Arriving at the field

In this section, I problematise the notion of the field as I grapple with operationalising the concept in my doctoral research. I discuss three methodological strategies that enabled me to approach the field and begin research and finally reflect on the conditions under which the field becomes legible for the production of knowledge.

The notion of 'field' entered anthropology from the natural sciences, including but not limited to zoology and biology. Like the natural sciences, anthropology too saw field work as the detailed study of primitive humanity in its primitive stage, just as the naturalists studied flora and fauna (Stocking, 1992). Inevitably, given the framing of field-work as the

acquisition of the other, anthropology as a discipline has a strong foundation in the broader extractive logics of colonialism and imperialism. Contemporary academic knowledge

production is no longer limited to the study of the other in far-away places - a result of the so-called 'cultural' turn in social science disciplines after the late 1960s (Asad, 1973).

However, 'field' and 'fieldwork' are traces - they remind us of the difficulties and complexities involved in the conditions of knowledge production.

Fieldwork implies that the researcher goes elsewhere to conduct research, which must mean that after conducting research, one comes back home to reconstruct research into knowledge. The field is where data is raw, complex, dangerous and unprocessed. Home is where one can gain some distance from the field, and in a calm and safe environment, 'process' the data to produce knowledge. The territorial logic is unmistakable but not entirely useful today, given the complexity of digital networks (Coleman, 2010; Slater &

Miller, 2000) and in general, globalisation:

The landscapes of group identity - the ethnoscapes - around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly

territorialised, spatially bounded, historically self-conscious or culturally

homogeneous...The task of ethnography now becomes the unravelling of a

conundrum: what is the nature of locality, as a lived experience, in a globalised de-territorialised world? (Appadurai, 1991, p. 191)

This de-territorialisation is not restricted to ethnoscapes but extends to technoscapes as is clearly evident in the case of internet infrastructures. From undersea cables to standards and protocols, the local is constantly marked by the national and the international (Easterling, 2016; Starosielski, 2015). The separation of field and home is further

complicated for 'halfies'³² like me. As a postcolonial subject, it is not always clear what is home and what is the field. There is also the double-bind that researchers like us face:

readers from the Global North expect us to translate the strange events ‘out there’ in the field while subjects and readers in the Global South expect an impossibly authentic

representation of their (our?) lived experience as well as the bringing of insights that come from the privilege of academic environments (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997). I experienced similar complications when it came to my field work, since the contexts of Chhattisgarh were at once familiar as an Indian (translating to a Western/international audience) and yet completely unfamiliar to me as a dominant caste non-indigenous south Indian.

For social science researchers, it is impossible to collect data without some assumptions. We already have some preliminary ideas about the 'field' and the kind of data we can extract from it. Inevitably, such assumptions come with epistemological and indeed, political acts of classification that orders our investigations at different levels – from the phenomenological to the logistical (Becker, 1998; Bowker & Star, 1999). In my research, I narrowed down internet infrastructure into three methodological strategies to begin my research, since I was fairly sure that once on the field, my informants would provide me with access to a wide range of infrastructural practices that would go well beyond my initial assumptions and strategies. First, I focused on the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) as the main object of ‘internet infrastructure’ since the NOFN was routed through a single institution (BBNL), had a clear set of objects (cables, power systems and so on) and locations

(Panchayats for instance) which could be observed and analysed. Second, I distinguished

32 A term coined by Kiri Narayan (quoted in Abu-Lughod, 1991) for postcolonials who do their research from the West

between government and citizens where the former group would be engaging with internet infrastructure in terms of administration, financial planning, technical maintenance and so on whereas the latter group would engage with internet infrastructure as citizens, users, consumers and so on. Third, I distinguished between Adivasi and non-Adivasi groups. These were initial strategies for approaching and managing field work, but not only would these strategies give way to complexities on the field, but even on paper, such strategies have inherent ambiguities and complications.

For instance, take the distinction between Adivasi and non-Adivasi groups. Implicit in the research process (in terms of the inherent divisions between who gets to be the researcher and the researched) is a ‘metanarrative’ of globalisation that pre-supposes the transition from pre-modern to modern, from provincial to regional to national and de-territorialised globalisation and so on (Trouillot, 1991). Contrary to the productive view of globalisation espoused by Appadurai above, it is worth remembering that if processes of producing knowledge are caught up in a totality where some people are fixed locally while others enjoy the pleasures and comforts of globally circulating capital and culture then it is a sign of social deprivation and degradation (Bauman, 1988). Although there is no geographical space that has only one or the other group, the distinction is useful since indigeneity is a historical marker of alternative cosmology and social structures compared to other ethnic, religious or caste-based subjectivity that have integrated more or less with modern life with clock time, wage labour, modes of consumption and so on (c.f. Thompson, 1967). I return to this question of a distinct Adivasi subjectivity in Chapter 6, Section 6.2.

Each of these methodological strategies enabled me to begin fieldwork without much prior knowledge about the region or access to social networks. As I began following up the NOFN apparatus in terms of institutions, specific types of users or administrators in Adivasi and non-Adivasi areas, the ‘field’ began to appear more accessible. I refer not to the stabilisation of my research object (since various individuals and groups I interacted with constantly disturbed the distinctions I began with and mentioned above) but rather a preliminary sense of how power relations are exercised in the field – who were the caste groups that

controlled the government jobs, the land market, specific castes controlling specific

industries (retail, or cloth markets), a sense of who was respected for which reasons, and so

on. I also got a sense of daily rhythms, how different subjects navigated their respective environments in terms of family and professional obligations, which public spaces were used by whom at which times, but also a collective sense of daily life and its pace.