Ethical Dilemmas of the Encounter: Ethnography,Fieldwork and Political Violence

The Encounter and Political Life

For anthropologists, and perhaps most practitioners of Indian sociology, ethnography is definitive of their disciplines. Students may look at Clifford Geertz’s (1973) ethnography on the cockfight as a way to look at Balinese society and Mckim Marriott’s (2002) attempt to capture the chaotic experience of the Hindu festival of Holi in rural India in the 1950s as examples of distilling the ethnographic encounter. While these essays, among others, can be read as pieces of written work that transcend social science writing, what is critical to their discussion is their experience and interactions with the people they studied among. It is this experience which has given ethnographers their authority as researchers.

Ethnography has often been regarded as providing a different view of the social, economic and political due to its practice of intensive long-term fieldwork, focused on one or several communities set in the context of their everyday lives. For example, one can think of Jonathan Spencer’s (1990) work on ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and how spectacular acts of violence such as the anti-Tamil riots of 1983 drew much of its logic from everyday life in terms of gender relations, rumour and the role of state institutions such as the police. We can also look at older studies that demonstrate how a focus on specific events reveals the politics of local relations which otherwise remain hidden (Gluckman, 1940), or how power influences mundane relations at the local level (Bailey, 1969). These approaches have influenced a wide range of studies of contemporary Indian politics that reveal the connections between mundane political life, special events such as elections and demonstrative politics and seemingly apolitical events such as festivals (eg., Bannerjee, 2007; Brass, 1997; Kaur, 2005).

Ethnographers have also applied their interests to situations of political violence and its impacts, ethnic and communal violence, revolutions, state violence and to conflicts and situations that produce populations such as refugees and the internally displaced. All ethnographic work involves an engagement with ethical practice in the ‘field’ (see American Anthropological Association [AAA], 2012). However, research on political violence, state violence and other kinds of overwhelming conflict appear to bring their own ethical concerns, which challenge existing ethical codes.

Ethical Dilemmas in Sensitive Contexts

Discussions on fieldwork in violent settings have often emphasized that while the finished ethnography may present description and analysis after editing, the ‘tensions’ of the field affect the ethnographic project and the relations between researcher and researched (Robben & Nordstrom, 1995, p. 3). Ethnographers have typically called upon different kinds of methods–genealogies, household surveys, interviews, visual documentation and archival work, if the project demands it. Most of all, they draw upon the method of participant observation, interacting intensively and intimately with groups of informants/respondents. Areas that have faced or still face forms of conflict and violence complicate these processes. In tense political environments, to share data or information recorded by researchers is to also share data that can be traced back to someone who may have a well-founded fear of life. Data collected from one group may be seen as offensive or even a threat to another group. Ethnographers may themselves be treated with a measure of suspicion as well, and it is not uncommon for state institutions to prevent ethnographers from collecting data, either directly or indirectly.

Consequently, methods that are tried, tested and fetishized by ethnographers may not always work. Ethnographers may have to find ways to make sure that their field notes maintain the confidentiality of their respondents. If notes cannot be made on the spot, ethnographers may even have to rely on ‘headnotes’ and other creative methods of recording (Sanjek, 1990). If we treat violence and conflict as caught in an ‘epistemic murk’ (Taussig, 1984), for which no single theory or methodology will suffice, it may even be necessary to look at things from a tangent. For example, as Kleinman and Kleinman (1994) observed, many Chinese were reticent to speak of the violence experienced during the Cultural Revolution directly. Rather, they noticed that those experiences and memories were expressed through discussions of their illnesses. Health and body, seemingly apolitical topics, therefore become a way of listening to experiences which could not be shared openly.

However, other concerns emerge, especially when ethnographers carry out work with different groups categorized as victims or perpetrators. Antonius Robben, in his interviews with military officials in Argentina who were guilty of human rights violations after the dirty war, found himself facing a dilemma when he met very polite and charming men, an image we seldom associate with violence:

I had of course anticipated their denial of these serious accusations, but I did not expect to be meeting with military men who exuded great civility and displayed considerable knowledge of literature, art and classical music. The affability and chivalry of these officers clashed with trial records I had read, affected my critical sensibility, and in the beginning led me astray from my research focus. It was only later that I realized I had been engrossed in ethnographic seduction. (Robben, 1995, p. 83)

While Robben could be questioned on his surprise of perpetrators bearing markers of bourgeois civility even after Eichmann, ² this element of seduction is further complicated in Atreyee Sen’s research on women activists of the Shiv Sena. Sen’s work was based on intensive interaction with a group of women who participated fully in local politics, often against minorities in Mumbai, a city whose logic of communal relations were altered by the Ayodhya-related riots of 1992 and the bomb blasts of 1993. Sen’s (2007) larger work, which presents an honest portrait of these women and their contribution to violence, situates them at the socio-economic margins of the city, thereby complicating what a perpetrator is. However, the fieldwork Sen conducted took a great toll on her, forcing her to cut off connections to anyone that would affect her interactions with these women activists. She writes about her dilemmas emerging on different occasions when these women and their children harassed and attacked members of a minority or other people, wondering whether she should intervene or not (Sen, 2004, pp. 3–5). Yet, this raises an important issue even for those working with respondents who are obviously victimized in every way. As Veena Das (1985, p. 6) writes, ‘the anthropologist cannot remain uninvolved, for his or her own anxieties about death, evil and suffering are constantly aroused’. In any case, ethnographers increasingly write about having to take a side during fieldwork (Armbruster & Laerke, 2008).

Sharing, Revealing and Concealing: Experiences from Jammu and Kashmir

In the final section, I will draw upon my own experiences of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Kashmiri Pandits who were displaced from their homes following the outbreak of conflict in the Kashmir Valley in 1989. A significant section of the community found sanctuary in camp colonies located in cities such as Jammu and New Delhi from 1990 until the closure of the camps in 2011. Much of my fieldwork was conducted at a camp in the city of Jammu from 2005 to 2007. The exodus of the Pandits is a controversial chapter. One set of arguments blames the exodus on the Kashmiri nationalist/separatist politics that targeted the Pandits on the basis of their faith affiliation and perceived support for the Indian state in Kashmir. Another perspective argues that the exodus was facilitated by the Indian state to discredit the movement in Kashmir (see Evans, 2002).

Here, I want to draw on certain dilemmas that I came across during my research. I had come to Jammu as an inexperienced doctoral student whose prior experience with any kind of data consisted of dealing with quantitative data printouts and conducting structured interviews with middle-class residents in Mumbai. This was my first time on my own in the field. While Jammu was not affected by violence the way the city of Srinagar in Kashmir was (and remains), it was affected by the conflict in other ways. Large parts of the city were under military jurisdiction as transit camps, excluding the cantonment area. Politics in Jammu was largely opposed to prevailing political sentiments in Kashmir. Furthermore, as the ‘peaceful’ city in Jammu and Kashmir, many groups had moved to Jammu to escape conflict, including the Pandits, migrants displaced by artillery shelling along the Indian and Pakistani borders, Dogras, Kashmiri Muslims, Gujjars and Bakerwals. While advertisements in the city proclaimed its identity as the city of temples, there are many places of worship for Muslims and Sikhs. As I conducted fieldwork, many ‘Jammu walas’ I met were descendants of refugees from West Pakistan and parts of Jammu and Kashmir currently under Pakistani administration. This has contributed to the ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity of the city.

Consequently, while my work focused on the experiences of exile among Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu, I came to meet many Kashmiri Muslims and Dogras who were interested in my findings as well. Furthermore, while I was not in the epicentre of the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir, for a long time, I was unable to access any state records or archives for information on the numbers of displaced peoples in the state for ‘reasons of security’, even though the Pandits were and are not engaged in open armed conflict. It was not until a later visit with a change in senior officers in charge of the rehabilitation of the Pandits that I was able to acquire some statistical information.

As a student of anthropology, I was inspired with a sense of my work being possibly meaningful and that the encounter between researcher and researched would be a two-way process. In my first encounters, I made it clear why I had come to Jammu and tried to explain what my fieldwork was about. What struck me was that my Pandit interlocutors, from the beginning, were extremely generous and tolerant of my intrusion. Yet, there was also a certain tragic shrewdness acquired over the years with regard to representations of Kashmiris and the conflict, and I later realized that my closest informants or even those I met only a few times had a clear idea themselves of what my work ought to be. Very often, my own politics would be probed as I would be asked questions such as: ‘don’t you think Muslims cause problems?’; and ‘do you think Kashmir should have azaadi (freedom)?’ I always managed to deflect these questions, which would, of course, compromise my ‘honesty’, often complicated by the fact that some families provided a complete stranger like me hospitality amidst hardship.

My interaction with Kashmiri Muslims and Dogras was also complicated as they, in turn, asked me questions regarding what the Pandits would tell me and whether I believed them. Even they had ideas of what I ought to work on. I had once shared a report I had written with some students who seemed sympathetic to and interested in the Pandits. Upon reading the report, they reacted bitterly insisting that I was lied to by the Pandits and that I, in turn, would mislead people outside through my work. I then realized that work in a politically tense and multicultural environment, where one person’s truth is another person’s lie, complicates questions of involvement and practice. I was also afraid that my data would inadvertently cause harm. The questions I want to raise here therefore are:

What do we share with people at our field sites?

These questions that came to my mind in the field made me realize that dilemmas regarding ethical practices and standards, while essential to any ethnographic project, are difficult to resolve. Does this mean that to do good ethnography among people affected by sensitive and controversial political processes or contexts requires the management of certain ethical practices?

Concluding Comments

While ethnography is a tried and tested approach for the study of political life and not necessarily limited to the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, the ethnographic encounter raises some dilemmas regarding ethical practices in the field. This note has been an attempt to raise some questions on this issue, looking at the encounter, especially in situations of political violence or in fields where ethnographers have to tread carefully between different political sensitivities. My own experiences in a politically sensitive and multicultural setting seemed to suggest that there are often no clear answers or solutions to an ethical dilemma. Rather, in the context of research on communities affected by conflict and who occupy a politically controversial location, sometimes acts that may seem to violate values of transparency such as concealment are unavoidable. I have no solutions to offer and perhaps the only resolution to an ethical dilemma is to be open to fieldwork experiences and learn from everyday interactions. In my experience, I found that over time, the concerns of the ethics and other dilemmas faded as I got to know my informants better and as they got to know me. I did not need to hide my position on issues gradually and adjusted my methods accordingly. They, in turn, provided me a more nuanced view of their world and politics with regards to Kashmir. In the end, the only solution to the ethical dilemmas of deciding what to share, conceal and reveal lies in observing and writing about the lives, history and experiences of those we study with honesty and critical affection.