Doing “Patchwork Ethnography” on Indians in South Africa and Ethiopia

For my book project on the current Indian flows of capital, commodities, and people to South Africa and Ethiopia, I did a multi-sited global ethnography from 2015 to 2022. This journey took me from New Delhi and Kolkata to the coal mines in Piet Retief (eMkhondo), Kathu (the iron ore capital), Cape Town, Pretoria, and Johannesburg until 2017. In 2018, I started my research in Ethiopia, beginning from an Indian-owned denim textile unit in Bishoftu, which, after a two-year break due to the pandemic, expanded to a study of Indian educators, hoteliers, strawberry farmers, traders, and Bollywood viewers in Addis Ababa, Holeta, Dire Dawa, and Harar, the Ethiopian community in Northern Virginia, and Indian teachers in Kottayam, India. My experience can be summed up as patchwork ethnography, Patchwork ethnography involves short-term field visits, fragmentary data, and innovations that resist fixity and holism in publication, focusing on long-term commitments, language proficiency, contextual knowledge, and slow thinking.[1] In this paper, I will describe how I struggled to move between communities and countries and still gain a deep understanding of them, and how I had to rework my approach and book proposal to address these issues. I claim that in light of the global linkages becoming more erratic and fractured as a result of the pandemic, climate change, and ongoing conflict, we need to reconsider how we conduct multi-sited qualitative research.

[1] Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe, June 9, 2020, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography.