INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

ety. 75 Instead I made the study center at Assi Ghat a temporary home where I was
allowed time to reflect upon experiences at the end of the day.
Throughout my field work at Varanasi I was assisted by Ajay Kumar who studied
at Benares Hindu University and worked additionally as a field coordinator for
the study center. His remarkable social skills and profound knowledge of local cultures
have considerably contributed to the study. Although Ajay Kumar belonged to
a Hindu family, he always paid the greatest respect to the Guru Granth Sahib and
was eager to learn more about the Sikh religion. Within only a couple of weeks he
pursued knowledge in the Gurmukhi script and was able to understand inscriptions
and notices in the gurdwara. Especially during the first part of my field work, when
my language knowledge was frail, Ajay Kumar participated in all interviews and
translated conversations from Hindi to English. Our extended cooperation provided
linguistic and social stability to my work, in the sense that we got know each others‘
language usages and behaviors, and informants were comfortable about having both
of us around.
EXPERIENCES THROUGH PRACTICE
Ethnographers may adopt different attitudes in the field depending upon their individual
personality, capacities, and purposes of the study. The classic keyword for the
working method commonly used by ethnographers ‒ “participant observation” ‒ has
been interpreted differently over times and generated interesting discussions on the
researcher’s role in the field. On a general level anthropologists have distinguished
between the more silent observer and the active participant ‒ two positions which
have come to represent two much wider ideals of objective and subjective research.
According to the former position the ideal ethnographer attempts to remain “invisible”
in field in order to maintain an objective approach and not lose the analytic perspective.
The latter ideal, predominant in reflexive anthropology, takes for granted
that all researchers have intellectual, bodily, and sensual experiences in the field and
will provide subjective interpretations whether they like or not. Advocates of the
latter ideal will purport that scholars should take use of their personal subjectivity in
the process of doing field work and writing academic presentations, instead of creating
homogenized ethnographies that reflect a false objectivity. 76
In concrete field work situations, however, the two categories of observer and
participant are more closely related and overlap, since the ethnographer, like other
human beings with bodies moving about in spaces, cannot escape herself to “objec-
75
In interactions with one middle-class family it became apparent that their invitation implied I
”repay” them by getting their eldest son admitted to a college in Europe and bringing expensive
consumer articles that I was of no financial position to retrieve. The granthis of gurdwara were
apparently aware of existing prejudices about European foreigners as being “wealthy” and on
several occasions countered this preconception by publicly and correctly introducing me as a
student surviving on educational grants.
76
See e.g. Davies 1999.
25
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008