Paper short abstract:

Through my fieldwork experience in Beirut as an anthropologist from India, I propose a ‘tacking’ between and amongst locations in the south, so as to see what epistemological, empirical and theoretical implications lie buried in potential relationships that have hitherto remained unexplored.

Paper long abstract:

The issues that I will raise in my presentation will be about a change of direction in classical anthropological travel and fieldwork. These are issues about research conducted from erstwhile 'other cultures' (India), by the classical 'others' ('Indian' Anthropologists) in locations hitherto reserved for scholars from the West or the centers. They are anthropological journeys that invoke a criticality of 'place' and 'location' in the production of anthropological knowledge, not only in terms of the location of research agendas and their field -sites, but also their agents of production. I address these issues here from the vantage point of my fieldwork conducted from the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi in a location outside India - Beirut. The focus remains on the story of visiting another culture, a visit that traverses a discursive path somewhat separate from the usual anthropological trajectories that fieldwork in my context could have implied.

How does fieldwork initiated from India but conducted 'abroad', engage with the contemporary discourses on anthropological theory and practice? Conducting fieldwork in Beirut from Delhi could signal an intervention that mediates in a variety of classificatory schemes of anthropologists and anthropological fieldwork viz., Western/Eastern; dominant/subaltern; center/periphery; North/South. For most, these relationships are necessary corollaries to the intricate affinity between socio-cultural anthropology and colonialism/imperialism. However, there is enough reason to consider these binarisms reductive at best and misleadingly Manichean, at worst. Accordingly, the positioning that I would like to accord to my field experience in Beirut from India, I reckon, is not best referenced to the limiting world of binarisms but rather in the discursive and practical sphere that Arturo Escobar and Eduardo Restrepo develop around the concepts of 'dominant anthropologies' and 'other anthropologies/anthropology otherwise'.

My articulation is thus enunciated first, from a 'plural' fractured space (although, it is not about a repetition of 'nativist' indigenous anthropology) in a global anthropological cartography and second, it is about formulating certain practices that can indeed contribute to the making of world anthropologies. Through a description of my fieldwork experience, I suggest new dialogic spaces/anthropological assemblages, which can potentially move beyond the limits of the colonial - postcolonial impasse and bring together unexpected sites into productive networks of dialogue and exchange. I propose a 'tacking' between and amongst locations in the south, so as to see what epistemological, empirical and theoretical implications lie buried in potential relationships that have hitherto remained unexplored.