On trusting ethnography: serendipity and the reflexive return to the fields of Gujarat

Abstract

We draw on David Pocock's fieldwork of the 1950s in central Gujarat, India, as a comparative resource to think about social change and anthropological knowledge. Revisiting where Pocock had been through new fieldwork, we were encouraged to think about the ways in which places are accessed and subsequently understood. Against our conscious will, the pathways we were able to take through the field strongly resembled those Pocock took sixty years earlier. The coincidence is such that the material casts shadows of doubt over the potency of terms such as 'serendipity' and 'chance' to characterize key moments of ethnographic fieldwork. Against the primacy given to the self in much reflexive anthropology, we demonstrate that the personal attributes of the anthropologist might influence the production of ethnographic research less than is generally assumed. The double bind of our 'reflexive return' comes from revisiting an anthropological field and experiencing the agency of that field in making what we can know.

Placemaking ‘experiences’ during Covid-19

“…Meanwhile, AirBnb executives, facing an abrupt end to income streams from both in-home stays and in-person experiences, launched 'OE' within just a few weeks of the global lockdowns. Scholars have discussed the value of serendipity in ethnographic fieldwork (Rivoal andSalazar, 2013, Tilche andSimpson, 2017), and this consideration very much characterized the approach we developed in response to a world which no longer supported travel as we knew it.…”

The Magical Romance of Serendipity: On Fieldwork, Accidentality and Anthropological Knowledge

“…Non sono pochi gli etnografi che si sono trovati in circostanze simili, con i loro abituali terreni di ricerca improvvisamente perturbati da avvenimenti catastrofici, da operazioni di soccorso o dalla macchina internazionale degli aiuti: Antonello Ciccozzi all'Aquila (Ciccozzi 2013) anni del dottorato, prima che nel 2001 un terremoto e poi un'ondata di aiuti umanitari senza precedenti stravolgessero la vita quotidiana delle persone che aveva conosciuto sul campo, spingendolo a tornare in quei luoghi e a narrare la catastrofe (Simpson 2013). A differenza di Salazar però, Simpson tira in ballo la nozione di serendipità per spiegare non tanto il suo incontro "casuale" con il disastro, ma l'eccessivo, insidioso peso che questa nozione è andata assumendo in antropologia a seguito della svolta post-moderna (Tilche, Simpson 2017). Schierandosi contro l'enfasi assegnata al "sé" antropologico nella fase di ripiegamento auto-riflessivo della disciplina, e al contempo prendendo le distanze dalla celebrazione dell'inestimabile valore dell'errore che ha contraddistinto le etnografie post-moderne, Tilche e Simpson provano a dimostrare che gli «attributi personali» (Ibidem: 692) dell'antropologo, compresa la mitica ed esoterica serendipity, contino molto meno di quanto siamo portati a credere, se lo scopo è quello di affinare la conoscenza antropologica senza «trasformare la verità in un tabù» (Ibidem: 691).…”

‘Hayan na ang mga Hampas-dugo! (the Penitents are coming!)’: Penitensya as religious-dark tourism

“…Serendipitous 2 interviews were conducted in situ while the tourists were partaking in the Easter ritual. Before proceeding, we should note that serendipity is not a new concept in research, and indeed 'chance and serendipity' have been viewed as keys to ethnographic investigations (Tilche and Simpson, 2017). While field workers are surrounded by opportunities for potentially serendipitous moments, it takes 'relevant and contextualizing prerequisite knowledge' to recognise these moments as serendipitous (Tilche and Simpson, 2017: 92).…”