“Imagine yourself….”

Imagine yourself as an ethnographer.

You are sitting at the threshold of a house that has been your home—for 6 weeks, or 6 months. Or it could just be at the home of someone you have come to know or a community centre you’ve been based at during your fieldwork. Imagine yourself, drinking chai, filter coffee, or any other beverage that is consumed more as a social practice in your locality, than it is to quench one’s thirst. It is then followed by conversations which can, in equal parts, be banal and insightful—the weather, work, food, politics, and sports. Imagine that you have been in this space for a while; long enough to be familiar with its people and history, yet discovering new, fascinating facets of their everyday life and, in the process, about yourself.

Your field notes, your data, your memories, and even your comportment—how your body moves through space and time—are fused as a living record of your fieldwork. These are key questions for which you sought answers when you arrived for fieldwork in the first place. Perhaps you were lost then, unsure. And perhaps your “knowledge” of something—most likely your topic or research question—may have increased. But something else has alsochanged.

You have become more of an ethnographer.

My invocation to “imagine yourself,” of course, alludes to the opening lines from Malinowski’s The Argonauts of the Western Pacific, where he tells the reader to imagine themselves on a tropical beach, alone, isolated, and at the beginning of an arduous fieldwork journey ([1922] 2005: 2). Though evocative, Malinowski’s invitation to “imagine oneself” is also problematic. For one, it is a visual setting rife with colonial connotations; for another, most contemporary anthropologists are unlikely to find themselves in such “exotic” settings anymore.

Instead, for most of you reading this essay, it might be more likely for us to imagine ourselves in settings that are banal, mundane, and quotidian. This could be a municipal office, a public housing project, a factory floor, or even on board a railway train!

This brief essay sketches out how, as contemporary ethnographers, we can use both imagination and everyday life as methodological and analytical frameworks. In doing so, I am especially inspired by The Ethnographic Imagination by Paul Willis (2000). I also write in a fashion, where I recount my negotiations and navigations of various fieldwork encounters over the past decade, and relate them to questions of knowledge production.

Practitioners of the Everyday

I like to think of anthropologists as practitioners of the everyday. Our unique skill is how we train our bodies and minds to follow people’s everyday lived realities. Part of this is the rigour of participant observation and the scientific process, but another part includes the important role of imagination.

Drawing on C. Wright Mills’ influential notion of “the sociological imagination,” which encourages social scientists to think about the connection between biography and history, Paul Willis suggests that everyday life and culture play a vital role in mediating between agents and structures (2000: xvi). Indeed, as Willis writes, “Experience and the every day are the bread and butter of ethnography, but they are also the grounds whereupon and the stake for how grander theories must test and justify themselves” (viii).

Following Willis, I like to think of everyday life as a kind of ethnographic baseline.

Everyday life—the social and material worlds of human beings (but also nonhumans)—is structured by certain patterns and rhythms which can explain complex systems, norms, practices, and so forth. At the same time, if there are exceptional—or unpredictable—events, these too are understood in reference to the baseline of everyday life, maybe as deviations, aberrations, or how they reconstitute new and complex interpretations (all of this still sheds light on the historical nature of social structures and systems).

In my applied anthropological work, I closely worked with women frontline workers. These workers were part of an NGO’s efforts to prevent domestic and gender-based violence in Mumbai’s urban poor communities. For most community members, although everyday life involved a negotiation of structural and intimate vulnerabilities—poverty, precarity, abuse—they often did not recognise domestic abuse as a form of violence. In such conditions, frontline workers, who also lived in these neighbourhoods, helped survivors of violence recognise the connections between structural and intimate violence—for instance, how women’s unpaid domestic labour sustained their homes and communities but was devalued. As a result of such interventions, urban poor women reappraised the value of their care labour; in some cases, they even mobilised their role as carers to critique inequality and exclusion in public spaces.

In my doctoral research, I shifted my focus to a completely different field. I decided to conduct fieldwork with engineers and workers responsible for repairing and maintaining Mumbai’s suburban trains. Here, too, I had to attune my ethnographic skills to gain an understanding of everyday life, which in this case was structured according to technical and bureaucratic protocols. Despite the regimented and technical nature of their work, engineers and workers often faced unexpected forms of failure and breakdown. To fix these, they relied on their expertise, collaborated with colleagues, and in many cases had to come up with new solutions—all of which were recursively folded into existing practices of repair and maintenance. Like my frontline worker collaborators, railway engineers and workers also saw themselves as performing a kind of care for trains and the millions of Mumbaikars who commuted on them.

A Reflexive Science

In both these fieldwork engagements, I not only attempted to follow the everyday work of frontline workers and engineers but also had to train myself to gain insight into what Willis refers to as “internality.” By this, Willis means that our research participants are actors or agents in everyday life, and by that virtue, they also have complex interpretations of the world around them—they ascribe meaning, understand cause-and-effect, and interpret their actions (2000: 116). The exercise of ethnographic imagination, thus, required cultivating a deeply empathetic relationship with participants; it means taking seriously their explanations and interpretations. But we also bring ourselves—our biases, beliefs, ideas, aspirations, anxieties—into fieldwork. For instance, I needed to foreground my commitments to values like feminism and gender equality, and accessibility of public transport, respectively.

Such a recursive interplay between the internalities of my participants and myself deeply shaped how I eventually did fieldwork and the questions I asked, which were still part of a rigorous research framework. Indeed, such dynamics exemplify the anthropological truism that the researcher’s body and mind are tools of research. As Willis writes, “maintaining a sense of the investigator’s history, subjectivity and theoretical positioning as a vital resource for the understanding of, and respect for, those under study” (2000: 113). In this way, he invites us to think about another aspect of reflexivity, how fieldwork changes the ethnographer. Throughout my fieldwork experiences, not only did I have to reckon with the privilege I carry—my gender, class, and caste locations—but many of my assumptions of everyday life were also fundamentally altered.

One such transformation was regarding care. I learnt to recognise how important care was in sustaining social life and relations; I also learnt to critique why and how care was often invisibilized or devalued. Why did we not notice those performing care and repair all around us? And how could I, as an ethnographer and individual, practice care more consciously and thus learn something from my participants?

Reflexivity and imagination, thus, are central to how we produce knowledge and insight about the lives of our participants and the social worlds we share and inhabit with them. As Willis writes at length, “Ethnography is the eye of the needle through which the threads of the imagination must pass. Imagination is thereby forced to try to see the world in a grain of sand, the human social genome in a single cell” (2000: viii).

This brings me to perhaps a provisional, if not quite conclusive, insight into ethnography, everyday life, and imagination. First, the exercise of ethnographic imagination can address important social scientific concerns regarding why and how things work. And second, everyday life is not static or fixed, it can also be the domain of change; it is where our worlds are sustained, cared for, and transformed.

But don’t think such an exercise should stop at the publication of ethnography. I think it is crucial to imagine not just different modes of research, but also a different idea of everyday life—as academics, writers, teachers, colleagues, collaborators, kin, and so on; an everyday life where, following my frontline worker and engineer participants, we recognise the importance of values like care and critiques of inequalities.

References:

Malinowski, B. ([1922] 2005). The Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea. Routledge.

Willis, P. (2000). The Ethnographic Imagination. Polity Press.

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Proshant Chakraborty is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.