M N Srinivas-
Srinivas was critical of the ‘book-view’ of Indian society. He argued
that the book-view gave a distorted picture of society by dwelling on the ideals
of the past from which the present reality departed considerably. The book-view
of Indian society presented an idealized picture of its institutions –
marriage, family, kinship, caste and religion – dwelling more on what they were
supposed to be than how they actually worked. For example, the book-view had
represented caste in terms of the invariant and immutable scheme of the four varnas.
The result of his rejection
of book view was the rejection of an essentialised and static view of Indian
society as a rigid and inflexible, chaturvarna system, governed by unchanging
religious beliefs and laws, a view adopted even by Henry Maine and Karl Marx.
Field studies shifted attention away from the four-fold scheme of varnas
to the operative units of the system which were the innumerable jatis. They
also drew attention to the ambiguities of caste ranking and the very
distinctive process of caste mobility. Thus, the field-view revealed the gap
everywhere between ideal and the actual. By bringing to attention ambiguities,
contradictions and conflicts, it paved the way for a better understanding of
the dynamics of social change. Thus, the idea of an unchanging and immutable
society began to give way, and the field-view changed not only the perception
of India’s present, but to some extent also the perception of its past.
But in effect he adapted the
approach and the ethnographic method of British Social Anthropology as the most
suitable for the study of Indian society. To be fair, it must be added that he
did not reject historical and macro-studies, but insisted that micro studies
generated by intense fieldwork using the method of participant observation
should be the starting point for the latter kind of inquiry if it was to avoid
the pitfalls of the book-view and the use of what he termed “conjectural
history”.
However, like every other method, field-work too is marked by its own
set of challenges and problems in
conducting a genuine sociological research. Firstly and foremostly, the
researcher faces the problem of the choice of the ‘field’ to carry out his
field-work as no typical field exists in reality. As stated earlier, unlike
natural sciences, sociology cannot study any particular social phenomena in a
laboratory by the experimental method due to certain moral and ethical reasons.
As a result, social research takes place in the open, where, unlike a
scientific experiment, it is extremely difficult to control the extraneous
variables. Hence, it becomes increasingly challenging
for the social scientist to establish a cause-effect relationship between the
variables stated under hypothesis. After having identified the field for his
research, the researcher faces the challenge of entry into the field. This
implies that unless the researcher is able to establish a good rapport with the
natives, he would find it hard to carry out his research. Thus, in order to
seek the cooperation of the native population for his data collection, the
researcher must gain their acceptability. In this, the social background of the
researcher also plays an important role.
Further, since the researcher can only carry out a
limited study of any given social phenomenon, the problem of holism looms
large. Since holistic study appears impractical in study of complex societies,
the researcher should keep in mind that the segment he is studying is the part
of a larger and complex whole and should look for interrelationships. Researcher
may also face problem in the formulation of hypothesis and might have to
reformulate or modify his hypothesis because hypotheses cannot be formulated in
the vacuum, without the knowledge of the field. Further, the issues of
objectivity and ethical-neutrality also need to be addressed. The researcher
should be aware of his biases and prejudices and try to make certain that they
do not influence his collection and interpretation of data. Though some of
these challenges are endemic to any social science enquiry, yet they can be
dealt with a cautious and informed approach on the part of the researcher.
Since the field-work basically involves dealing with people, the researcher
must be empathetic and flexible in his approach and employ the services of well
trained field workers.
In the ultimate analysis, it may be argued that in
any field research, the sociologist is an integral part of the research
process. The data so collected has no existence independent of him. His data
are ‘constructions, not reflections of facts or relationships alone. In the
process of knowing, external facts are sensorily perceived and transformed into
conceptual knowledge. Thus, the sociologist as a researcher in an active factor
in the creation of knowledge and not just a mere passive recipient. The
importance of his perception makes a sociologist as integral a part of the
research process as the data he observes.
Reconstituting
the ‘field’ and the practices of fieldwork in social anthropological research-
(Akhil
Gupta and James Fergusson)
Early social anthropological research was largely
concerned with the study of small scale societies in their natural state or
surroundings. Hence the term ‘field’ came to denote a distinct social group
which was to be studied in its unique socio-cultural and geographical setting.
Early anthropological research was largely based on the dichotomy of subject
and object. In other words, it was based on the separation of the social
scientist (subject) from those ‘others’ whom he observes (object). It was based
on the assumption that over involvement of the social scientist with his object
of study (social group) may contaminate the research findings. The idea about
‘otherness’ remained remarkably central to the fieldwork practices of Malinowski,
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, etc.
Amory shows how these ideas about ‘otherness’ and
taking for granted of a white subject have shaped the field of African studies
in the United States. She shows that African American scholars were discouraged
from working in Africa, on the grounds that they were “too close” and would not
manage to be “objective”, while white scholars were judged to have the
appropriate distance from the black “other”. This helps to explain that why the
contemporary field of African studiescontains remarkably few black American
scholars. Kath Weston too in her study of gay and lesbian communities in United
States arrived at a similar conclusion. She argued that her position as a
native ethnographer itself blurs the subject-object distinction on which
ethnography is conventionally founded. She calls native ethnographer as a
‘virtual anthropologist’.
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson also question the
conventional notion of field and argue that in the light of new developments
there is a need for reconstruction of field and field-work practices. They
argue that processes such decolonization and globalization, accompanied by
processes of diffusion and acculturation, have challenged the traditional
definition of field and the very idea of a clearly demarcated space of
‘otherness’. They argue that the conventional notion about the ‘field’ in terms
of a homogenous social group with its unique culture and geographical
surroundings has come to be questioned in the wake of globalization. Social
groups are no longer tightly territorialized or spatially bounded. Further, the
process of diffusion and acculturation, have significantly altered the
homogenous character of social groups and today cultural heterogeneity is more
common.
Gupta and Ferguson further question the ‘field-home
dichotomy’ in social anthropological research. They question the traditional
notion of field which rested on the idea that different cultures exist in
discrete and separate places. They argued that the ‘location’ of the field
should not merely be seen in geographical sense alone. They advocated
retheorizing of fieldwork from spatial sites to social and political locations
in terms of unequal power relations. For example, subaltern approach in
sociology has significantly contributed towards a better understanding of
various socio-economic and political processes in India, which were until now
largely studied from an elitist perspective. Gupta and Ferguson argue that with
decolonization, there is proliferation of domestic research led by the natives.
As a result, today, the very idea of ‘otherness’, which was central to the
early anthropological fieldwork, is subjected to review. Hence, there is a need
to modify the practices of fieldwork accordingly.
Further, Gupta and Ferguson also question the
fundamental premise of early anthropological field-work practices that only
professionally trained observers could be trusted to collect ethnographic data.
As Paul Radin in his study found that his untrained native research assistants
proved to be better than the academically and professionally qualified
observers in terms of gathering valuable data. This is because, as Radin argues
that such professionals are socially separated from those whom they study by
their very training. The training of the professional observers erects an
undesirable barrier between themselves and the persons to be interrogated. It
may lead to a difficulty in establishing direct and immediate contact and
building rapport with their sources of information. While on the other hand,
the native research assistants or local intellectuals are better positioned at
least for certain sorts of data collection. Thus, reflexivity has significantly
contributed in reconstruction of the ideas about field and field-work practices
in social anthropology. Such a rethinking of the idea of the ‘field’ coupled
with an explicit attentiveness to ‘location’ might open the way for a different
kind of anthropological knowledge and a different kind of anthropological
subject.
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