Search

Through collaborative writing, the authors reflect on ethnographic engagement and critique “research tourism,” that is, drop-in, quick-fix “fieldwork” in developing countries. We position ourselves not as researchers vis-à-vis researched, but as two scholars set between researchers and researched, sometimes in the role of researcher but also stepping inside the binary to limn the gap. Through a dialogue across disciplines and a co-labor of writing, we inquire into the negotiation of research relationships in local contexts and how those relationships are conveyed in the academy. Using collaborative writing as our method of inquiry, we gather insights about our own roles and the unspoken relationships and expectations of researchers and researched in countries such as India. This allows us to introduce a multi-dimensional perspective on experiences that are usually represented from the single point of view of the researcher. This article begins in the middle of things because that is where we are.

In Friction, Anna Tsing asks us to see the rain forests of Indonesian Kalimantan as a place where chaste concepts such as “nature” and “science” get pulled into the forest, shoved past devastated hillsides, and dragged through community meetings into a desperate melee of stories and desires. The concepts will never be the same again. The book is organized into three sections: “Prosperity,” “Knowledge,” and “Freedom” (with a crucial introduction and a pensive coda). The headings refer to universalist aspirations; they serve as themes rather than markers of the actual chapter topics. In each section, using a wide range of ethnographic techniques, Tsing explores how various peoples’ ideas and desires come into engagement and how that engagement changes the people, their ideas, and the world. The book has seven chapters, but the chapters alternate with short segments of writing offering particular perspectives that implicitly explore how to take a perspective at all. These segments allow the suggestion that the concerns in them have been generated by the way the chapters themselves rub against each other. Under the first section, “Prosperity,” Tsing asks us to consider how global capitalism operates in specific instances, as she puts it, “in friction” (p. 12). A preliminary segment that traces the 1970s dreams of progress before circling around to rage and despair. Chapter 1, “Frontiers of Capitalism,” explores the concept of “frontier,” the negotiation of what is “legal” (and for whom), and how land is made “public” (thereby taking it from people who use it and giving it to others) and then tumbles into the depths of the struggle to control the valuable commodities in the Kalimantan rain forests. This will be difficult going for many readers. Some will be put off by the constant presence of Tsing’s pointing finger directing us exactly where to look and what to see. Others will be unnerved by the violence (no easy escape to paper generalities allowed—there is mud here, and greed, and despair–“Look at it!” Tsing insists). Chapter 2, “The Economy of Appearances,” at first seems like a safe refuge. There is even a reassuringly abstract graphic

In this report of research currently underway on libraries in the city of Pune, Maharashtra (India), the focus is on commercial, street-corner libraries. Using an ethnographic approach, this research explores the way these libraries function, and the values placed on reading by Pune's middle class library users. Commercial libraries seem to have occupied a niche not filled by the public libraries in Pune, that of providing current popular fiction and glossy magazines in convenient locations. The libraries have a variety of origins and motivations, but are typically run with only the most rudimentary of cataloging and shelving systems, and no reference functions at all. Patrons describe their reading activity as leisure, and name television viewing as the main alternative or competing activity.