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Accepted Paper:
Ethnography on the intimate and stigmatised: Reflections on research methods, constraints and negotiations in the field
Swayamshree Mishra
(Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur)
In this paper I reflect on the constraints – theoretical, methodological, and ethical – faced in the field, and critical insights gained while working on intimate and sensitive topics like menstruation and infertility in rural and urban Odisha, a state in India.
Paper Abstract:
Anthropologists have been innovating methods and epistemologies to represent and theorise the “intimate and unsaid.” Moving beyond traditional labels and understandings of constraints in challenging fields, scholars are increasingly looking at such constraints, and their negotiations with them as entry points to finding new ways of doing research and towards locating novel insights and learnings. In this paper I reflect on the constraints – theoretical, methodological, and ethical – faced in the field, and critical insights gained while working on intimate and sensitive topics like menstruation and infertility in rural and urban Odisha, a state in India. I discuss the implications of positionality in a familiar field site and revisit debates on authenticity and partial representations in the context of one's caste and class positionality in India. I extend the argument to discuss the “mistakes” committed in the field and the dilemmas faced as an ethnographer while conducting the study and during writing. The paper also utilises field sketches to highlight the importance of drawing as an ethnographic tool in a context where taking pictures, recording conversations and making videos of rituals related to menstruation was intrusive and unethical, yet crucial to capture.