prevent Trump from coming
to power, as many people did. The former social worker realised that Trump
was going to sweep the state of Indiana anyway, so decided to vote for Green
Party candidate Jill Stein, whose politics were nearest to his own. The third
person, also a former coal miner, had voted for Trump and said that he was
embarrassed to tell me so. He felt that Hillary Clinton was «a very flawed
candidate» and he did not know what else to do. He repeated several times
that the world that lay ahead with a Trump Presidency was very «troubling»
to him. But, he said, don’t you remember that when we first met more than
twenty-five years ago, you had said that there is no essential difference
between the Democrats and the Republicans. In the dialectical relationship
that obtains between ethnographers and their research participants, where
each is trying to make sense of the other, it can take quite a while to see how
an ethnographer herself/himself appears to these interlocutors. Quite apart
from the issue of the durability of mutual misunderstanding, it is worth
noting that, as much as anything else, a considerable quantum of our
discipline’s curiosity, and indeed its promise, is also directed at the question
of what research participants make of the fieldwork encounter.
   As anthropological orbital paths have changed and the discipline has
stopped revolving around the standard issue white male British
anthropologist with a double-barrelled name, it may be becoming more
possible to see the dark side of the ethnographic moon, to perhaps learn
more about ethnography itself. This article will in the first place reflect on
the consequences of reversing the direction of the anthropological
encounter by having anthropologists from the Third World work among
white Western populations. What is the outcome of such a role reversal, of
this non-standard form of ethnographic fieldwork? What is it that happens
when anthropology’s planetary circuits change course? I will argue that it
does more than merely correct historical imbalances of anthropological
knowledge production, thereby changing the substance of that knowledge
itself, although of course that is a goal worth pursuing, as has cogently been
pointed out by the «world anthropologies» critique of hegemonic


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disciplinary practices (Ribeiro, Escobar 2006). Thus, I am trying to claim that
such scholarship goes beyond gathering the new kinds of perspectives and
data that only «studying up» (to use Laura Nader’s phrase) can uncover. It
may in fact help reveal contours of the practice of ethnography that would
otherwise remain obscured.
   To shift into a different metaphor, going against the grain of the colonial
encounter can rob the anthropologist of the cloak of expertise and prestige
that comes from being a (typically reluctant) emissary of a dominant
collectivity in the global order. It is important to recognise that there are
specific things that this nakedness enables one to discover. Anthropologists
have reflected previously on fieldwork by postcolonial anthropologists in
other postcolonial spaces. Writing in Granta in 1986, Amitav Ghosh mused
about an argument that had erupted between himself, an Indian
anthropologist in the making, and an Imam in rural Egypt, where Ghosh was
conducting his fieldwork. Provoked by the Imam, Ghosh was astonished to
find himself making boastful assertions about India’s bomb-making
capacities, insisting that they were superior to those of Egypt. «So there we
were, the Imam and I, delegates from two superseded civilisations vying to
lay claim to the violence of the West» (Ghosh 1986). A beautiful re-
interpretation of this incident by David Scott makes the argument that
Ghosh, as a postcolonial anthropologist investigating another postcolonial
context, was seen to be making a bid for the «empty space of power» of the
West, and it is this move that was being resisted by the Imam (Scott 1989).
   Moving away from postcolonial places, what are the implications for the
practice of ethnography when the anthropologist-delegate from one of these
«superseded civilisations» undertakes fieldwork in the US heartland? Does
completing the ethnographic circuit in this manner reveal something about
ethnography itself? This formulation of naked ethnography – ethnography
in the strict sense of the term – is an allusion, of course, to Malinowskian
exposure (Malinowski 1989), and to the assertions made by several
commentators that Malinowski’s diary must be read together with the
ethnographic accounts he published in order to understand the full import of
his work (Clifford 1986; Rapport 1990). It also looks back towards Donna
Haraway’s formulation of «situated knowledgs», and attempts to heed her
words of caution. «"Subjugated" standpoints are preferred because they seem
to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of
the world. But how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much
skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the
"highest" technoscientific visualizations» (Haraway 1988: 584).


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122                                                            CHANDANA MATHUR


    Stemming from this, there is a related note of caution regarding language.
For all that this essay makes its arguments in a first person voice, it is
important to underline that these reflections strictly pertain to
anthropological fieldwork, do not interrogate realms of personal experience
separate from fieldwork, and are concerned with what we can learn about
ethnography itself from non-standard fieldwork over the long term. This is
not auto-ethnography, I would argue. Denielle Eliott laments,
«like Malinowski’s Diary left abandoned on our office bookshelves, layered
with dust from neglect, we are still absent in many forms in our own
ethnographic writing, there but not present. We continue to construct
ourselves as the invisible, neutral observer» (Eliott 2014: 155). Conversely, in
making ourselves manifest in the context of our fieldwork encounters, we
are only following the longstanding, if inadvertent, Malinowskian tradition.
It is patently ethnography «in the strict sense of the term».
    I first arrived in the town of Newburgh in Indiana to begin my fieldwork in
the world-changing year of 1989. This was the year that marked the
momentous end of the era of the Cold War, celebrated ever since in media
images of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. I stayed there until the summer
of 1991, after the local Fourth of July parade had celebrated the US victory at
the end of the Gulf War – the first large-scale conflict of the new world
order. The initial framing of my project drew heavily on anthropological
political economy perspectives, an approach which contrasts profoundly, of
course, with Malinowski’s own conspicuous silence regarding the imperial
subjection of the people of Melanesia. As Joan Vincent notes (and Gupta and
Ferguson subsequently pick up on this), Malinowski presented the Trobriand
Islanders as completely isolated, even though they were frequently subjected
to «blackbirding», being among the estimated one hundred thousand Pacific
Islanders who were abducted and forced into indentured labour (Vincent
1990; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). That this is not a presentist allegation to
level against Malinowski is evident from the contemporaneous publication
of W.H.R. Rivers’ Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia (Rivers 1922).
    I certainly had no wish to overlook the shaping role of world historical
forces in the context of my fieldwork. Starting from the premise that cultural
processes in the United States cannot be adequately understood without
grappling with the symbols, structures and practices of contemporary
capitalism, I had arrived with a particular interest in the defining material
conditions of the area. In the immediate vicinity, these were determined
principally by the flagship Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America) plant that



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had stood outside of Newburgh since the early 1960s and the surrounding
coal mines that had lured it there in the first place. As a woman scholar from
India, I had initially been drawn to the project by the paucity of studies of
Western societies by anthropologists from my part of the world. I realised
only later that spending nearly two years in the American heartland at the
end of the twentieth century has taught me invaluable and unlovely truths
that may have been less accessible elsewhere or at another time. I went back
to Newburgh again for further fieldwork in the summer of 2015, and am
again back in touch with the majority of the research participants I had
known decades ago.
   The findings that I had stumbled upon during the 1989-91 period of
fieldwork – arguably at a key moment in the process of systemic
transformation – and had revisited and discussed with research participants
in 2015, are concerned with the nature of work, collective memory,
masculinity and nationalism. They seem enormously significant today for
this is, of course, classic Trump country as per the standard depiction – with
out-of-work coal miners and factory workers inhabiting a landscape of
vanishing opportunities and a labour movement seemingly in its death
throes.
   To return to the question of anthropology in reverse, does it truly describe
my 1989-91 research in Indiana? I was a relatively penniless graduate
student from India subsisting on a modest fieldwork grant but I came from a
middle class family in India, and it was not unlikely that my long-winded
educational journey would eventually bring me to middle class shores. The
men who were the focus of my research – and it was men primarily – were
white men engaged in classic Fordist occupations, who described themselves
as middle class, of course. For these were the days when middle class status
was claimed and ascribed as readily in the US as the unexamined term “white
working class” is used today (for a critical exploration of this new usage, see
Mathur, Kasmir 2018). However, the division between manual and mental
labour was plainly visible and acknowledged, and the resulting unconscious
adherence to class scripts and cues is quite astonishing. Transcribing a taped
conversation with an electrician at the Alcoa plant, I squirmed to hear
myself complete a sentence for him. The tape captures my immediate
apology as I noticed what I had done, and then this response from him: «No,
don’t apologise. You said it better than I would have». This is not to say that
class deference inevitably defined my interactions in Indiana, nor that I was
a completely tone deaf fieldworker. I am merely trying to complicate a
blanket claim of anthropological role reversal.

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124                                                             CHANDANA MATHUR


   Yet, at the same time, I was a distinct oddity – a stranger from India
studying in a little known university in New York, both places distant,
unknown, and considered somewhat threatening. Moreover, I was a woman,
which fact drew harassment so dire that I was forced to change my address
three times in my first six months in the field. I have a clear recollection of
anger as well as fear during one of the first of these incidents, as I cowered
indoors waiting yet again for the police to arrive in response to my call about
an inebriated male neighbour hammering on my front door late at night.
Anger that nobody (including myself) had anticipated that sexual
harassment would emerge as a major issue in the wholesome Midwest of the
United States. As we were setting out for fieldwork, I did not receive the
same warnings and sound practical advice as a fellow graduate student who
was told to be mindful of the difficulties she would encounter as a blonde
North American researcher in the Middle East. So powerfully ingrained are
the assumptions that mark out certain world regions as misogynistic and
others as relatively enlightened that I had arrived quite unprepared for these
distressing incidents. The gender-specific risks of fieldwork – one of the
usually unspoken «intimacies» of our discipline – is finally receiving
attention, for example, in the form of the American Anthropological
Association’s newly adopted policy on sexual harassment and sexual
assault1.
   These difficulties eventually subsided when I was able to rent living space
within a family home, and effectively live as a member of a local family. I
was able to settle in to the point that I had the luxury of experiencing the
sense of claustrophobia that most fieldworkers recognise from Malinowki’s
diary, the suffocating fear that life and fieldwork will eventually merge and
that escape to a familiar world will become impossible. This was, of course,
much more justified in Malinowski’s case – his fieldwork being in many ways
a brave face put upon the crushing fact of exile – than it is for most of us
subsequent followers of the methodology he pioneered.
   In general, during my years of fieldwork in Indiana, my potential middle
class status was more than offset by the fact that I was a woman of colour.
The cloak of prestige and expertise still largely eluded me during my summer
fieldwork of 2015, by which time I had in fact become a member of the global
middle class, as a tenured academic in Ireland, a European country towards
which middle Americans are generally well disposed. To the people who did
not already know me, yet another implausible location had been added to

1. See http://s3.amazonaws.com/rdcms-aaa/files/production /public/AAA- _SH_Poli-
cy_2018.pdf.


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the string of far-off places I was associated with – Ireland now, as well as
New York and India. Since I could no longer be conveniently slotted as an
«exchange student», I encountered new varieties of mistrust and avoidance.
   Unhampered by prestige, I also found that certain kinds of knowledge are
shared only with outsiders and pariahs. This was especially noticeable during
the first Gulf War – an exceptional moment for the consolidation of my
status as an outsider. It unexpectedly drew people towards me who wished to
confide their unease with warfare without making a public stand. Thus, I
heard from a local high school teacher that he had attended an anti-war
march in Washington DC, a fact that he carefully concealed from his
colleagues and students. Immediately after a multi-denominational church
service that turned into a call for holy war, I received an anguished phone
call from a minister who had officiated at the event but disagreed profoundly
with what was being said there. Painful as it is to do this kind of fieldwork, it
is also exceptionally rewarding in terms of the perspectives it makes
available.
   There is a further reason for suggesting that an already difficult research
methodology should be made more challenging. The second thread that I
wish to follow speaks to the peculiarly contemporary relevance of long-term
ethnography. Electoral politics around the world has rewarded hate-
mongering, nativism and majoritarianism in recent times – as in the election
of Narendra Modi as India's Prime Minister in 2014, and the Brexit vote and
the Trump victory in 2016. It is also noteworthy that these are comfortably
compatible majoritarianisms that publicly express admiration for each other.
This frightening new world arrived early for those of us attuned to
developments in India, when Modi won the general election in 2014. His
party and their thinking has gained ground still further since that time. This
has led to reverberations throughout the Indian polity – from the public
lynchings of Muslim men for allegedly eating beef by crowds of Hindu right-
wing «gaurakshaks» or «cow vigilantes», to the killings, threats of violence
and administrative and litigational harassment of writers, journalists,
academics and university students deemed to be anti-national.
   The xenophobia and anti-minority sentiment that underlies these
developments – the «fear of small numbers» in Arjun Appadurai’s words, and
its accompanying «surplus of rage» – is profoundly at odds with an
anthropological sensibility, which exults in difference and enthusiastically
seeks out the unfamiliar (Appadurai 2006). In a polarised world rife with
violence and majoritarianism, anthropologists will perforce find themselves
among group-thinking populations driven by fear and hate. Are our
empathetic methods of research well suited to this endeavour? Can

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126                                                          CHANDANA MATHUR


ethnography enable us to understand those with whom we fundamentally
disagree? Or could it be the case that even when we do not understand
except at a purely descriptive level, the very process of this kind of
anthropological research itself becomes part of the movement towards
mutuality? This is a plea, of course, for long-term and committed
anthropological fieldwork, since temporal depth yields data drenched in
relationship, or «intimacy», to use the lingua franca of this symposium.
   Hannah Arendt has written scornfully about empathy, «as though I tried
to be or to feel like somebody else» (Arendt 1983: 241), but she valued
sympathy, or fellow feeling. This is a potentially useful distinction to make
in the context of challenging fieldwork among unsavoury others. Writing
from the European context, Gingrich and Banks reckon that «it is more likely
that anthropologists have avoided fieldwork with neo-nationalists not
because they have been unable to gain access but because they do not wish
to – for the sake of moral hygiene rather than to avoid bodily endanger-
ment» (Gingrich, Banks 2006: 7). Where fieldwork of this kind has been
attempted, there is little agreement about the content of the research
process. Drawing on her experience of collecting oral histories from former
members of the Ku Klux Klan, Kathleen Blee argues that classic feminist
research techniques based in egalitarianism and empowerment are out of
place when researching hate groups. On the other hand, Susan Harding
argues for the re-categorisation of her Christian fundamentalist research
participants: «Why are the margins in studies of culture not occupied equally
by politically sympathetic and repugnant cultural "others"?» (Harding 1991:
392). Where others might hear distasteful, even distressing, utterances from
research participants, Harding hears the cadences of a separate language. To
get within earshot of «born-again language», she recommends «standing in
the gap between conscious belief and willful unbelief, in a place I call
«narrative belief» (Harding 2001: xii). An anthropologist commencing or
returning to fieldwork in the conservative Midwest has to calibrate her/his
own research strategy.
   When I went back to Indiana again for further fieldwork in the summer of
2015, having been out of touch with the majority of the research participants
for long years, I miraculously rediscovered almost everybody (and this is
logistically more difficult now given that people no longer use landline
telephones and I do not use social media). It was surprisingly easy to fall
back in step again with the people I had once known. To my astonishment,
more than one person said something along the lines of «Oh, it’s good to see
you again – I was talking to someone about you just a few days ago». An
encounter with one such individual helps to make the broader points


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regarding ethnography that I wish to discuss here. In an essay about the
ethnographic technique of the «focused revisit», Michael Burawoy notes that
it brings up for researchers «the dilemmas of participating in the world they
study – a world that undergoes (real) historical change that can only be
grasped using a (constructed) theoretical lens» (Burawoy 2003: 645). This
encounter attests to the durability of mutual misunderstanding in the
ethnographic context, but simultaneously points to possibilities latent in
anthropological fieldwork.
   I had been living in the Bible belt at a key moment in the politicisation of
right wing Christianity in the US in 1989-91. I spent a lot of time at a
conservative local church, since its Minister was, astoundingly enough, a
thoughtful, left-leaning individual who helped to assuage the cognitive
isolation that had afflicted me during my early days in Indiana. I grew quite
close to one of the families at this church – an Alcoa hourly wage worker, his
wife and small son. Unlike their Minister, they were traditional religious
conservatives, and I remember one occasion when the wife, Helen, and I met
for lunch and the talk turned to the fact that I was not a Christian. I
explained that I thought that it was perfectly possible to be a good person
without being a Christian. Am I not an example of a basically good person, I
asked her, without being a Christian and without wishing to be one? Helen
grew quite emotional, saying that I was fine as a person, but that she was
worried for my afterlife because she was so fond of me. I responded with a
logical question. Mahatma Gandhi was a good man. He knew about Christ
and Christianity, but he did not convert. Did she think he was suffering in
hell in consequence? As may be imagined, this led to a very prolonged lunch.
Helen said she did not know enough about doctrinal matters to say for sure
what Gandhi’s afterlife experiences might be like, that this was a question
for more knowledgeable religious people. I was trying to break down for her
the automatic identification she made between morality and Christianity,
trying to say that good people came from many different religious
backgrounds, or none at all. My persistent point throughout this conver-
sation was – isn’t it possible to be non-Christian and still be good, non-
Christian but not forever doomed?
   It was an intense discussion, and when we met again after twenty-five
years, we both remembered the occasion vividly. However, we both
remembered it in diametrically opposed ways. I remembered it as I have just
described it. She interpreted my persistent query quite differently. When I
said – isn’t it possible to be non-Christian and still good, non-Christian but
not forever doomed? – she read it as a desperate plea, as an expression of a


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128                                                            CHANDANA MATHUR


sort of «salvation anxiety» on my part. Although I had been trying to
unsettle the certainties of conservative Christianity that she brought to our
encounter, as well as its prescribed politics, she was successfully able to fold
my remarks into her world-view. It is important to admit that this world-
view has remained largely impermeable to me for over twenty-five years. To
truly understand it, it is necessary to believe in it wholeheartedly.
Hochschild’s call for climbing across «empathy walls» notwithstanding
(Hochschild 2016), anthropology’s intersubjective methods of research only
take us so far.
   The predicament of mutual unintelligibility is not newsworthy in and of
itself. We have all had our statements and sentiments misunderstood at one
time or another. The context of anthropological fieldwork is quite specific,
however – the anthropologist inserts herself/himself into the field as a
means of collecting data. The body and the subjectivity of the anthropologist
are themselves the research instruments. The areas of misunderstanding are
themselves immensely useful social data. In the encounter that I have
described, it does not matter that Helen and I are so constrained by our
worldviews that we read radically opposite meanings into the same
utterance. It does not really matter that we will probably never understand
each other’s standpoints. What is significant is that we are in dialogue and
will continue to remain so. That is the slender thread of consolation that
long-term ethnography offers in a deeply polarised world. These narrow and
enduring chinks of dialogue enabled by committed fieldwork, which may be
rendered by ethnographic writing into brief sparks of illumination extending
in both directions – it is these that will always set anthropology apart from
other forms of knowledge-making, especially when the goal is to understand
the dynamics of majoritarianism.
   This is the kind of anthropology that is under threat in the age of «audit
cultures» and neoliberal universities. As anthropologists comply and churn
out articles based on hit-and-run fieldwork and dump them on academia.edu
to maximise citations, we are turning our backs on what our discipline truly
has to offer in these frightening times.




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2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 119-131
                                          2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 119-131




 Chandana MATHUR was educated at the University of Delhi and the New
 School for Social Research, New York, and she has been lecturing since
 2003 at the Department of Anthropology at the National University of Ire-
 land, Maynooth. Drawing on the perspectives of anthropological political
 economy, her work focuses principally on the contemporary United States,
 South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. She is a former Chair of the World
 Council of Anthropological Associations (2016-18), and the recipient of a
 Distinguished Service Award from the International Union of Anthropolo-
 gical and Ethnological Sciences and a Presidential Award from the Americ-
 an Anthropological Association.
 chandana.mathur@mu.ie




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Chandana Mathur
Redefining ethnography «in the strict sense of the term»: Perspectives gained from non-standard,
old-new fieldwork
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 119-131.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3520
