The Insiders’ Experience of an Undergraduate Level Ethnographic Fieldwork Training Program in India

Abstract

Research on fieldwork experiences is not something new to the discipline of Anthropology. However, undergraduate level ethnographic fieldwork training programs in India as a research area still remained unexplored. The purpose of the study described in this paper was to explore the proceedings of undergraduate level ethnographic fieldwork training programs in India. This article uses the authors’ own recollections regarding an undergraduate level ethnographic fieldwork training program carried out by a college affiliated with the University of Calcutta. All four authors along with their 21 fellow students have participated as trainees in this fieldwork training program. Through a qualitative analysis of these recapitulated events involving the acts of “preparation before the field trip,” “doing fieldwork” right up to “writing of field reports,” the study stresses one of the less emphasized and methodologically significant issues of education and the socialization process the trainee fieldworkers pass through while doing fieldwork. This article illuminates how the real-time field exposure guides naïve students to realize the utility of different research tools, techniques, methods, and some of the true requirements of an ethnographic fieldwork.