3. Context and Methodology
3.1 Positionality and Reflexivity
Issues of identity are unavoidable while conducting interviews in the field. While not going into the depth of these issues like the geographer Farhana Sultana does in her excellent paper on reflexivity and positionality (2007), I briefly explain some aspects in the spirit of full disclosure. My father, Ardhendu Sekhar Chatterjee, is considered to be a key figure in the organic movement not only in West Bengal but at the national level as well. Through DRCSC, the NGO he co-founded, he has been engaged in rural development for more than four decades. Although my interest in agriculture was
sparked by the exposure to my father’s work, I left India when I was sixteen years old to study at an agricultural high school in Japan, and then went on to study anthropology in the same country. I did an ethnography of organic farmers in the Japanese prefecture of Ibaraki as part of my undergraduate studies. My interest took me further to a university in The Netherlands, where I completed my Master programme in Agroecology and Organic Agriculture. My father has thus been actively engaged as a practitioner in the construction of an agroecological model for development, while I have approached the issue from an academic perspective. My purpose for this brief explanation of my background is to try to make clear the differences between my father and myself, while still acknowledging our familial bond. That being said, there is always a risk that I am biased towards my father. I try to overcome this wherever possible by cross-checking and validating his statements with other resources, using academic papers where possible.
In Bajkul village in Purba Medinipur where I interviewed farmers, I was a source of curiosity. I was not only a city boy [shohorer chele], but I also looked different because my mother is Japanese and my father is Indian. The fact that I was studying in Germany complicated issues further, and elicited many questions about Japan and Germany from my interviewees as well as curious onlookers.5 My family name Chatterjee is a Bengali
Brahmin name, which brings with it a privileged status within the caste system even if I am illiterate in its workings. My gender gave me a freedom of movement, allowing me to stay at the farmer’s house and to hang out in the evenings in the village centre even after it had become dark, while making it difficult to access the perspective of female farmers on issues of farming sustainably. Conversely, at BIOFACH, an organic food exhibition event where the participating companies were looking for potential international buyers, my supervisor, Amelie Bernzen, may have seemed to be a worthier person to talk to because she “looked European” and thus a potential buyer, or at least a connection to the European market.
5 I found myself having to explain why barbecues are a common sight in Germany (Why would you cook
outside with charcoal when you have gas at home?), and how Japanese people could eat raw fish (Doesn’t it taste bad?). The fact that women and men can sit together in a room and drink beer in these countries
I tried to make use of my outsider status to ask basic, almost borderline stupid, Fact
Questions. Unlike Perception Questions, which begin with “Why?” or “How?”, Fact
Questions ask “What? When? Who?”. This is a key strategy espoused by Wada and Nakata (2015), two in community facilitation, to avoid asking for people’s opinions which are abstract and based on conjecture, and instead engage in a grounded discussion based on what actually is (i.e. facts). Thus, an unstructured interview is necessary, as the pre-existing conditions for each interviewee is different. In the case of the farmers, I visited them in their fields in “go-along” interviews to be able to use the various crops and land-forms as “props” to enable me to ask fact questions, as I could point out something and ask farmers to explain the what it was, when it was planted or created, and who was tasked with the work. I also use this approach throughout the dissertation, explaining terms as much as possible to avoid assumptions being made. This feeds back into the demands of an Assemblage approach that seeks to avoid generalizations.
In selecting my case studies, I avoid the strategy of gaining greater statistical significance by random sampling, instead choosing a snowball method to sample purposefully. The reasons for doing so are as follows:
1. The path dependency (or context-specificity) of the development of organic agriculture. It is the specific connections among specific actors, or in other words the path dependency, that drives the adoption of organic agriculture. Complex systems involve critical transitions, non-linear and abrupt shifts (Vandermeer & Perfecto, 2017). No pure line of derivation is possible because of these shifts. Using an analogy from evolutionary biology, if we rewind history and play it back, each scenario will lead to its own specific outcomes (Holland, 2013).
2. There is a dearth of data about non-formal organic agriculture in India on which I could have relied on, and primary-data generation requires considerable resources. In an interview with the lead author of the study Organic Farming in
India: Status, Issues, and Ways Forward (2017) , I learnt that private consultants
were hired in order to arrange and schedule meetings with each individual company from which they wished to conduct interviews and surveys.
3. One of the key exhortations of the AT approach is to practice nomad science, in an attempt to see otherwise. This is an attempt to seek out alternate lines of development made possible by looking at things through the rhizomatic development of non-formal organic agriculture.
What this approach may lack in generalizability to the population (through statistical significance), it gains by providing a more in-depth understanding of how organic agriculture is understood and operationalized.
In trying to avoid parachute or helicopter research (Minasny et al., 2020), I tried to collect all the data myself, conducting face-to-face interviews. This limited the scope for quantitative data collection. I was unable to forge connections with local universities, and was not inclined to do so as well because I was not familiar with the procedures of setting up such a partnership. I did meet with several local researchers; however, I judged that it was too late in the research process to involve them in any meaningful way. While by no means a “German researcher”, I am also not a “local researcher”. The fact remains, however, that my field visits never lasted more than a month in one location. This meant that I had a limited perspective, seeing the village only at certain times of the year.