The Menstruating Ethnographer: Notes from Riverine Northeastern India

This paper draws on the emotions of pain, guilt, and empathy that I experienced concerning my menstruation while doing fieldwork. It is based on my ethnographic research in char or the temporary river island of Assam, a state in India northeast. Chars are unique riverine landscapes that appear and disappear continuously due to flood, erosion, and deposition in the Brahmaputra River system, which starts in the foothills of the Himalayas and drains into the Bay of Bengal across India and Bangladesh.

I had planned my fieldwork meticulously around my menstruation cycle. Every month I would travel back home to soothe and cater to the pain resulting from menstruation. These “period leaves” from the field would make me feel guilty for missing out on data. As I reflect, the guilt is a derivative of the lack of academic training or discussion around self-care. The women in my field empathized with my condition and some of them made it a point to call me if something ‘interesting’ was happening in the char when I was on my ‘period leave’. Eventually, I managed to cope with the pain and guilt. I depended on the following self-care strategies: peer debriefing, journaling, and embroidering. I ask: What subjectivities are developed while fieldwork in pain, guilt, and empathy? What does it mean to invest in self-care during fieldwork?

My paper will build and combine the literature on embodied ethnography and emotional labour. They show that the emotion of the ethnographer is an important element of the research. Works on embodied ethnography show that fieldwork requires an awareness of the researcher's body, perception, and responses to understand the knowledge process. Literature on emotional labour acknowledges the importance of treating ethnography as emotional labour and demystifies the conventional idea that ethnographic credibility requires an unemotional and impersonal researcher.