Fieldwork encounters: Navigation of relationships and the conundrums of ethnographic knowledge production

Abstract

The paper examines the methodological challenges of conducting ethnographic research in complex research settings underpinned by social inequalities and power relations. It analyses how the quests for validity and mutuality were undermined by recurrent doubts that saturated relationships with my interlocutors—displaced communities and individuals occupying positions of power in Delhi. By examining authorial voices and silences, as well as the prevailing fault lines, it highlights the issues of trust, surveillance, and the need to deploy guerrilla research techniques to circumvent authorial sanctions. It offers an understanding of the limits of a single ethnographer who became visible across various interconnected field sites by examining the dialectics of revealing and concealing, and highlights ethnography as an embodied, affectively structured, and uncontrollable experience grounded in chance and contingency, rather than a purely objectivist endeavor. Ethnographic intersubjective encounters unwittingly allow interlocutors to enact their fantasies, thereby deepening our understanding of prevailing social relations and necessitating that we approach ethical concerns in a processual manner in the field sites.