Extra-terrestrial landings: An ethnographic account of doing ethnography

Abstract

The field site is the retail showrooms of a fast-expanding organized retail company selling budget eyewear products across shopping malls and high streets of urban India. Through a thick description of 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork – arriving, forging social relations, recording and writing – this article traces the practical, ethical and epistemological paradoxes in doing ethnography. The article identifies these paradoxes as inherent to ethnography given its radical intent. Not studying them as limitations or failures, the article makes the case for a more honest and critical reckoning with these internal contradictions by making them more present in ethnographic practice and writing. It is argued that in so doing we enrich our understanding of the complex and contradictory social worlds we inhabit and study.

Introduction

For my ethnographic research on young people’s experience of work in the fast-growing service economy in urban India, I conducted 14 months of fieldwork between 2016 and 2017, with repeat visits in 2018 and 2019.

While my broader interviews and general interactions with a variety of service economy workers, managers, job seekers, and recruitment agencies in a variety of locations and settings helped me develop a bird’s eye view of the broad contours of the ‘field’, the beating heart of my fieldwork and the ethnographic story I tell comes from my daily engagement with the salespersons, optometrists and store managers on the store floor of a popular organized retail company, that I call Spexy, which sells budget eyewear products like sunglasses, prescription glasses and lenses.

During my fieldwork, I would ‘hang out’ at different Spexy stores in shopping malls and high streets across the city of New Delhi, and closely observe the sales work and other store interactions and activities. I would casually chat, socialise, and joke with the staff, eat meals and drink tea, and when I could, assist in the work (making sales pitches, modelling for customers, cleaning and arranging stock, dusting shelves, dispatching sold items, cleaning customer glasses, attending store phone calls, etc.). Though I was never taken on formally as a company employee, the store staff did arrange an extra uniform for me in my later months, which I would often wear to the stores. When it was possible for my informants, I would go out (ghoomna) for shopping, eating, sightseeing and movies. I would visit their PGs (paying guest accommodation), and for some, visit their homes and interact with their families (in Delhi or their hometowns in the neighbouring North Indian states). The winter months saw the wedding of two of my informants in their hometowns in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh, which I was invited to attend. I continue to be part of different WhatsApp group chats—silent observer in the official store groups and active participant in other different groups of store friends.

Through the methodology of ethnographic attention and participation, my attempt has been to understand, with as much complexity and richness as possible and in as much microscopic detail as possible, the lifeworlds of the store staff—the nature of their individual and collective practices, actions and fantasies, the nature of their interpersonal engagements and finally, the nature of their own individual and collective reflections on it all. Evoking all five senses—i.e., through the methodology of sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing (what Tsing (2015: 37) calls the ‘arts of noticing’)—the focus has remained on developing a deep sensory, affective, and felt understanding of the mundane and the everyday, of spoken words, as also non-verbal actions and gestures, and their tacit and explicit meanings. Through jokes, gossip, casual conversations, flirting, bitching, texting, and sharing food and work, I have strived to develop a close sense of how my informants imagine social hierarchy and their location in it; what meta-narratives of morality and respectability they construct; what identities and embodied performances they desire what normative values they uphold and why; how education identities interact with work identities; what qualities they see as ‘winning’; what the desired trajectories of personal growth are and how success is defined; what the experience of social failure is; what the new terms of social interaction are and how my informants judge each other, and come to like, respect and love some, and mock, despise or hate others.

The aim here is what Michael Jackson (1989: 3–4) has most persuasively described as the attempt to capture the ‘lived experience’ of people through the methodology of ‘radical empiricism’. Radical empiricism, he writes, is different from traditional empiricism, in that it recognises that any attempt to capture the ‘immediacy and fullness’ of human life requires immersive participation on the part of the ethnographer. Not distanced viewing, like some imagined fly-on-the-wall, it is only through the ethnographer’s personal and proximate experiences in the field can she develop any understanding of the lived experience of others. Fieldwork then is based on the interactions of the researcher with the researched. Not the discovery of some ‘truth’ that is out there, whatever is finally learnt arises out of the ethnographer’s own inter-subjective engagements in the field. Significantly, what then becomes important is that we ‘clarify the ways in which our knowledge is grounded in our practical, personal, and participatory experience in the field as much as our detached observations.’ (Jackson, 1989: 3) and make the researcher and the process of research present, not absent, in the research. Jenkins (1994) warns that ‘elimination of any trace of what fieldwork is like in practice’ (433–434) ultimately ‘freezes the picture’ (438) and urges for a detailed discussion of the full ‘temporal and constituted nature’ (434) of the entire experience of fieldwork and research process more broadly to keep the ethnography’s dynamic and contextual nature alive. The analytical imperative becomes to adopt ‘a more ethnographic approach towards the lived reality of fieldwork’ (Douglas-Jones et al., 2020) and make visible the personality and particularities of the researcher as a ‘fully formed person in flesh and blood with particular sociological characteristics and historical baggage’ (Chua and Mathur, 2018: 19).

Such a description should include not only a detailing of what was done, how, when and why, but also include an honest recounting of what could not be done and could not be fully understood—a demystifying sobering account of the many anomalies, gaffes, failures, confusions, embarrassments and tedium that are inevitable in research. To be clear, such a discussion of the more real and gritty details of fieldwork is not merely an exercise in ‘confessing’ to one’s mistakes and limitations in the research or just the sharing of some flavourful behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the hallowed adventures of fieldwork. Nor is it an attempt to create an illusion of scientific objectivity and validity by showing retraceable ‘steps’ to the final analysis. Rather, the need for such a discussion is driven by the awareness of the ‘dialectical irreducibility’ (Jackson, 1989: 2) of human life and social experiences, which are complex, subjective, and fragmentary. So, any understanding of it can only be partial, limited, and mediated through the very specific nature of our presence and participation in it.

The ‘field’, as Berry et al. (2017: 537) write, is ‘a physical place as well as an epistemological space of investigation’. Pushing back against the assumptions of fieldwork as built on masculinist notions of endurance, authority, and objectivity, they outline the agenda for a more feminist ethnography that pays attention to the sometimes hidden and oftentimes violent ways in which gender and race shape the field, fieldwork, and fieldworker (also see Pollard, 2009, Yates-Doerr, 2020). This opens the possibilities of ‘decentring’ the dominant masculine figure of the ‘fieldworker-as-hero’ meeting disciplinary gold standards of ‘good fieldwork’ and centring a more honest and ‘non-heroic’ approach to the vulnerabilities, trauma, difficulties, and failures that mark fieldwork (Douglas-Jones et al., 2020).

This article is an ‘ethnographic encounter’ with ethnography (Pandian, 2019: 4) through an account of my fieldwork, my subjective position within it, and my attempt to craft what Scheper-Hughes (1993: 28) calls a ‘good enough’ ethnography. Through a detailing of my personal and contingent experiences, what emerges are the various paradoxes that are inherent to the very exercise of doing fieldwork and developing an ethnographic understanding of the world. These paradoxes challenge the ethnographic project by threatening to expose its ‘limits’. However, I argue that a greater awareness of these methodological contradictions leads us to a more complex understanding of the social worlds we inhabit and strive to study.

In the article, I begin with the classical moment of ‘arrival’ in the field, highlighting the confusion and amusement that it causes. Next, I look at the thorny issue of building social relations in the field, learning to strike the ‘right tone’. Then, I reflect on the mess of making sense of field ‘data’ and translating field experiences to the page. Finally, I conclude with a deliberation on what these field realities mean for the authenticity and potentialities of ethnography.

Jadoooo!: Extra-terrestrial landings

Upon my request, Niyati, Head of Human Resources at Spexy, introduced me to the store staff in one of the flagship retail stores when I had accompanied her in one of her field visits in my second month of fieldwork. Speaking in English, she launched:

This is Garima…she is from London...from Oxford University in England. She is a PhD student. She is doing her PhD research. She is doing research on retail sector in India. She wants to study retail management and organisation, and also retail recruitment and HR practices…how customer relations are built and good customer service maintained. Retail is a new sector that is coming up in India now. It’s a very, very dynamic sector...

Struggling to find any more words to describe me or my research, Niyati finished the introduction faking a broad smile and turned to me to check, ‘yep, ok, that’s all? Is that correct?’ Mildly embarrassed, I nodded my head in thanks and shyly smiled at the staff to say hello, who stared back at me with a striking look of incomprehension. The awkwardness of the moment was temporarily broken by Girdhar, the store manager, who confidently stepped forward, stretched out his hand, and introduced himself. Speaking in a patchwork of English and Hindi, he surprised me with an exaggeratedly grand welcome: ‘Welcome, welcome to our store! You will not feel disappointment…You have our full support in your research. We will give you all the answers you are looking for. Welcome!’

Another round of awkward smiles and head nods followed before the staff dispersed, returning to their work or phones or private conversations.

The vagueness and incomprehensibility around my status as a ‘researcher from London’ who is ‘researching retail sector’ continued over my subsequent visits. The staff would politely return my friendly (and sometimes over-friendly) smiles but keep their distance. One inquired ‘so you are doing company audit?’ Another asked, ‘so you are...like...what do you say...doing consumer research? Market survey you are doing?’ Over the next few weeks, I was able to make clear that it was not a company audit or market survey that I wanted to do. However, my interest in their everyday working lives was less easy to explain, and not for lack of trying on my part or theirs. Was I really just interested in their ordinary lives? Their store romances and conflicts? Their everyday frustrations and fantasies? That couldn’t be it! If a thesis was really being written, in a prestigious foreign university no less, it must surely be on something more important and respectable! Did I not want to predict future growth rates and new trends in the retail sector? Where were my survey forms and questionnaires?

The confusion around my research project was not so much because the staff were sceptical of sharing ‘information’ with me. As fieldwork progressed and I developed good relations, even close friendships, with most, they were happy to open up to me, and talk about their work experiences, vent their frustrations, discuss their problems in love and marriage, and share their life dreams. ‘It is good. I like it. Yes, it’s good. You are so interested in my life. I also get to think and do analysis. Sometimes I realise how shit my life is, but that is ok’ one admitted, in a humorous vein. Many would ask me to come and sit with them and take their ‘intro’ (interview), and show great keenness to narrate their life’s stories and share their life fundas (literally, fundamentals; meaning logics and tricks of life) with me. But anytime we returned to a more formal discussion of my research and its design, the old questions would spring up again: ‘Aise kaise? (How come like this?)’, ‘Isse kya niklega? (what will come out of this?)’, ‘Yeh kya research kar rahe ho (What is this kind of research that you are doing)?‘, ‘Will your ma’am in London not scold you?’ and one with a stinging sarcasm that I could not miss, ‘if just sitting around, chit chatting all day, one can get a PhD, I could have also done a lot of studying, but nobody told me this. I thought in doing more studies, you have to really do studying.’

The difficulty in my fully explaining or their fully understanding my research process, I realised, came from deeper differences in our personal life choices, subjective positioning, social contexts, and epistemic understanding of the world. It was difficult for many to understand how I was just spending a year hanging around in the store with them unpaid and free of pressures of marriage or job. It was not clear why, unless I was just a lazy and insincere researcher (‘a bad student’), I should spend time following gossip trails across the stores and not interview top management, customers and managers to speedily complete my research, find ‘the correct answers’ for my ‘report on the retail sector in India’, and get on with my studies and life.

My answers never seemed satisfactory, and to many in this regard I remained an odd, extraterritorial figure who was in many ways a mysterious and inexplicable new presence in their lives for over a year, and whose research and life choices remained largely beyond comprehension. This incomprehension was also a source of amusement. Jokingly, I was often called ‘Jadoo’, after the name of the alien in the ‘ET’ inspired Bollywood blockbuster ‘Koi...Mil Gaya’ (a nickname which conveniently was an easy distortion of my own last name). I would laugh along with them when they would sing the theme song of the film, poking fun at me, but internally, feel great anxiety at the wide distance, of inter planetary proportions, that it suggested. But then, there were also moments of assurance. ‘I have understood what you are doing’ excitedly exclaimed Pandey jee one day when I was in the midst of tediously re-hashing the same old explanations about my research project. ‘You are just going to write a story. You should write a book like Chetan Bhagat’. Chetan Bhagat is a popular Indian writer whose paperbacks are widely sold in bookstores as well as pirated copies on streets and traffic lights, and many of his books have been made into Bollywood blockbusters. He writes about the experience of youth in India, their structures of aspirations and anxieties. A Chetan Bhagat style paperback novel was closer to my research purposes and better explained my presence, and for these reasons, a comparison I preferred and encouraged over Jadoo.

Social relations and forms of relating

Even as the joke about Jadoo enjoyed great popularity, there was concerted effort on the part of both the store staff and me to humanise, socialise and domesticate this distant alien figure of the researcher through the forging of inter-personal social relations and assigning of locally legible social identities. Ethnography, in the end, is only about and through the various forms of social relations and ways of relating made possible—what Hannerz (2010) (quoting a colleague) notes to be the ‘study of intimacy’, and Jenkins (1994) calls the ‘apprenticeship’ in social being and interactions (also see Faubion et al., 2009). There is no detached observer and whatever is learnt is routed through the complex web of social relations entered into in the field. These relations are affectively charged, producing a range of intersubjective affects such as fear, frustration, guilt, anger, discomfort etc. (Pollard, 2009). They are diverse and complex, as all social relations are, and require tact, care and constant work. They are impacted by social characteristics of age, class, caste, education and gender as well as shaped by the personal idiosyncrasies of the individuals involved—the nature of their temperaments, dispositions, tastes, sense of humour, personal values and ‘energy’.

In this section, I tease out some aspects of the messy tangle of social relations I entered. I detail their nature and experience, my presentation and participation—all of which is central to the kind of ‘data’ I collected and present in my written ethnography. I note that unlike other research that studies ‘up’ or ‘down’ my research is in many ways ‘sideways’ and based at ‘home’ (Hannerz 2010: 60)—in my home city, with young individuals with whom I enjoy a degree of familiarity with many socio-cultural references, practices and norms. However, my superior class and education and importantly, my foreign migration also makes, what (Abu Lughod 2008: 137) calls, a ‘halfie’ out of me, where I am in between being an outsider and an insider. It was in this space of in-betweeness that many of my social relations and forms of relating were negotiated. ¹

The store floor is alive with social activity where the staff intermingle freely, especially during lunch breaks and in the many long stretches of fallow time during weekday afternoons. The staff exchange jokes, insults, life wisdom, and ‘senti’ (sentimental) emotions in plenty. These interactions and relations show different shades of friendship, romance, and indifference. Alongside, tensed sociality and hostility, labeled 'dirty politics' by the staff, is rampant. I was, as far as I could sense, broadly seen as a friendly, happy-go-lucky ‘girl’ who was an ‘extrovert’ and able to ‘confidently’ talk to everyone. My ‘fluent’ and ‘fast’ English, and ‘London base’ was a source of excitement and curiosity, and what initially led many to start responding to my friendly advances. However, they felt disappointment when instead of the high-fashion wearing, English speaking ‘modern girl’ what they found was more of a ‘simple girl’. But with the passage of time, as our interactions grew and I was no longer someone to be ‘looked at’ and judged from a distance, but someone they were beginning to form friendships with, the initially expressed disappointment gave way to approval and even praise for my ‘traditional roots’, ‘sudhara hua (straightened out) attitude’ and ‘sober’ dressing style. Over the course of our developing friendships, I was also praised for my good ‘listening skills’, ‘good jokes’ and ‘relaxed nature’. My general naiveté (bholapan), as betrayed by my many questions, was commented to be endearing—‘you are too cute!’ said one salesgirl, affectionately pulling my cheeks.

However, these apparently warm and approving remarks can be misleading, as I learnt fast in fieldwork. Under their veneer, the actual work of developing and sustaining relations was a delicate dance, complicated by issues of gender, class, caste, and sexuality, fluctuating ‘moods’ of people as well as certain misjudgements and slips on my part. I was always aware of the very fragile nature of these relations, alert to their changing dynamics, and conscious of the need for constant reflection and recalibration in my presentation and style of engagement. My efforts were driven both by the pragmatic concerns of sustaining research access as well as the loftier aim to make the entire research exercise more egalitarian and participatory by reducing power disparities as much as possible and including as many voices as possible.

Aware of the strict brand hierarchies that define class status, I was careful to dress in the same brands and style of clothing as my informants, and when discussing shopping or my own consumption patterns, which were sometimes different from my informants, I would present them as more similar, where I would only discuss the experience of shopping in flea markets or company factory outlets (where discounted products are sold). However, such pretence also meant that reciprocity was possible to a lesser extent than I would have liked. For example, I could never invite my informants to come and hang out in my home even as I freely visited theirs. Or share with them all the photographs on my phone’s photo gallery even as I would excitedly enjoy seeing pictures on their phones, which some would very trustingly just put in my hands, allowing me to swipe right or left as I pleased.

In my attempts to reduce class differences between us, my aim was not so much to deny my different class position (which was obviously known to all), but rather just to push it away from view to not have it constantly bear upon our relations. However, it was not always possible. There were slips in my mannerisms. For example, once I had gone out with a few of my informants to a nearby eatery for lunch. Slightly under the weather and generally absent minded on that day, I lost 2000 rupees (approx. 20 GBP) that somehow slipped out of my wallet. After a few moments of being flustered, I was able to recompose myself and move on again. The speed with which ease returned to me did not go unnoticed by the others. Another time, I arrived at the store in a cotton kurta. Ramesh, who had previously worked in a garments shop, took the cloth of my kurta in his hand and felt its texture. With an exaggerated gesture of awe, he announced to Aashiq sitting next to him: ‘Linen!‘, referring to the superior variety of fine cotton out of which my kurta was cut. I mumbled something about how the kurta was very old and not very expensive, but my explanations were drowned under his chants of ‘Bade log! Bade log!’ (Big people! Big people!). In such moments of exposure of my different class position, I would often be left wondering if my ‘dressing down’ was an entirely fraudulent and laughable exercise. I was not sure to what extent my informants sensed a degree of inauthenticity in my general presentation in the store, and how this impacted their thinking about me.

Lunchtime was an important time for socialising, where I could participate in long discussions with the staff. I would often sit in more than one lunch session in the day, eating my meal in parts to be able to join different groups of staff. The staff would open their tiffin boxes and put all the food in the centre and freely eat out of each other’s boxes. I would also bring my own tiffin and share my food with all. There was one sweet from an eatery near my house that was very popular with the staff of which I would often bring extras. However, it was difficult for me to just as easily eat out of their tiffin boxes. I am vegetarian with acute allergy to various lentils and flours. Instead of getting into lengthy discussions about the exact nature of my allergy and its fatal reaction on my body, at the start of my fieldwork I used to just altogether avoid eating anybody else’s food. However, as I soon realised, my withdrawing from the commensality of food sharing was not received well, and I sensed a lingering suspicion of casteism in some of the remarks made by the staff. My efforts at explaining my allergies would often be responded with a short smile and change of the topic of conversation. So, I started to eat some clearly safe items, like salads and sweets. However, I was always stressed fearing cross-contamination and disappointed that I could not just more clearly and confidently explain my allergies.

Men and women interacted freely on the store floor. I too would participate in ‘mixed’ socialising and developed good independent relations with both men and women. In my private engagement with the women, I would often be allowed into very intimate conversations. This was not always possible with the men; nevertheless, I enjoyed a good rapport with them, where I could ask direct questions and joke with them with ease. Many often said I was quite ladka-like (boy-like) given my choices of independent living and boy-like dressing. However, it was more difficult to continue my relationships with my male informants outside of the store on a one-to-one basis, like in a private Whatsapp conversations or meeting alone in the city. Any such private contact would immediately start sparking off rumours of romance. This was not the case in my early months of fieldwork when I was still seen as a researcher with a clear ‘professional’ research agenda to our meetings. But with time, I was more than just a researcher and social norms of propriety began to apply to me. For example, I once showed eagerness to join two of my male friends on a day outing in a water-based adventure park, and immediately regretted it when I saw bemused smiles on their faces. To make such interactions more possible and ‘safer’, I felt the compulsion to invent a partner. In half a mind, I thought to mention my recently ex European boyfriend, presenting the relationship as still on-going. I soon realised that a foreigner boyfriend was raising more eyebrows than helping. Desperate to do some damage control, I lied that he was half-Indian, which immediately made him more acceptable. This lie about a long-term, half-Indian partner stuck on and proved to be immensely beneficial to my social navigation—improving my relations with my male informants and giving me more common ground with my female informants.

Now, in these efforts to build and maintain relations, I constantly felt a sense of unease about the small lies I had to say and how carefully I had to curate my presentation to my informants. Not just my presentation, but also my deeper engagement—what I said in discussions, how I responded to what they said, when I laughed, when I nodded in agreement or when I shook my head in disapproval—always felt a bit contrived. ² All social relations and interactions are undeniably marked by a Goffmanesque performance of some sort or the other, and research then is no exception, but I felt a strong sense of unease on two fronts which has led me to reflect further on the very nature of ethnographic research, its ethical complications as well its inherent contradictions:

First, Scheper-Hughes (1993: 24) writes about how she would ‘enter freely into dialogues and sometimes into conflicts and disagreements with the people of Alto, challenging them just as they challenge me on my definitions of the reality in which I live.’ Jackson (1989: 4) similarly stresses such dialogic participation where we must ‘put ourselves on the line’. Rejecting removed observations (like that of a voyeur or a tourist), Jackson states that in the context of ethnographic fieldwork, ‘objectivity becomes a synonym for estrangement and neutrality a euphemism for indifference’. Much in the same vein, my interactions and relations with my informants were two-way, where I too would share personal details, express opinions, and enter into debates, challenging them and being challenged in turn. However, my interactions could never be fully freewheeling or honest. I could never express all my opinions, or show all my emotions, however strongly I felt them. I know many of my opinions—about say, money, race, homosexuality, marriage, Islam, sex, consumption or the corporate sector—to be very different from many of my informants. I was always fearful that any full disclosure on these issues would alienate me from them or impact the ease with which they shared details with me. In many of these discussions then, I was often only putting some, and not all, of myself on the line. While not maintaining an indifferent or estranged neutrality, I was often only making strategic interventions, enough to keep the conversation lively and going, so as to learn more about them, without having to reveal all about myself.

Second, based as my fieldwork is on peer friendships, the challenges of some inter-personal incompatibilities and my own limits to constant socialising were also strong. On a personal level, with some I just could not ‘click’. Some others I found excessively clingy or sexist or plain boring and repetitive. For example, I found the following exasperated comment scribbled in one of my diary entries: ‘Sometimes I pray she is transferred to a different store. The minute I enter, she corners me, not letting me talk to anyone else. She just goes on and on.’ Even with the staff members who I could make bonds with easily and naturally, it was hard to be interested in everything that was said always. In these moments, I would feel an overwhelming sense of boredom, annoyance or exhaustion, and a desire to just withdraw into myself. But given the pressures of time and the constant preoccupation with the larger research agenda, I would be forcing myself to feign interest, and continue to laugh at jokes I did not naturally find funny or stay curious about details of events or individuals that I could not get myself to personally care about. In social contexts outside of research, I generally choose to make my feelings known and am okay to suffer the consequences of my misanthropy or misbehaviour, but in the field, my constant effort was to go against this natural instinct and stay in constant effort to look the agreeable and affable ‘cute girl’ whose cheeks were pulled. I never fought with anybody or became too irritable or upset or angry. Not just more tensed or conflictual, I also never let any of my friendships become ‘more than friendly’—as could have been possible with one of the salesmen with whom I shared an affectionate relationship, based on plenty of laughter and trust. Instead, I always kept all my own engagements very carefully in the territory of friendship, always maintained at a level of general amicability.

Herein lies the paradox. While anthropologists make the case that ‘lived experiences’ can only be understood through immersive and participatory fieldwork, the very agenda and practicalities of research ends up curtailing the extent of participation possible and artificially controlling the nature of one’s participation, with the researcher constantly curating her presentation and performance to strike the right balance best suited to serve the agenda of research. Roberts’ (2016), in his ethnography set in Mumbai slums, similarly discusses his experience of trying to strike a balance between sharing and participating in the lives of informants and maintaining a social distance and neutrality that he felt was crucial for carrying out research.

Now, really immersive participation should have led me to express my opinions and feelings more honestly and engage in a host of inter-personal social relations with my informants, which would traverse an entire landscape of emotions—now joyful, now sorrowful, now disapproving, now hateful, now strained, now reconciled. Only such a variety in forms of relating could have really allowed me to participate wholly and honestly, developing an inter-subjective understanding of the world in the truest sense of the term. Instead, the result of exercising restraint and control, as I did, has been that my social engagement in the field has been mediated through only one of the many ways of relating with other people, and whatever I have learnt about them or their worldviews and experiences is limited to only that which such a form of engagement allows. This is not to say that my relations were not ‘real’, but rather to acknowledge that people reveal themselves differently in different forms of relations and in different emotional junctures in relationships, and my understanding is limited to only that which carefully managed friendly and ‘uncomplicated’ relations can allow.

Translating social reality

Since the reflexive and interpretive turn in Anthropology in the 80s, prominently marked by the publication of Clifford and Marcus’s (1986) book Writing Culture, it is well established that ethnography is, after all, a written construct and that greater attention must be paid to the very process of its construction. More recently, Pandian’s (2019) work has contemplated the ‘dark arts of expression’ to study the stakes and potentialities of contemporary ethnographic writing as it captures but also remake reality. This is not merely an exercise in clarifying methodology, but rather, an epistemological exercise in clarifying the provisional and constructed nature of social reality and its representation. It is not that a social reality exists which is observed by the researcher and then subsequently recorded in the writing, but the very process of writing is where social reality is being constructed. In other words, whatever is learnt and conveyed is in the writing—what gets written down in the field, and in what manner, and what gets written up as the ethnography, and in what exact manner.

Not formal sit-down interviews, my interest was more in casual conversations, jokes, off-the-cuff remarks, gossip, side-glances, smirks or whispered utterances. Given the slippery, elusive, and ephemeral nature of such ‘data’, recording and documenting was challenging, and often a source of anxiety. Early on in my fieldwork, I decided to not use a diary and pen, having suffered the impact of self-conscious and stilted conversations that it would generate when the staff would see me furiously scribbling down any words coming out of their mouths. Instead, I turned to my smartphone to make notes. The phone—a ubiquitous instrument of our times—slipped in unobtrusively without making my informants conscious. I would write my notes in my phone’s password protected digital ‘notepad’ in anonymised shorthand. Sitting alongside many of the staff, who too would be busy on their phones (chatting with friends, partners or family or browsing the Internet or their photo galleries), I could make lengthy notes with ease. I would also step out of the store or go to the toilet to make voice recordings of my own. Sometimes, in the latter half of my fieldwork, in some of my long discussions on matters more directly related to the question of ‘work and labour’, I would ask if I could record the conversation on my phone as a memory aid. The staff, with whom I now enjoyed a good rapport, would consent easily and continue talking unaffected.

Writing, of course, is not something that just happens in the ‘writing up’ period after fieldwork but constitutes the very process of fieldwork itself. At the end of each day, I would spend 4–5 hours writing my notes, expanding on the notes and audio recordings made on my phone. I would write down details of things that were said to me or things I overheard the ordinary and extra-ordinary happenings in the store, as well as my nascent analytical ideas, personal anxieties and practical concerns. My notes would include long quotes, descriptions of people and spaces, sometimes accompanied with drawings.

In my night-time reconstructions of my day-time notes, I was aware of the role of both memory and fatigue. Many a times, I would surprise myself by remembering entire quotes or minute details (even some that missed my attention while out in the field) that I would write down with great vigour and precision, alongside making connections with past observations. While at other times, especially at the end of a particularly exhausting day, I would see my writing sag under the weight of sleepiness. My will and memory would be weak, and my notes would become more hurried and missing in detail. ³

My notes were all written by hand, in dozens of notebooks and numerous scraps of paper which I did not digitise. This meant that when going through my field notes nothing was ‘searchable’. While it made the process cumbersome, it offered the great joy and advantage of stumbling around to make new discoveries in every re-reading. In contrast to the process that uses digital software to ‘codify’ data by themes or keywords, my process remained more organic and dynamic where I would go to my notes looking for one thing and be reminded of another. I could never isolate events or individuals or themes, and in every reading got the chance to refresh my memory of the entirety of the interconnected social worlds of the retail stores and the people in it.

In my observations and daily note making, I learnt early on to not be guided by pre-set theories or analytical categories. This was not easy. Often in the throes of messy and contradictory ‘data’, my readings of the wider literature would often provide the sweet relief of analytical cohesion and clarity. However, I realised how artificially forced these categories felt if one really listened with one’s ear to the ground. With time I learnt to not be anxious to immediately arrive at coherent narratives and interpretations, and to be more open to the openness, incompleteness and seeming incoherence of the happenings and people around me. One incident from my first month in the store was particularly educational.

It had been a ‘dry’ few days in the store, and sales were beginning to drop. Girdhar, the store manager, was under immense pressure from the company heads, and in turn, increasing work pressure on the staff. One afternoon, he rounded everybody up in the store and gave them a long ‘lecture’ on the values of hard work, alertness, and eagerness to push for higher sales. As punishment for the poor performance of the last few days, he ordered to have the store's sitting bench removed so that all the staff are forced to be constantly on their feet, and not ‘laze around’. He instructed two of the male staff to carry the bench upstairs to the storage room and supervised the move striking a pose of authority. Over the next few days, the bench stayed in the storage room which doubles as the lunchroom, and I observed how the store staff now enjoyed the luxury of sitting on the bench to eat lunch and relax, no longer having to bother laying out newspaper on the dirty floor to sit down. Girdhar’s punitive measure, as I saw it, was now a new convenience afforded to all.

Influenced by my readings of many work ethnographies that discuss the dialectics of control and resistance between the managerial class and the working staff, I began to imagine the supposedly re-appropriated bench as cast in the image of worker resistance—as some great ‘weapon of the weak’ (Scott, 1985) that tactically (de Certeau, 1984) challenged worker disciplining. I made the following excited comment on my phone: ‘What an inversion! G thought to punish everybody to make them stand in the store to work hard, but now everybody can sit and enjoy more freely upstairs’. Curious to unpack this metaphor further, I would often point out to the staff the great irony in how the relocated bench had improved their eating arrangement and not changed much on the store floor where they would now just sit on other stools. Their responses would, however, be quite lukewarm, even as the metaphor kept growing in prominence in my mind and notes. Frustrated, I decided to ask one of the salespersons more directly: ‘What do you think about Girdhar sir’s decision to move the bench? Has it helped at all?’ She returned a quizzical look: ‘Huh? Bench? This bench?’ Then laughed and added, ‘What yaar Maam! Girdhar sir is a very nice guy, but sometimes he is just a drama queen. He just got senti (sentimental) yaar. We’ll put the bench down tomorrow. I was telling this only to Guard bhaiya yesterday. It is taking too much space in the storage room. I have to turn like this and then like this to go to the toilet’.

As the bench was moved down the next day in the most ordinary, matter-of-fact manner without anybody even taking much notice of it, the falsely propped up metaphor of the bench started to crumble in my mind. In this I realised two things: One, the staff did not think about the bench in a language of resistance. Neither was its relocation seen as any great assertion of control over their labour, nor was its new use seen as tactically reversing or resisting any imposed power hierarchy. This is not just in what they said, but also their actions and experiences surrounding this incident. Two, in how social relations develop in the store, the manager and the workers cannot be seen as two opposite and distinct categories, whose relation is constantly and only defined by power struggles of control and resistance, with the workers as always resisting and manager as always dominating. So, discarding any pre-set notions, I decided to start afresh, paying more attention to the emic and often more complex categories and metaphors in which it was that the staff related to one another and thought about power and pressures of work. Hereon, in how I saw and recorded details, I was more responsive to how it is that my informants saw and participated in the world around them, however much it may muddy my understanding of the world as shaped by my prior assumptions and reading of the literature.

In my efforts at close listening, one of the great challenges was of not always fully understanding all that I heard or read in the field. Paradoxically, the more determined attention I paid to every word and phrase, the more confused I got. It was sometimes difficult to even understand what was being said, before one could even proceed to place the words in their larger context to understand their intended implication. For example, here are some WhatsApp statuses put up by informants:

“No right, no left, no middle, only up!”

Or

“You are my ego, not my attitude!”

Or

“This winter gonna hurt, but summer gonna hurt too!”

Or

“I can break ur mood and ur heart...also balls...but not your mass!”

Another example is the following conversation. Ruminating on life, one of my informants went off on a tangent that I could not fully follow:

Think like it is all like a ball. Like a ball, do you know? It’s smooth and round and bouncy. This ball you can throw up or down or dribble, if you like. Just like a ball. Everybody has a ball. Everybody is playing catch-catch. Just look around—balls flying everywhere. Some people have big balls, small balls. Some have shiny balls. I can give you my ball, and you can give me your ball. We can exchange.

Or another conversation, where Raghav is commenting on the style of another worker:

Raghav (in English): I have understood her. Her style is jackass style.

Me: What do you mean?

Raghav (in English): It’s j-a-c-k-a-s-s. Jackass is somebody who can catch it in you. Can fully just catch it in you. Just like that, catch it in you.

The seeming incongruousness of these statements is partly the result of my own limited understanding of the cultural codes of the field. I may struggle to understand some such statements, but their meaning may be straightforward to others. More attention, participation, and time will allow greater cultural competence and intimacy with the people, and the intended meaning could become clearer to me as well. However, the problem of incongruous speech is not just because of my limited ability to understand, but also linked to the inherent difficulty and limits to clear communication. It is not always possible to find the right words to capture our emotions and thoughts perfectly. Not everybody has the natural talent for articulation, and even those who do, do not always find the rights words, especially when speaking impromptu. As researchers and writers, we are only too familiar with the pains of clear articulation, often arriving at it only after multiple drafts of re-writing. Or, alternatively, it could also be that the expressed sentences are deliberately kept vague to obscure their true meaning, in effort to not reveal more than one wants to or to stave off the researcher’s persistent and oftentimes intrusive interrogations.

The result of this is that my research has come to be guided by the pragmatics of comprehensibility—that is, only that which I have been able to understand, I have been able to record and interpret, and the ‘incongruent voices’ (Clifford, 1986: 6) that I have not been able to understand, I have had to discard. Given such patchy comprehensibility, it is once again underlined how the final claims made in the ethnography are coloured in a ‘dialectic of doubt and certainty’ (Jackson, 1989: 184, referencing Young, 1951). But the more important point to highlight here is that such limits to comprehensibility should not be seen as a failure of the research or the incompetence of the researcher. Rather, acknowledging the problematics of an authoritative researcher voice, all research and researchers must move forward with the humility that there are limits to always, fully and confidently comprehending and interpreting the informant. Islam (2021) demonstrates that a critical awareness of ‘not knowing’ and ‘partiality of knowledge’ has feminist merit in recognizing the essence of ethnography as an intersubjective ‘journey into the unknown’ (also see Gunaratnam and Hamilton, 2017). Not just our methods, it allows a greater appreciation of the disruptions and dislocations that shape the field and the lives of the people we study. Inverting the question, she asks – ‘what do we lose by imposing a sense of coherence and completeness on our fieldwork?’ (Islam, 2021: 6).

The final point I make is on the question of consent and anonymity in the writing. In the formal sense of the term, my fieldwork meets the minimum requirement of ‘full and informed consent’ of the participants as demanded by University ethics frameworks. However, if one is to judge full and informed consent in the actual context of the practice of fieldwork, the answer become less straightforward. I noted earlier the difficulty of incomplete comprehension among my informants regarding the exact nature of my research agenda and methodologies. My suspicion is that many of my informants will be surprised, or at least amused, to find many of the details of people’s mannerisms, interpersonal dynamics, or circulating jokes and gossip making their way into my written ethnography. Given this, it cannot be confidently ascertained how full or informed their consent has really been. Some of my informants wanted that their full names be included in my writings. ‘There is a book being written on me. Of course, I want my full name in it. Write what you want, just put my full name—in capital letters! England should also know that there is a RAJESH PANDEY!“, Rajesh said in half jest and half seriousness. However, given the larger and on-going ethical dilemmas of my ethnographic process, I have disregarded my informants’ wishes and anonymised all the names. ⁴

Here I am not alone in facing such a difficulty. Many ethnographers note how formal ethics frameworks are often based on assumptions of how quantitative research progresses, and often blind to the messy complexities of qualitative, and particularly, ethnographic research (van Den Hoonaard, 2002; Simpson, 2011, Bell and Wynn, 2020). Given this dissonance, ethnographers must evolve their own ethical frameworks that are best tuned to the local reality of the field, the emerging relationships with informants and adopted methods. While it is not possible to always arrive at easy resolutions, constant reflexivity and open discussion is useful.

What is ethnography worth?

In this article, I have traced the many practical and ethical dilemmas as also epistemological paradoxes that I have faced in the process of ethnographic research, and the attendant feelings and practices of false presentation and misrepresentation, incomplete knowing and doubtful understanding which have inadvertently become part of my fieldwork and writing. A final paradox then. Is ethnography, encumbered by its internal contradictions, rendered less ‘authentic’ and ‘accurate’? Is ethnography real or made-up? Fact or fiction? These are rhetorical questions often asked dismissively by sceptics, but more importantly, these are also questions that are also seriously debated within the field by ethnographers (see de Leon, 2015, Narayan, 1999; Rosaldo, 2013; Stewart, 2007; Pandian and McLean, 2017). As John Jackson (2018: 2–3) writes, provoking critical reflection: ‘… all ethnographers are liars. That’s because all ethnography is fabrication and invention, fakery of the highest representational order.’ This is, however, not out of an ill-intent to lie, but arising from the recognition that ‘any ethnography is an authorial construction, a collaborative one, no doubt, but no less contrived because of such on-the-ground partnerships between researcher and researched.’

The underlying intellectual endeavour here is not to determine if ethnography is fact or fiction, true or false, real or fake, but rather to be aware of the ‘inescapable simultaneity’ (Jackson, 2018: 6, discussing Taussig, 2011) of both—in fieldwork, writing, as also in life. I conclude by emphasising once again ethnography’s contextual, constrained and constructed nature, and reminding us of its overall purpose, which, as Michael Jackson (1989) argues, is not to determine any one fixed truth or reality, but rather to develop ‘a conjunctive mode of reasoning characterised by a quest for similitudes, resemblances, and unity’ (Jackson, 1989: 171) with aim to better understand a ‘splintered, provisional and contradictory world’ (Jackson, 1989: 17). The contradictions and ethical dilemmas identified in this article move us towards a deeper understanding of the social worlds around us and our own modes of operating within it and encourages us to think of creative ways of writing the enduring methodological paradoxes and limitations into, and not out of, ethnography.

Shah (2017) has written about ethnography as a ‘revolutionary praxis’ given its radical commitment to developing a holistic understanding of lifeworlds through long term participation in people’s lives based on a ‘profound intimacy’ with them. The limitations and confusions I have noted arise precisely from such a radical mandate of ethnography. I echo the feminist sentiment that these limitations are not weaknesses but strengths that have ‘ethnographic value’ (Yates-Doerr, 2020) in achieving radical knowing by revealing both the contradictory and complex nature of the world, and our patchworked ways of understanding it (Günel et al., 2020). Our job then is ‘of honoring, even cherishing, our limits’ (Yates-Doerr, 2020: 241). My article contributes towards ongoing conversations around building a more realistic and self-critical ethnographic picture of doing ethnography that pays attention to the actions, doubts, dangers, vexations, and vulnerabilities that surround the fieldworker as a sexed, raced and caste/classed body with emotional histories, behavioural particularities, social biases, disciplinary and intellectual baggage that determine what kind of knowledge is generated. It is hoped that this not only improves our field practice and experience, but also makes our writing more honest and ethical, creative and alive.