While fieldwork in a place already known to the researcher brings with it a list of specific advantages and disadvantages, it also encounters many of the same methodological and ethical considerations common to all ethnographic research. Written pre-fieldwork, this paper anticipates some of these issues – from interview techniques and participant observation to the researcher’s own relationship to the research – and invites the reader to respond.
My aim in the following is not to expand on the themes and questions around which my research is based, but to investigate some of the practical questions and problems that will face me during fieldwork this year. Based on my ‘Fieldwork Proposal’ – the official document aimed at persuading the department I am adequately prepared to undertake fieldwork – this paper is necessarily written without the benefit of hindsight and makes no claim to represent some kind of model for best (or even good) practice. Rather, I hope it will make a contribution to an emerging discourse that focuses as much on ethnographic practice as on theory, considering the research process in its own terms and not only as a means to an end.
With these issues in mind, I begin with a descriptive account of my knowledge of the field site where I plan to undertake research and the advantages and disadvantages this generates. This information is pertinent to the question of how I will conduct fieldwork, and I deal with these methodological issues – alongside some ethical considerations – in the second part of the paper.
Local knowledge
I first visited the community where I plan to undertake fieldwork – a self-run leprosy community with a population of around 1,000 people – as a volunteer for six months in 1984-85. I returned for the same length of time in 1986-87, when my role was largely administrative, drafting funding proposals to external aid agencies and filing reports to the same groups. My third visit – in 1989 – was between the second and third years of my under-graduate studies at SOAS, and constituted the three months’ fieldwork on which I based my BA dissertation. During this trip I was able to experiment with a number of research methods, including a small scale survey (of 100 households), a number of indepth interviews and a preliminary questionnaire. 1
Following this I remained in touch with several members of the community by letter, and returned for a holiday in the summer of 1995. It was a time of some upheaval in the village as a British nurse who had spent 17 years working alongside the village Elders as an administrator was making arrangements to leave for a new job in Delhi, and a replacement was to be appointed from within the community. A Management Committee was elected 2 and a member of the village – a cured leprosy patient who had worked as Financial Controller for the previous ten years – was appointed. Concerned about his dual role as a villager and administrator of the projects that employed many of his neighbours, he asked if I would return for a six month interim period to provide him with back-up during a time of major change. I agreed and returned in 1996. Back in the UK at the end of the same year I helped to prepare a successful National Lottery bid for a new employment generation project in the village. My last visit, for three weeks in the summer of 1997, was to facilitate a monitoring exercise for this project, as required under the terms of the grant.
The reason for describing my encounters with the community in some detail is to provide a basis from which to demonstrate the twin advantages and disadvantages of conducting research in a place I already know well. Advantages include an extensive knowledge of the local area and the people and a grasp of Telugu, the local language. Members of the community already know and trust me – and as such are likely to be more receptive to my questioning and open in the answers they provide. Knowing a few individuals as close friends I will also have help in finding suitable informants as well as with practical matters. 3
An obvious disadvantage, on the other hand, is that I am known in the village not foremost as a researcher but as a volunteer worker whose presence is thought to ensure a continuous flow of funding for social and welfare development programmes.
This will no doubt have a bearing on the kind of information people will be prepared to discuss with me and the slant they chose to put on that information. Informants might well provide the answers a) which they think will be the most practically useful to themselves and b) which they think I will want to hear. For instance, as a largely Christian community whose members were converted during contact with British missionaries in a residential leprosy hospital, many villagers assume that I – as a British man who has worked with leprosy patients – have similar religious beliefs. 4 As such they may take any questions I ask on religion as a test of their own piety. 5 That these disadvantages would also exist for any foreign researcher visiting the village – since all white foreigners are seen to some extent as bearers of aid, as missionaries, or as both – is not sufficient reason to dismiss them.
What is clear is that I will need to redefine myself as a researcher. 6 As part of this process of redefinition I had considered renting accommodation outside the village rather than living in the community’s guest house as on previous visits. Told that this might cause offence, however, I have decided instead to find alternative accommodation within the village. This will have the added advantage of situating me in a street of similar houses alongside other people, rather than in the more excluded and high-status property called the guest house. In addition, the village has a tradition of public meetings with speakers, dance performances and dramas which are attended by men and women alike, and I will use
one of these events soon after my arrival to make a public statement about the kind of work I intend to do while in the village. Clearly this won’t lead to an instant transformation in the way people see me; it will, however, make a start. A third strategy is to develop different kinds of relationships – where I am able to lose my role as a patron (or even researcher) and become more of an honorary villager – on trips away from the village. On previous visits I was involved in a number of cycle expeditions which took a group of around ten people from the village first to Hyderabad and, on another trip, to Madras. This prolonged, intense contact over a period of between a week and ten days allowed us to be open with each other in ways that we perhaps could not be in the village. 7
Methodology: problems and solutions
A particular methodological problem I face is finding ways of talking about abstract issues, such as notions of personhood or patients’ emotional and cognitive responses to leprosy, which have been experienced but never verbalised. This is, perhaps, an amplification of a more general problem: that is, while much of our everyday behaviour is conducted unselfconsciously, if one is asked to explain a particular experience or action one becomes self-conscious and the nature of the experience is altered. Alternatively, a respondent may give an account based on learned information (wanting to give the right answer) or on what he/she believes the questioner wants to hear.
If I am asked why I clean my teeth everyday, for example, my initial response would be: ‘To get them clean.’ Pressed for a more detailed answer, I would probably add: ‘It removes plaque which causes tooth decay and gum disease.’ Although this would not be an entirely misleading response, it is a) not a conscious reason, and b) relies on information provided on the posters in the dental surgery – that is, a reason given to me, not one learned through the experience of my teeth rotting or my gums becoming diseased. Another, possibly more honest response, would be: ‘I do it out of habit, and to leave a nice taste in my mouth.’ The point is that there are many possible answers to the same question, many different levels at which it may be answered, and many layers of possible interpretation. It also shows how the fact of asking the question creates data which otherwise might not exist. If I persistently asked people whether they felt diminished by their deformities, for example, respondents, who had previously given the matter no thought, might start thinking that they should feel so, and/or might actually start feeling so.
This is especially pertinent in situations where the extraordinary becomes ordinary – as do the leprosy-related experiences of leprosy patients in a leprosy community. Begging, the dressing of ulcers, contact with foreigners and so on all become normal to the extent that they need no internal explanation to the social actors involved, but are alien not only to the anthropologist but even to the geographically local.
There are no quick fix solutions to this, but there are strategies I can use to help me. When dealing with sensitive subjects, for example, or on issues that it is reasonable to assume respondents have given no prior consideration, information is often elucidated not by formal questions and answers but by conversing generally, encouraging respondents to talk about the issues that interest them and to probe gently. Given that fieldwork is conducted over a whole year it’s also possible to repeat these conversations, adding or taking away particular questions, on many occasions.
It’s also important to listen to what is being said – rather than using a respondent’s words as a trigger to one’s own thoughts or theoretical models – and to be as aware as possible of the non-verbal forms of communication that may also be going on in a particular situation.
Another way of dealing with this is focus on events and actions as well as verbal discourse, and in this context participant observation is especially important relevant. Since a number of the village men rely on a form of begging for their income, during my fieldwork I hope to follow at least one begging group on a 40-day trip to a large city. In addition to the advantages of living in close proximity to a group outside the community – as I outlined above – much of my data will emerge from watching and listening to what is being said without me saying anything at all.
There are, of course, other more practical problems to address here too. Since I can’t actually beg with the group or necessarily be seen to be with them (in case this effects proceeds adversely) I will need to work out the logistics of how I can observe them in action. Although I want to keep my options open on this, the most practicable solution is probably to spend certain parts of each day watching them and the public’s reaction, at some distance, in different locations. Later, at the end of the day, I will spend some time with the group talking about what’s gone on that day before going back to a hostel. I had considered sleeping out with the group, who set up camp under a bridge or some other secluded place. Although I might stay with them a few times towards the end of the visit, my reasons for not doing so are not only because of the discomfort that would be involved (sleeping rough on the roadside without washing or toilet facilities), but also because I may be a burden on members of the group who, in addition to concerns for their own safety, would have to worry about me. It is also possible that people won’t want me to see them begging, although the fact that it is talked about openly in my presence does suggest that this won’t be too much of a problem.
Turning to the collection of other kinds of data, practical methods will include indepth interviews (including life history accounts) and conducting an initial survey of all households in the village to collect information on such areas as: where people live; to whom in the village they are related; religion; caste; and occupation. This information, supplemented with official records maintained in the office, will be useful both in terms of chronicling change, and in providing comparative data on social norms that can, in some sense, be measured against norms elsewhere. A useful side effect of the survey is that it will bring me into personal contact with every family, not just those who are more publicly visible, as has been the case in the past.
Other contexts in which I will engage with members of the community will include workplaces, village teashops, at carom board games and at celebratory meals, 8 at whole village events (such as dramas, school prize giving, Independence Day and the World Leprosy Day march), at weddings, church services, meetings and funerals, and outside the village in the bazaar or at the cinema. Where appropriate I will tape record our discussions and – with the help of a research assistant – transcribe them later; otherwise I will take notes contemporaneously or as soon afterwards as possible. Although serendipity will play a large part, in this way I would expect to collect (and help create) data from a range of interactions, from conflict situations to planned events and everyday occurrences.
Since a key part of my research relies on understanding what others think about leprosy (and the people I am working with in particular), I will also interview a range of outsiders, including members of the general public in neighbouring villages and towns; local doctors; management committee representatives; those working for related NGOs, both locally and across the State; students; journalists; business people and traders with whom Bethany villagers interact commercially. I will also make use of archival material and other literature held at the two Universities in Hyderabad (where I will also have regular meetings with members of the social science departments); at the German Leprosy Relief Association (GLRA) and the Federation of South Indian Producer Associations (SIPA) in Madras; and at Action in Disability and Development in Bangalore.
None of this, of course, detracts from the fact that, ultimately, the thesis I write will be my interpretation of the representations people have made to me. It will record the events I judged to be important, and it will use the ethnography that best supports what I want to say.
Verbatim transcripts of conversations with informants do not overcome this problem: they simply pass the job of interpreter to the reader who, without the more nuanced knowledge of the researcher who was present when the conversation took place, is arguably more likely to distort the information than the researcher. My response to this particular question is that while I will try to maintain some self-reflexivity, to formulate the issue as ‘a problem to be overcome’ is not necessarily appropriate. That is to say, as long as I situate myself within the text 9 and make clear my bias, I don’t think there is anything intrinsically false in it being my own interpretation.
Notes
1 The questionnaire I used was developed as the practical element of an under-graduate course I took entitled ‘Principles of Social Investigation,’ run at that time by Johan Pottier. This initial research training provided a good grounding for developing research methods to be used during the proposed period of fieldwork. back
2 This committee is made up of representatives from donor agencies; senior staff (also villagers) of the projects funded by those donors; two local outside people of standing; the elected president and secretary of the Elders; and the secretary of the community’s Mahila Mandal (women’s group). The committee meets quarterly to make decisions on policy issues. back
3 Helping me if I fall ill, for example, or suggesting suitable candidates as research assistants. back
4 To complicate matters further still, religion is an issue that I have avoided discussing with most people in the village, because my own lack of piety would be a disappointment to many, and also because I would become an opportunity for the more evangelical. back
5 On the other hand, of course, they might not. My own pre-conceptions of the agendas individual informants may have, could be, in some cases, unfounded. Nevertheless, I need to be aware that the answers given to any question represents a particular view at a particular time and is more than the objective meaning – if we can think of words as having objective meanings – of the words uttered. back
6 While not denying that I did previously fulfil another role and, as such, am a part of the community’s history as well as the present ethnography. back
7 This might also have to do with shifting boundaries: while my identity within the village was as a foreigner, outside the village – surrounded by different kinds of ‘foreigners’ – I became, at least temporarily, a kinsman. back
8 For example, wedding feasts, rituals to celebrate a girl’s first menstruation, the New Year communal meal and family meals to which I am invited. back
9 While still retaining some distance. Although I recognise that the researcher is part of the ethnography, I don’t want to produce something in which I become the sole focus. Readers should expect to find out something about social exclusion and cohesion among leprosy patients in South India and the broader theoretical issues surrounding this. That it won’t be the same account that someone else who undertook the same research would write is, I think, self-evident, but that doesn’t mean the account has to become purely autobiographical. back
James Staples is about to begin fieldwork with leprosy patients in south India. Particular research interests include: social exclusion/ cohesion; marginality and social boundaries; phenomenology; and the body.