Lost in Translation: Doing (And Not Doing) Ethnographic Research in Village India

This paper is a reflection on the difficulties of conducting criminological research in rural India. It tells the story of two periods of ethnographic fieldwork (1999 and 2002) conducted in one North Indian village (pseudonym: Nagaria). This article is written in the ‘tales from the field’ narrative tradition, relying primarily on my own fieldwork experience and later reflections, and intentionally making little reference to the methodological literature. Much of the paper - particularly the fieldwork extracts - is written in the ‘ethnographic present’. A dramaturgical approach is adopted (Goffman 1959), with a focus on the ways in which social interaction may be understood as performance. Theatrical terminology is used to underscore the ways in which field relationships may be stage managed. Contrary to conventional notions of the power of the researcher, in this tale from the field it becomes clear that the superior acting skills of gatekeepers and key informants led to the upstaging of this ethnographer.

Julia WardhaughEmail:

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Julia Wardhaugh   is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at University of Wales Bangor, United Kingdom. Her research interests include rural and urban crime and deviance in South Asia, and the criminalization of street homelessness in urban and rural Britain.