On trusting ethnography: serendipity and the reflexive return to the fields of Gujarat

Alice Tilche,Edward Simpson

doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12695

Abstract

AbstractWe draw on David Pocock's fieldwork of the 1950s in central Gujarat, India, as a comparative resource to think about social change and anthropological knowledge. Revisiting where Pocock had been through new fieldwork, we were encouraged to think about the ways in which places are accessed and subsequently understood. Against our conscious will, the pathways we were able to take through the field strongly resembled those Pocock took sixty years earlier. The coincidence is such that the material casts shadows of doubt over the potency of terms such as ‘serendipity’ and ‘chance’ to characterize key moments of ethnographic fieldwork. Against the primacy given to the self in much reflexive anthropology, we demonstrate that the personal attributes of the anthropologist might influence the production of ethnographic research less than is generally assumed. The double bind of our ‘reflexive return’ comes from revisiting an anthropological field and experiencing the agency of that field in making what we can know.

Highlights

We draw on David Pocock’s fieldwork of the 1950s in central Gujarat, India, as a comparative resource to think about social change and anthropological knowledge
How does an anthropologist distinguish a serendipitous moment from an inevitable one? Fieldwork is typically at first a one-off and lone affair; the ability of the anthropologist working in one location to make any sensible judgement about the role of either serendipity or inevitability in fieldwork is, we suggest, hope understood as deduction
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 690-708 C 2017 The Authors Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Anthropological Institute

Summary

Introduction

We draw on David Pocock’s fieldwork of the 1950s in central Gujarat, India, as a comparative resource to think about social change and anthropological knowledge. The books make a broad but accurate prediction of the changing relation between caste and hierarchy in Gujarat more generally, a trend made clear by new fieldwork in the region, as we discuss further below.

Results

Conclusion