”I thought you were one of those modern girls from Mumbai”: Gender, reflexivity, and encounters of Indian-ness in the field
Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: This paper is a reflection on my experiences of doing fieldwork in Goa, India (1999-2000) from my position as a „halfie‟ anthropologist, born in India, and raised and educated in the United States. I discuss three „significant fieldwork events‟ that shaped how I was perceived by „others‟(locals and tourists) in the field in order to both illuminate and complicate the gendered, racialized, and diasporic postcolonial politics of conducting anthropological research on the topics of tourism and religion. Further, I pose these encounters as dilemmas, not to be resolved but rather to be explored as impacting and complicating the fieldwork process as well as access to domains of knowledge. Thus, my point here is less one of elaboration on the details of these moments, but rather the utilization of them(as ethnographic data) to think through a set of larger issues concerning the nature of fieldwork, the writing of ethnography, and researching tourism. I both suggest the study of tourism as lending itself to more nuanced analyses and develop a theory of participation, one wherein the researcher adopts a stance of „reflexive anthropologist‟ and „reflective tourist‟ at the same time.
Source: PEARL (University of Plymouth)
Author: Pamila Gupta
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2184858196