Fielding and Feeling a City Together: Notes on Collaboration
Drawing from Ruth Behar’s (1997) thoughtful proposal on the vulnerable observer alongside Clifford Geertz’s acknowledgement of the more darker feelings of repulsion (1986) being significant to the fieldwork encounter, we reflect on how our shadowing of each other in the field helped us reflect on two states of being- showing ego (showing arrogance) and being ‘pavam’ (being naive) that we witnessed in the field and how these affective registers helped us read our fields differently. By exploring these registers, we also attend to the differences that we carried into the field. How were our differently shaped bodies, marked by different castes, alongside our different research questions received in the field? For example, if Anjana’s question compelled her to walk through public spaces and sometimes inhabit beaches at night, Deepti’s research question pulled her into the four walls of an institution. While the former threw up questions of safety for Anjana alongside the remarkable relief of not having to seek access, the latter pulled Deepti into frequent interactions with men in closed but safe spaces. Finally, we also intend to ask what would happen if we foreground collaboration in ethnography? What kinds of witnessing and orienting is possible if there is not one but two bodies enmeshed together? What feelings would we then attend to?