Chapter 3 Reassembling the social from the global south: Methodological perspectives
3.9 Semi-structured interviews and multi-sited ethnography
In this section, I reflect on the conventions and traditions of participant observation ethnography and use of semi-structured interviews. Both of these methods have been considered a staple of anthropological research (Kvale, 1996; Rubin & Rubin, 1995; Warren, 2002). Infrastructural practices are interwoven into the lives of those who engage with it, and thus any study of infrastructural practices has to necessarily come embedded in a wider context of daily flows of life and ongoing social action. Given the emphasis on infrastructural practices and both practices and processes of governmentality and subjectivation, the choice of ethnographic participant observation was natural. However, it is also true that such practices are fleeting and sometimes in private, inaccessible for observation, and at the same time, individuals and groups talk about these practices in ways that are distinct from the practices themselves. In this context, I combined multi-sited ethnographic observation with semi-structured interviews. In this section, I discuss some of the practical and
theoretical implications involved in using the methods of interviews and ethnography.
For the purposes of my research, each individual’s infrastructure-related practice was contingent upon their position in the network of social relations in my field site. Rather than frame the interview as a ‘speech event’, I instead see interviews as an attempt to
‘understand the meanings of respondents’ experiences and life worlds’ (Warren, 2002, p.
83). My interviews and conversations with informants, who were permanent employees in
local government were very different from government school teachers who were employed on contract. I could not have the same set of questions for different kinds of social actors. Further, interviews as social interactions are marked by power relations in terms of unequal social positions characterised by race, sexuality and indigeneity marked by the status of the researcher and researched as insiders or outsiders depending on the contexts (Zinn, 1979) and further interviews could validate problematic ways of
representing minority communities reproducing the logics of racism, sexism, casteism and so on (Foster, 1994; Stanfield, 1993). Keeping these precautions in mind, I devised what Jack Douglas (1985) has called ‘creative interviewing’ – an attempt founded on empathy and understanding, an attempt to forge common ground and provide space for the informant to speak at length by creating a shared (even if uncomfortable) narrative space. (See Appendix 3A topic guide with typical questions used in semi-structured interviews).
As Briggs (1986) notes, for informants and for interviewers, interviews are saturated with images of the social dynamics of the interview, the dynamics between the interviewer and the interviewee, the social contexts in which the interview takes place (in an office or a home), and finally, the imagined texts that will be created with interview data. Accordingly, and in line with my theoretical framework, I did not assume that people spoke the truth as a rational agent in control over their social relations but as carriers of discourse that both reflected and reproduced their position in the overall architecture of social relations. In this way, local government employees, informants who were bureaucrats in charge of
administrative aspects of operationalising the National Optical Fibre Network upheld and reproduced the national policy discourse of bridging the digital divide, empowerment of rural subjects, nationalism and more (as discussed in Chapter 4 and 5). At the same time, their dominant caste position in the field helped them embody and assume the discourse of development without any apparent political or social complications or contradictions. They spoke about the intended outcomes but were uninterested in how infrastructures were practiced in actuality.
Qualitative researchers coming from the Chicago School in the 1950s made a tall claim about participant observation as a ‘complete’ research method, ‘[a]n observation of some social event, the events which precede and follow it, and explanations of its meaning by
participants and spectators, before, during and after its occurrence. Such a datum gives us more information about the event under study than data gathered by any sociological method’ (Becker & Geer, 1957, p. 28). This illusion of ‘completeness’ became unsettled fairly quickly in the field since both my theoretical framework and my choice of methods to some extent were constitutive of the social reality they were trying to describe (Gubrium &
Holstein, 1997; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Outside the confines of government offices, I frequented the places where individuals belong to different social groups would need to interact with internet infrastructure – for accessing subsidised food from the government, accessing free smartphones from the government, accessing government services from the village government or Panchayat office and so on (see Appendices 3C to 3E for transcripts of three interviews).
I was well aware that living in the field and coming to observe such infrastructural practices was not the same as being a resident. Although interviews are seen as providing suitably etic and participant observation as suitably emic perspectives for researchers (Jorion, 1983), these distinctions too blurred on the field. Through participant observation, even though I could get a sense of daily rhythms and patterns of usage by different social groups, I had no history that allowed me to noiselessly enter the complex web of social relations in the field.
As a researcher, I believe that “we should recognise that we are part of the social events and processes we observe and help to narrate. To overemphasise our potential to change things artificially swells our own importance. To deny our being ‘there’ misunderstands the inherent qualities of both methods – in terms of documenting and making sense of social worlds of which we are a part of” (Atkinson & Coffey, 2003, p. 427; emphasis in original).
I complemented semi-structured interviews with ethnographic participant observation, a method that ‘finds its orienting purpose in an underlying concern with cultural
interpretation’ (Wolcott, 2008, p. 72). With a broad understanding of culture as acquired social behaviour, ethnography requires a ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) to translate individual and collective experiences, practices and relations into text (c.f. Marcus & Fischer, 1986). The contextual information about the architecture of social relations – who was in charge, who had access to what kinds of cultural, economic and political capital - I could only gain accumulatively over time spent in the field. This contextual knowledge was akin to
instinct since much of the knowledge was absorbed informally rather than formally learned.
Body posture, gestures, silences, deference in tone of voice, off-the-cuff remarks – all these were valuable indicators of power (apart from the obvious indicator of caste status). It was not always possible to record and document such subtle micro-dynamics of power. This is where ethnography comes into its own distinct from other qualitative approaches such as interviewing since the effort in ethnography is to account for social action in actuality (Jerolmack & Khan, 2014). In the established conventions of ethnographic observation, I kept a diary and pen with me at all times and I would frequently note down observations as they would occur to me (c.f. Given, 2008). These would be about things my informants spoke about, my observations about infrastructural practices, my own instinctive
interpretations of their practices, my intuitions about what I was sensing by being present in that moment as a researcher-observer (see Appendix 4 for an extract from my field notes).
Rather than a ‘god’s eye view’ or a mere ‘data-collection’ approach, my entire approach was ethnographic in its imagination even if it was often what Slater (2013) has called an impure or ‘quick and dirty’ ethnography – an often messy but determined approach seeking to understand the complexity of lived life and practices including my informants’ own understandings and explanations; while (building on insights by feminist ethnographers) being aware of my own subject position’s influence on how I perceived the field and subsequently theorised it for my research (Haraway, 1988; Visveshwaran, 1996).
After finishing my field work I returned to London and started going over my field notes, separating the data into four broad categories – conversations, observation, interviews and images. I started highlighting words, phrases or sections if they seemed related to my theoretical framework, in other words a direct or indirect reference to governmentality and subjectivation. In the second stage, I tried to organise the highlighted portions of text into coherent themes and sub-themes in line with key concepts in my theoretical framework (see Appendices 1A to 1C for broad conceptual maps of the coding frames I used for analysis of my data). In the process of translating the rich texture of experiences and fragmented notes from the field into empirical chapters of my doctoral research, I acknowledge that
‘culture is always an inscription of communicative processes that exist historically between subjects in relations of power’ (Clifford, 1986, p. 15). In such a process I have retained a polyphonic sense of my data where the researched can speak with as much space as my
own voice in keeping with the dialogic nature (Holquist & Bakhtin, 1981) of discourse and knowledge production.
3.10 Conclusion
I have used discourse analysis, multi-sited ethnography and semi-structured interviews to situate the discursive policy contexts within which internet infrastructures are infused with meaning, authority and legitimacy. I subsequently observe and interpret infrastructural practices of individuals and groups to analyse the interlinked processes of governmentality and subjectivation.
The problem of 'fixing' - in place and in time, internet infrastructure is a risky enterprise. As my research shows, infrastructure is local, national, global and refers to the past and invokes the future - all at once. My empirical investigations were carried out between March and September of 2018, a year in which the Chhattisgarh state elections were held and several months before the national elections, due in mid-2019. Adivasi groups were becoming restless and agitated because of a number of developments: their homes would be ransacked regularly by elephants who in turn had lost much of their natural habitat;
entire villages had been given away to mining companies while local government officials were either bribed or intimidated; infrastructure appeared in their midst shorn of context and meaning. Given that the National Optical Fibre Network and the biometric identification card are both central government initiatives, would a change of regime in Delhi mean a change in how the entire infrastructure would be imagined and used? In essence, internet infrastructure is a label that conceals a lot of moving parts. My field is a snapshot in time.
Even if I were to visit the very same field site in five years from now, there is little doubt that new infrastructural practices could be observed, with corresponding practices of
governmentality and subjectivation.
My emphasis therefore is not on the specificity of a particular place or a particular practice since these are constantly changing, mutating and evolving due to different pressures and flows of power. Rather, I argue that the analysis of infrastructural practices (and how they are spoken about or remembered) and their ’articulation’ into social (and power) relations
provides a valuable way of studying broad processes of mediation as scholars developing or using feminist approaches to ethnography have showed. (De Laine, 2000; Gajjala, 2004;
Grewal & Kaplan, 1997; Haraway, 1988). This level of infrastructural mediation is typically constellated in different ways depending on the disciplinary affiliations of the researcher.
Thus, my field data would be theorised differently by political sociologists, social anthropologists and by STS theorists. Rather than adopting a narrow focus on the materiality or a purely discursive approach to infrastructural mediation, I have chosen diverse methods such as discourse analysis, ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews. These methods allow for incorporating the production of subject positions, the various statements that individuals and groups make indicating relations, processes and practices relating to infrastructure and finally observation of the practices themselves. Regardless of disciplinary interests, flexible interpretive research methods are well suited to investigating questions of subjectivation and governmentality as processes that are contingent on both the objective situations (practices) that individuals and groups find themselves in as well as the subjective interpretations of how subjects make meanings about such practices.
Finally, my research is based in northern Chhattisgarh in India. This is different from research that is based merely in India. The latter usually connotes research done in non-indigenous societies. The overwhelming literature on the societies of Chhattisgarh is about the Adivasis labelled as Maoists (as victims of mining and State oppression or villains opposing development), or about the environmental issues of Chhattisgarh. Adivasi society and small cities like Ambikapur are rarely written about since they are ‘unremarkable’ even within the Indian (mediated) public sphere let alone a global public sphere. Adivasi, Dalit and Bahujan societies, such as those in Surguja district, are thus in a double bind of
exclusion – the margins of the margins as it were. However, the perspective of such groups need not necessarily be at the ‘margins’ of knowledge production. Multiple empirical
accounts rooted in the global south, studied by Adivasi, Dalit and Bahujan scholars, studying internet infrastructures from different disciplinary interests can ‘de-centre’ the practice of theory building. It is not that every empirical research done outside the west needs to be bracketed – in India, or in Nigeria, in Mexico and so on. Instead, the unbracketed universals such as ‘infrastructure’ need to be grounded in rigorous research. Open-ended methods
such as ethnography and discourse analysis provide the scope for such rigorous empirical research without necessarily reverting to a metaphysical universalisation of epistemologies and politics.