Shared knowledges: Family,fusion,friction,fabric

Introduction

How do ethnographers harvest cultural knowledge in the abstract field which is equally a real place? By what means do we then transform gathered knowledge into textual knowledge? For whose benefits? And to what ends? Such foundational meta-questions, at once methodological and ethical, have much preoccupied anthropology as a discipline in recent decades. And yet, Middleton and Cons (this issue) are correct to point out that the role of salaried assistants – specifically, persons recruited from within communities under study – has been strangely muted in our discipline’s noisy frenzy to examine, disclose and share. Anthropologists eagerly and emphatically highlight tropes of friendship, engagement, emotional, psychological, political and even sexual involvement. ¹ They seem notably less forthcoming, however, about entanglements with hired helpers.

When every kind of intimacy has been relentlessly subjected to revelation and critique, why would practices of collaboration with paid assistants be neglected? Why would this area be particularly fraught, untouchable? At stake is not just the production of knowledge but its ownership and its rewards, both tangible and intangible. Underlying both production and ownership are different kinds of power disparities including but not limited to economic and linguistic matters – inherently touchy issues for ethnographic authority and probity. Our collaborative chapter aims to contribute a few insights from a few angles into the depths of these still waters, and affirms the issue editors’ insistence that further open discussion is indeed worthwhile and necessary.

To introduce ourselves: Ann is 66, a professor at Syracuse University, and has been working in provincial Rajasthan since her doctoral research in 1979 – the year she met Bhoju. Bhoju, ten years Ann’s junior, is a Government Middle School headmaster currently posted in a hamlet outside the provincial market town – qasba – of Jahazpur, where he now makes his home in a suburban neighborhood. Alongside his teaching career Bhoju has worked on and off as a research assistant to various American and European academics for over 30 years. His first and most formative employer, who taught him his ethnographic skills, was Joseph Miller, a folklore scholar and videographer trained at the University of Pennsylvania.

Madhu Gujar, 26, is Bhoju’s eldest daughter. She attended college in Jahazpur, earning a BA in Sanskrit, and her post-graduate studies included an MA in Hindi and a B.Ed in Sanskrit. These qualify her for a teaching career, but she has not yet obtained a posting. Chinu Gujar, 21, Bhoju’s second daughter, pursued agriculture in Higher Secondary School, and is currently in her final year of college, working toward a B.Sci. Both Madhu and Chinu began their lives and their schooling in the village of Ghatiyali, moving to Jahazpur in their teens for the sake of educational opportunities. Gujars in rural Rajasthan are still associated with livestock and herding, but they are not transhumant pastoralists, as in some other regions. In Ajmer and Bhilwara districts, Gujars are often small landholders, fully integrated into village communities. The Gujar-Mina agitations that flared several times in Rajasthan in recent years (Mayaram, 2008) had little impact in those districts where Bhoju is based; his closest friendships are with Mina educators and businessmen from in and around Jahazpur.

Most human relationships are inevitably polymorphous. However, it is worth keeping in mind a conceptual distinction between salaried assistants (this special issue’s focus) and what anthropologists of the past often called ‘key informants’. I would also distinguish the relationship between ethnographers and research assistants from the more freestyle, open-ended engagements that Lassiter promotes in his Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Lassiter speaks of collaborative research as ‘an ethical and moral enterprise’ (2005: 79). Adding economic transactions to the mix in the form of salaries does not by any means erase ethical and moral dimensions. I stress these terminological matters even though, or exactly because, our essay explores working relationships through which all three categories – assistant, key informant, collaborator – are messily confounded.

In his 1960 preface to a volume comprised of anthropologists’ portraits of ‘key informants’, Casagrande states that ‘fieldwork by its very nature is at heart a collaborative enterprise’ (1960: x). While these words from half a century back sound quite contemporary, in that same preface, Casagrande carelessly lumps assistant and interpreter with cook and house-boy. In giving pride of place to individuals – ‘key informants’ – who ‘by virtue of their special knowledge or skills, their authority or qualities of intellect and temperament’ may become an anthropologist’s ‘particular mentors and close associates’, he thus perhaps disingenuously segregates the hired help from the interlocutor (1960: xi). I hope that what follows here shows how the role of assistant and the role of ‘key informant’ not only merge but evolve into collaboration.

Bhoju and I began straightforwardly in 1980 as employer/employee, but even that businesslike relationship meant entirely different things in rural Rajasthan than it did in my home town of Chicago. Our relationship rapidly branched out into multifaceted complexity. Leaving aside what we all consider to be primary – our ties of kinship and friendship – Bhoju and more recently his daughters have been at once ‘key informants’, ‘research collaborators’ and ‘co-authors’. Nonetheless, ‘research assistant’ has lingered among us in a meaningful way to describe quite literally the work they do some of the time: they assist me in projects oriented to literatures they have not read and discourse worlds they do not know – projects I could not execute without their help. The moment we begin our work together, assistant overflows its bounds. Our work becomes collaborative as joint pursuits of cultural knowledge stimulate their minds and views, and their creative suggestions infuse and transform my visions and inquiries.

At the beginning of August 2010, my husband and I settled in a rented flat around the corner from Bhoju’s family in Santosh Nagar, an offshoot suburb of central Jahazpur. We lived there through the middle of June 2011. Bhoju and I began almost immediately to work on a broadly framed research project about identity and place in a provincial town. Bhoju is a busy man and always short on time. As a headmaster and teacher, he works school hours Monday through Saturday, and as a government servant he is subject to being assigned on short notice extra duties (such as training workshops) that can eat up anticipated vacations. On top of these considerable responsibilities related to employment, the demands of sociability in provincial Rajasthan can be extreme.

Given Bhoju’s taxing schedule and my wish to gather women’s viewpoints, it made sense for me to hire Madhu to work with me when Bhoju was otherwise occupied. Madhu and I did considerable research together from August through October. Chinu began assisting me after that, when Madhu was simultaneously ill and preparing for a crucial examination. Between the middle of December and the middle of April neither Madhu nor Chinu was much available between the compelling preoccupations of their weddings and their schooling. Both did return home (as is common) after their marriages, and we worked together again, sporadically but fruitfully, in the hot season.

Approximately one-third of 140 interviews I recorded during my entire 11 months in Jahazpur were conducted in the company of one or both of these young women. This article necessarily devotes more attention to collaboration with Bhoju because of the depth of our shared experience over decades. However, although my work with Madhu and Chinu was a matter of mere months, it was revealing and critical to my current writing about Jahazpur. ²

As has been the case with Bhoju and my past efforts, this essay is co-authored but composed in separate voices. Here (but not in all of our writings) the dominant first person ‘I’ is mine – the Euro-American professor of anthropology. Bhoju Ram, Madhu and Chinu Gujar each provided written texts in Hindi which I have translated and from which I draw, inserting intact passages of my co-authors’ words throughout a topically organized discussion of our work together. The topics themselves crystallized in my mind only after I poured over the three others’ texts. I do not strive to merge our four distinct voices. Even innovative strategies such as those practiced by the Matsutake Worlds Research Group, a collective which attempts to mimic ‘rhizomic sociality’, break articles into chunks with individual named authors (2009: 399). ³

Our contribution proceeds in four parts:

1. Family: Kinship and authorship. Looking back, I discuss in severely truncated summary how over the past 30 years Bhoju and I have crafted, recrafted, and published accounts of an evolving relationship at once working and familial. I am part of Bhoju’s family now as he is part of mine. Madhu and Chinu take these conditions for granted, having known me literally since birth as their paternal Aunt (Buaji). What does being part of one another’s family mean? Bhoju’s understanding seems consonant with anthropology’s. He uses the evidence of ritual performance, exchange and terms of address. His wife’s brothers formally bestowed gifts of cloth on me at his daughters’ weddings; his children call me Aunt; therefore I am kin. I would build on this, following Bhoju’s lead, but stressing emotional ties: along with my own children and nieces these are the people about whom I care the most in the world. To revert to the academic tongue, let me offer Marshall Sahlins’ recent definition of kinship as ‘mutuality of belonging’ and kin as ‘people who are intrinsic to one another’s existence’ (2013: 2). These phrases perfectly define the way I am connected with Bhoju’s family. ‘Mutuality of belonging’ would not obliterate discrepancies of power and agency in any family, but rather pervades them. Elsewhere I have described a moment of incorporation (in 1997) when Bhoju’s mother ordered me to stir the lapsi, a cracked wheat pudding she was preparing to offer to the ancestors (Gold, 2013). ‘Mutuality of belonging’ is a lot like lapsi, thicker and sweeter than water.

2. Fusion: Chemistry of knowledge production. We all discuss research aims, practices, dynamics and results: how we gather information, piling up the scraps and chunks of it, and how these fragments sometimes cohere into knowledge. Bhoju and his daughters describe their roles as facilitators of my collection enterprise; at the same time they themselves relish the knowledge for its own sake. They find it keenly interesting to see their culture, neighbors, rituals in ways newly meaningful. I stress here intoxicating, magic moments when findings and minds come together and things click, or chime. Vague, romantic, and imprecise as my language may be, I consider fusion crucial to our research. Without these moments fieldwork would hold little charm for me; my ethnographies would be drab and dull. My own is not quite the transcendent ecstasy that Lassiter experiences when he sings at a powwow: ‘Self-confidence and well-being bent my whole form and scattered any despair and emptiness I had as if they were waves yielding to a ship’s bow’ (1998: 64). If I cannot claim such extreme transformation, I can aver that moments of fusion, constituted by a melding of minds, are truly exhilarating.

3. Friction: Disparate perspectives. It would go without saying that Bhoju’s experiences of caste and religious difference in Jahazpur should contrast strongly with my own. Sometimes we argue openly about these matters and sometimes we brood silently. Friction is the word that comes to mind. Highlighting tensions resulting from our disparate viewpoints, I argue that such friction is fruitful – that dissonant, alternative perspectives may yield enhanced understandings. This restless discord I equate with ‘the grip of encounter’ – one among several ways in which Tsing glosses friction (2005: 5). She is writing of global flows; I am writing of personal encounters. Nonetheless, Tsing’s assertion – ‘Friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power’ (2005: 10) – rings true to me in the context of collaborative fieldwork.

4. Fabric: Threads and patterns. In concluding, I hark back to Margaret Mead’s phrase, ‘weaver of the border’. Mead’s extraordinary portrait of one such weaver, Mrs Phebe Clotilda Coe Parkinson, describes her as a ‘gifted informant’ (1960: 177), as someone who inhabits the ‘in-between world’ (1960: 180), and as someone who ‘has always seen herself as it were from the outside’ (1960: 182). For Mrs Parkinson – a woman of mixed ancestry whose life was shaped by marriage to a European – these characteristics were imposed by genes as well as experience. Yet each of these phrases might apply to Bhoju and his daughters, although their heritage is completely Gujar. They inhabit the ‘in-between world’ because of Bhoju’s involvement with foreign researchers. Madhu told me more than once as her marriage drew near that she felt she was watching ‘some other girl’ go through the many rituals. Bhoju has compared himself to Narada, a ‘messenger’ between heaven and earth in Hindu mythology (who often stirs up trouble). I argue that the weaving of ethnography in which Bhoju, Madhu, Chinu and I participate produces not just borderwork but whole fabrics in variegated patterns.

Family: Kinship and authorship

Our history of collaborative co-authorship is equally a history of evolving kinship. Bhoju’s account, written in response to the issue editors’ description of their aims, opens by evoking the alchemy of relatedness:

Since 1979 I have been working as a research assistant and co-author with Dr. Joseph Charles Miller and Dr. Ann Gold. Although I began as an ethnographic assistant to Joe and Ann our relationship is now one of family members. ⁴ Profoundly, they have become brother and sister to me. For example, I call Joe ‘Brother’. I have been working with Ann such a long time, that even though I call her ‘Ainn Bai’, she has become Ann Buaji [‘Aunt Ann’; literally father’s sister] to my whole family, and soon this relationship will extend into a third generation! [Madhu was pregnant when he wrote this; a healthy boy was delivered to her a few weeks later.] Here is some strong evidence of how far our kinship has progressed: At my daughters’ wedding [January 2011], just like a brother and sister, Dr. Joseph Miller and Dr. Ann Gold and their spouses received gifts of clothing in the mayrau; they were dressed along with the whole family (Figure 1). ⁵

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Figure 1.

Ann, standing between Bhoju’s wife and her brother’s son, receives a gift of clothing at the mayrau for Bhoju’s daughters’ weddings, January 2011. Photo by Bhoju Ram Gujar.

For more than 20 of the 30 years during which Bhoju and I have worked together – since the late 1980s – we have made persistent efforts to disclose our practices of research, to interrogate the meaning of assistantship and the roles of our un-merged voices in the texts we ultimately produced as co-authors (Gujar and Gold, 1992; Gold and Gujar, 2002). My initial response to some lines of the issue editors’ introduction was haughty denial: I was sure I never conveniently erased Bhoju’s presence ‘in the all important progressions from fieldwork to published ethnography’. I was equally sure that I had never failed to discuss how research assistants affected the directions of fieldwork. This was a retrospective denial that the text of my first book proves false.

In Fruitful Journeys (Gold, 1988) I acknowledged in the preface particular contributions from Bhoju Ram and other paid assistants who worked with me during more than 18 months of doctoral research (1979–81), when I was based in Bhoju’s birthplace, the village Ghatiyali. However, when presenting interview texts, I did indeed erase their names. While I had begun deliberately to employ dialogic strategies (see Dwyer, 1982; Tedlock and Mannheim, 1995), Fruitful Journeys adopts the convention when reproducing an interview text not to identify the individual asking questions. Whether it was me, or Bhoju Ram Gujar, or Lila Devi Chauhan, or Nathu Nath, or Vajendra Kumar Sharma, I wrote ‘interviewer’. Why? How awkward and artificial and lame it seems now. I can only assume, imagining my insecurities as a junior scholar, that I did not want anyone to count up how many times I was not the one to articulate the best questions. That blunt admission says a lot about the erasure of assistants. By contrast Gold and Gujar (2002) names each speaker in all interview dialogs. In my memory I had falsely projected that practice backward, thus receiving a shock on re-opening Fruitful Journeys.

Between 1981 and 1987 I gave birth to two sons and did not return to India. It was during that time period when Bhoju and I first co-authored an article. What propelled me to make Bhoju co-author when I submitted this article to Asian Folklore Studies? Although the topic was my idea, and the literature review required an intensive effort on my part, scoping out an unfamiliar scholarly domain, Bhoju in this case had literally provided all the original materials. He sent me a Hindi text with miracle stories he had gathered at multiple sacred groves and these formed the substantial contribution presented in ‘Of Gods, Trees and Boundaries: Divine Conservation in Rajasthan’ (Gold and Gujar, 1989). Once I had crossed that psychological and professional hurdle of naming Bhoju’s authorship in print, even after I was able to return to Rajasthan to undertake my own ethnographic research, I found myself habituated to a sustained awareness of how a so-called assistant did far more than assist. I saw how he might shape a project design or significantly influence its trajectory.

In 1990, Bhoju was in the United States and, at my invitation, gave a public talk at Cornell about how being a research assistant changed his life. Much of what he said surprised me and we became inspired to do the article ‘From the Research Assistant’s Point of View’ (1992). This was the first of our publications in which the order of authors became Gujar and Gold. Bhoju was co-author of later research on children and environmental knowledge in which he took the lead, and co-principal investigator on a successful grant proposal on that subject to the Spencer Foundation.

So we progressed from erasure to disclosure. However, our power differentials never disappeared. I am the one with access to prestigious publishing venues, as well as the one who decides whose name to put where. I am the literal writer almost all of the time. Even when Bhoju composes prose I render his Hindi prose into English, and edit it. There are instances when it happens that I feel I have labored so hard on the academic framing of an article based on shared fieldwork that I ‘deserve’ sole authorship, and I take it. Not once has Bhoju questioned my decisions about where I do or do not list him as co-author, or whose name comes first. What he asks of me always is to appreciate his ethnographic skills, and to return as soon as possible with another research program. When I am in Rajasthan, power shifts again, for I often feel painfully dependent on my collaborators’ energies.

Some readers of the manuscript for In the Time of Trees and Sorrows, our eventually prize-winning environmental history book, warned me that by assigning Bhoju co-authorship I was liable to be accused of appropriating his voice rather than commended for acknowledging it. In that book (Gold and Gujar, 2002) we provide a 22-page chapter titled ‘Voice’ of which three pages are Bhoju’s own composition. There we describe in near excruciating detail the ways Bhoju affected ‘the directions of fieldwork’, seeking to differentiate our talents and capacities, and touching only lightly on two tender areas – language and money.

About language, I can say that my Hindi has for years been stuck around the fourth (of six) levels of proficiency: ‘able to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical and social topics and on professional topics in restricted contexts’. ⁶ Above this comes ‘fluently and accurately on all levels’ – which I shall never attain. In Rajasthani I remain at the still lower stage of ‘limited working proficiency’. An example of how the limiting factor of ‘restricted contexts’ can impact research is in the vocabulary of recognition. My vocabulary swells only in the areas in which I have already done extensive work. During my first and longest fieldwork I had gained a high capacity for discussing deities, temple worship, shrine rituals and all associated matters. In the 1990s, when I wanted to understand agriculture, I was shot back to an early stage of vocabulary building. I had the same experience in 2010–11 as I began to interview shopkeepers – finding myself dismayed at basic missing words. In interviews where I am at a linguistic disadvantage Bhoju inevitably does most of the talking.

When I worked with Madhu and Chinu the linguistic situation shifted. Inexperienced and reticent, they left it to me to formulate questions. Because of all our time together as a family over the years, they had no problem with my accented Hindi. Thus if the interviewee couldn’t fully understand me (or the other way around) one of them would chime in and explain. These interviews thus proceed in an elementary language, my language. In certain ways, when I review their content, I see a usefulness in this simplicity; I confess to enjoy not having Bhoju taking the lead. I am also acutely aware of how my language level constrains the depth to which we are able to probe any given topic.

When we were interviewing Madhu’s and Chinu’s friends and fellow college students among our neighbors, we all spoke Hindi and not Rajasthani. From time to time, however, my young female assistants would contact for one of our interviews a female neighbor who was not educated. Reacting to my American accent, some of these women were stymied, resulting in occasional embarrassing miscommunications in first conversational encounters. One declared, on tape: ‘Even if I am born again, in my next life I still won’t understand your speech!’ Once an unschooled woman becomes accustomed to the way I talk we are able to converse – me improvising in a mix of Rajasthani and Hindi, she responding in Rajasthani slowed down and slightly Hindi-ized for my benefit. I have for many years conversed fluently in this fashion with Bhoju’s non-literate wife Bali and eventually did so with many unschooled Jahazpur women.

Madhu and Chinu both wrote about the difficulties they had at the beginning, especially with non-literate interviewees. Madhu stresses the hurdles of explaining our purposes:

Talking with some of these women was difficult even for me. Before they would even answer, they asked me so many questions: ‘Who is she? What kinds of things does she want to talk about with us? And what is she going to do with the things she learns from us?’

Bhoju refuses to take any money belonging to me, not a cent ‘out of my pocket’. He only accepts payment when I can prove to him that my grant budget has designated funds for a research assistant. Whenever I am in Rajasthan, there is a fierceness to Bhoju’s spending on my account, a manifestation of expansive hospitality plus honor. For example, when Daniel and I arrived in August 2010 we found that without any advance consultation, Bhoju had purchased all necessary costly furnishings (bed, fridge, kitchenware, etc.). He refused to let us pay him for them – arguing that he would keep them after all, once we had left. He often neglects to keep track of expenses such as petrol even when I implore him repeatedly to do so. Although my husband and I set up various cooking and eating arrangements during our Jahazpur year, Bhoju’s household frequently fed me, my family, and my guests unstintingly. In writing budgets I try to make Bhoju’s stipend enough to compensate not just his working hours but his extravagant hospitality, and can only hope I have at least partially succeeded. Bhoju has of course reaped financial rewards over the years due to working with various foreigners and occasionally assisting in Study Abroad programs from my university.

Bhoju told me that institutional funding channeled through my grant helped him to pay for the elaborate wedding of his three daughters in 2011. I have not yet ‘come to terms’ with how I might write about this wedding, which took up more than a month of all of our attention, a month during which I was entirely without research assistants. With no daughters of my own, I was emotionally as well as ethnographically absorbed in every aspect of the nuptial proceedings. This returns me, of course, to family and the tricky dilemmas of relationship and authorship. The brides and their mother, after the wedding, helped me to translate songs, to log ritual action in photographs, to interview the barber woman who officiated at most of the complex women’s rituals as well as the beauty shop owner who did the sisters’ make-up. I have no idea how I shall manage to write about all aspects of such an intimate event, which was of course a singular dramatic watershed in lives I care about so much. Yet every time I sit down to sketch an outline of my book, our book, about Jahazpur, the wedding is one chapter.

Fusion: Chemistry of knowledge production ⁷

Regarding research practice and its rewards, one thing all four of us have in common is true enjoyment of learning. Bhoju, Madhu and Chinu repeatedly employ the Hindi word jankari as they describe their work with me. This word is the noun that appears most often in Bhoju’s text. Jankari can mean ‘information’ but is commonly translated as ‘knowledge’. ⁸ I suggest that fieldwork as a quest to obtain information also involves rarer and subtler transformative moments – fusion-like moments when information becomes knowledge and, as is the case with chemical fusion, energy is produced.

Bhoju writes of the gathering and processing of jankari in a nuanced fashion, contrasting the process of learning what he already lived and breathed in Ghatiyali with that of learning things new to him as well as to me in Jahazpur. Of his pre-Jahazpur research he says:

At first it seemed a little strange to me because the culture, religion, traditions and atmosphere which I was researching were in fact identical with those in which I was raised. At that time, I knew a lot but I was also ignorant; my knowledge was not mature. Still, because I already had knowledge, I was able to get results from others. ⁹

… I myself care very much about all the traditions connected with society, caste and culture. There is so much knowledge I did not have earlier in my life, that today I have gained.

In the winter of 2010–11 Jahazpur’s mythic and polluted Nagdi River became a shared passionate obsession. Bhoju and I each composed and published respectively in Hindi and English NGO Newsletters short and polemical documents about its condition. We were striving for a new kind of activist position and prose, to give our research some kind of meaning and efficacy in the community (Gujar and Gold, 2011; Gold and Gujar, 2011). We had the satisfaction of recognizing our impact on local governance: the mayor funded construction of new gutters to redirect drains beyond the river. Alas, the process has stalled without achieving a successful outcome and we cannot yet claim an effective practice of ‘public anthropology’ (McGranahan, 2006).

Madhu and Chinu in 2010 were mostly innocent of prior research experience, and both were somewhat reticent in interview contexts, although at times they could be surprisingly proactive. Fieldwork in their company was often more social than businesslike. Visiting female neighbors, I learned much just from observation: body language, home décor, clothing, and the ways interviews lapsed so readily into gossip. Formal interview content was often secondary. Because they required me to articulate my own questions, working with Madhu and Chinu stretched my language skills to their fullest extent. I felt inadequate, but also in control.

Both young women in their own writing stress two different but related subjects that were of particular interest to them while working with their Aunt Ann: learning about women’s rituals and learning about working women. Of the former, Chinu for example writes:

In order to learn about vows, most of the time we talked with those women who had the most enthusiasm for keeping them, and who in general were most interested in worship and recitation of religious texts. From talking with these women, I learned a lot about the practice of worship and religious storytelling, and I heard a number of stories.

The sisters sometimes assumed rather different positions in similar situations when helping me record women’s ritual activities. When we went to attend a dark moon worship performed by our neighbors in Santosh Nagar, Chinu, without affectation, naturally joined the worship of Tulsi Mother (Figure 2). OPEN IN VIEWER

By contrast, when assisting me by recording women’s songs addressed to the river goddess Ganga Ma in her mother’s natal village Rampali on the day of her grandmother’s funeral feast, Madhu appeared to use body language and clothing to separate herself from the other women. Many of them were her maternal cousins and kin, but less educated than Madhu and more deeply entrenched in rural lives (Figure 3). OPEN IN VIEWER

With Madhu and Chinu, fulfilling ethnographic meetings of the minds – that is, moments of what I am calling fusion – were sporadic, but particularly enchanting. Both young women, as would their father, made efforts to create an atmosphere conducive to the flow of information – that is, of jankari. While they found this most taxing with uneducated women, they also began to realize that such women might provide the most satisfying or original material.

For example, there was the interview with the old drummer woman whose language was difficult for me to penetrate as it was not just Rajasthani but a quaint, flowery, bardic Rajasthani. We asked her the usual questions about Jahazpur’s festivals. Later when transcribing the tape, Madhu noted that when I had asked how long a certain festival had been going on in Jahazpur (a question to which most responded, ‘one hundred years’ or ‘a very long time’), this old woman declared, ‘since the creation of the universe’. Somehow this gave us particular and shared delight. For Madhu, I believe it was a moment when she suddenly appreciated as invaluable the oral cultural worlds of her mother and grandmothers. Educational priorities force young women such as Madhu and Chinu to race as fast as they can in the opposite direction of their unschooled mothers’ traditions. Working with me certainly did not deter them from that determined course, but it did foster sweet appreciation for the older generation’s arts and knowledges.

Friction: Disparate perspectives on caste hierarchy and religious difference

Bhoju writes:

I know that whenever I am doing ethnographic work, then I am not Bhoju Ram Gujar, nor do I have a caste or a religion. It is enough that with whomever I am doing an interview, I follow his way [majhab; also means ‘religion’ in Urdu]. This is the biggest reason for my success in fieldwork. My purpose always remains the compilation of information.

… According to my caste and religion I should not eat and drink at Muslims’ homes. Nonetheless, in spite of this, on several occasions in Jahazpur it happened that I did eat and I did drink. This is my obligation, because I need to obtain their sympathy, in order to work with them, if I want to learn about their customs and their religion.

… It is an ongoing tradition in Rajasthan that whenever water, tea or food are offered to you at someone’s home it is necessary to show respect by accepting these. Sometimes I don’t want to do it, but I drink and eat in any case. I might not even enjoy what I am eating, but still I praise it. I learned this from Ann and from Joe Miller, that this kind of adjustment is very necessary for successful ethnographic work. In the villages I did not have such problems, because everyone there knows to which caste I belong and with which family I am able to eat and drink. But Jahazpur is a city, and in westernized culture, caste rules do not keep their significance.

… What I am trying to say is that both the researcher and her assistant have to be extremely sensitive, in every kind of situation. They must willingly extend tolerance to everyone. Being from the middle ranks, as I am, is a good thing, because one can establish rapport with members of all groups. The research assistant must work in harmony (talmel) with all the various social groups (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Bhoju interviews a member of the groom’s party at a Muslim wedding we attended together. Photo by Ann Grodzins Gold.

There are two areas where Bhoju and I have had particularly divergent reactions to our Jahazpur research, or have interpreted our findings differently. These are, perhaps predictably, caste hierarchy and religious difference. As he stresses in his own account, Bhoju possesses a very strong sense of his twin identities as Gujar and Hindu. While he is willing and able to shed these in certain contexts and within certain limits, in others he cannot – even though schooled by Joe and Ann in the need to do so. Importantly, Bhoju’s inability at times to forget who he is has to do largely with awareness of his social persona, the pressures to which it is subject, and its vulnerabilities. Bhoju accepts that my behavior is not similarly ruled.

It is fine with Bhoju if I drink tea at a leatherworker’s home, for – as he states – ‘western’ values with which he is perfectly familiar pay no heed to such matters. But with part of his life still rooted in rural society, Bhoju himself is only partially able to step out of his shoes. He is acutely sensible of potential repercussions that might affect his extended family and his position in his own community. Which transgressive steps Bhoju chooses to risk (eating a full and delicious meal at the home of a Muslim) and which he avoids (drinking tea at the home of a formerly ‘untouchable’ leatherworker) are themselves revealing. Bhoju describes frankly how he felt about the latter:

I remember once I went with Ann to Ratan Lal Regar’s house. There I made a pretext that I was keeping a fast that day, and saved myself. So we sat and conversed with him. [Ann had tea but Bhoju did not!] There are so many things we need to pay attention to when doing an interview.

Turning to Hindu and Muslim relations in Jahazpur, it is clear in our respective writings that Bhoju is more often tuned into tension and I am more often tuned into comfortable accommodation. I expect both of us are right some of the time, and that in our excesses we may correct one another through a kind of generative friction. Bhoju’s account frequently uses the word mahaul, which translates as ‘atmosphere’, and he characterizes Jahazpur’s mahaul as one of tension:

In Jahazpur as a research field, whether you take a social perspective or a political perspective, there are many differences you must take into account. It is a sensitive research field. In Jahazpur, whenever there is any public festivity, whether Hindu or Muslim, there are always arrangements for both the police and the army to attend the entire event. No disturbance ever actually happens, but there is an atmosphere of tension that remains. Both of the major religious traditions hold very elaborate festivals and celebrations; these are done in a competitive spirit because these groups feel a kind of rivalry and try to outdo one another in their festivals.

It is a challenge to do ethnographic research on any special subject in an atmosphere like this.

… The Hindus celebrate festivals such as Jal Jhulani Gyaras, Janamasthami, Dashara, etc. and there are Muslim occasions such as Id, the Moharram taziya etc. There are multitudes of processions and they all take place in an atmosphere of competition and tension.

As I contemplate these interpretive frictions, or heterogeneous encounters to use Tsing’s language, I wonder whether it may be more difficult for us to write together a book about Jahazpur than it was to write the history of Sawar. Yet I hope we will be able to arrive at an innovative style that permits friction as revealing of multiple truths.

Fabric: Threads and patterns

A bridge enabling journeys between two places is certainly a valid image for the interpersonal work of ethnography (Grindal and Salamone, 2006). Yet collaborative endeavors involving research assistants require a more interpenetrating metaphor. ¹¹ I would like to return in concluding to an image of woven fabric, inspired by Mead’s description of her ‘key informant’ as a ‘weaver of the border’. The fabric I have in mind is not just a border, but a whole piece of patterned cloth. I think of jointly produced ethnographies such as Bhoju’s and mine as woven fabrics. Were any threads to be yanked out, unraveled, snipped loose, that cloth would be missing not only pattern but strength.

Bhoju closes his account of ethnographic research with the following words, chastening to me:

In conclusion: In this kind of work, the assistant has a more important role than the researcher, because if the researcher makes a mistake or asks a question that really shouldn’t be asked, no one minds all that much because after all she is a foreigner, and there are a lot of things she doesn’t know. But as for the assistant, he must think a whole lot and every single question that he asks should take into account the local atmosphere.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Portrait of Ann and Bhoju. Photo by Joseph C. Miller, Jr.

If I go back to my first fieldwork, even then, Bhoju was not simply a hired mind. Even then, when I was 33 and he was 23 – a kid just out of college – Bhoju was an ardent researcher. I clearly remember his scolding me when I became lax or distracted or just plain tired. Much of this was due in part to the enormous impression Joe Miller, our brother – fieldwork taskmaster par excellence – made on Bhoju’s young mind and to the strict training Bhoju received from Joe, harsh and loving at once. But it also had to do with Bhoju’s own omnivorous intellect – his boundless eagerness to learn, to acquire information, and to experience that particular frisson of satisfaction when gathered bits and pieces fuse into knowledge. He was stimulated by parents who had forged difficult paths with severely limited means, giving him the gift (the grace) of education (Gold and Gujar, 2002: 165–81).

Both Madhu and Chinu close their brief descriptions of our work together by expressing their desires to do more such work in the future, to have another opportunity, as Chinu puts it, ‘to work with you, and thus to learn more and to know more’. This wish is reciprocal and encapsulates my conclusion about shared research: it is at its best when we learn together, even if our understandings or uses of what we learn are ultimately divergent.

In describing my work with Bhoju and his daughters, I have stressed the familiarity and comfort of family bonds; the shared and fulfilling epiphanies or prolonged revelatory processes of discovery when information fuses into knowledge; the ability or necessity to comprehend our conflicting interpretations as productive sparks of illuminating friction; and the willingness to acknowledge our ethnographic products as a fabric of meaning that no one of us could claim wholly theirs. While these elements characterize my particular history with Bhoju Ram’s family, they are also lessons with broader relevance for anthropology.