Paper short abstract:

Intersectionality of personal nostalgia prompting engagement in academic research, with nostalgia of the community where ethnographic work is completed, can impact anthropological knowledge production in unpredictable ways especially where it has to contend with the involvement of the State.

Paper long abstract:

In Writing Culture, Marcus discussed the importance of doctoral fieldwork for an anthropologist noting that “it is in turning the dissertation into a published monograph or a series of articles that career directions are determined...” (1986: 265)

However, what happens when an anthropologist remains an outsider, unable to secure a suitable academic or research position. Can an outsider seek engagement with academic research and can nostalgia of first academic work be addressed by independent research?

This is especially so since the research work that I intend to pursue contends with nostalgia of others too. My doctoral fieldwork in the year 2000-2001 was in a Sikh village in Punjab in India, which had emerged from a militant movement. Tatla (2006) noted that the memory of the destruction of a holy Sikh shrine by the Indian army in the city of Amritsar in 1984 – interwoven with the memory of Sikh history – emerged as a traumatic event that fuelled Sikh militancy in Punjab.

This event continues to imfuse nostalgia of the Sikhs in Punjab and abroad, resulting in conflicts with the Indian State (Shah: 2022) as well as impinges on Sikh studies (McLeod: 1999) in unpredictable fashion.

This has the potential to complicate any research not only due to legal requirements to seek prior permission in India but also the political context within which it may be implemented, limiting the transformative prospect of nostalgia in expansion of my first ethnographic work with the Sikhs in Punjab.