Extra-terrestrial landings: An ethnographic account of doing ethnography

Abstract

The field site is the retail showrooms of a fast-expanding organized retail company selling budget eyewear products across shopping malls and high streets of urban India. Through a thick description of 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork – arriving, forging social relations, recording and writing – this article traces the practical, ethical and epistemological paradoxes in doing ethnography. The article identifies these paradoxes as inherent to ethnography given its radical intent. Not studying them as limitations or failures, the article makes the case for a more honest and critical reckoning with these internal contradictions by making them more present in ethnographic practice and writing. It is argued that in so doing we enrich our understanding of the complex and contradictory social worlds we inhabit and study.

Im/material and intimate relations: Considering ethnographic methodologies for already-surveilled communities

“…'Invading ethnography' is one such reflexive framework, which identifies studying hierarchies of belonging that are often solidified through the ethnographer's 'invasion' of the social setting of research (Adjepong, 2019). While negatively connotated words like invasion can allude to a desire to avoid such tensions in ethnographic research, Garima Jaju (2023) argues that such avoidance is futile as these are the innate contradictions of ethnography, which only reflects the natural paradoxes of our social words. Considering further Adjepong's and Jaju's use of invasion and extra-terrestrial to denote the ethnographer's entry into a social world, their theorizing indicates that it is not necessarily the presence of the ethnographer that has created an unnatural relation but the form of relation that they take up in such a role.…”