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The paper provides fieldwork reflections of the author as a native researcher in rural Manipur, India. It discusses challenges and strategies employed to obtain relevant information. It contributes to doing ethnography at home debate.
The paper is about the author's reflections on doing anthropological research on a familiar site and culture to study the livelihood of Liangmai in Manipur. As a native and tribal anthropologist, doing fieldwork at home has undeniable perks like effortless rapport building, shared mental images in communication and no requirement to learn a language or need for a research assistant from the field. However, gaining access to locals’ interpretation of reality is much like an outsider fieldworker. Extracting relevant information and nuances of practices/views from the people whom you know comes with its own share of difficulty. A phrase like “you already know it” can be a real problem for gathering in-depth empirical data. At times, the native researcher’s queries are not considered worthy of explanation. In dealing with a familiar space, a researcher must be sensitive to their context and complex situations so as not to hurt community feelings in the fieldwork process and to maintain a long-term friendly relationship. This piece on ethnographic reflections contributes to contemporary debates on doing at-home ethnography. It discusses strategies deployed to overcome challenges.