Abstract
Mainstream political scientists largely prefer broad-based modelling, inter-country comparisons and quantitative analysis of politics instead of close analysis of messy political conjunctures. 1 Even when political scientists examine political events or change at the level of the village or urban neighbourhood, they tend to compare many different settlements using a survey approach (for example, Krishna, 2003). However, appreciation of the micro aspects of politics, including people’s own understanding of the political, is crucial. On-the-ground, close-up, real-time and long-term observation of people and institutions can offer special insights for the study of politics. The ethnographic gaze can challenge many assumptions of traditional political studies and may call for a significant re-theorization.
In this note, I present an overview of why the ethnographic approach should be seen as a useful tool for students of Indian Politics. I suggest three advantages of the ethnographic approach. First, ethnographic studies open a window into micro aspects of politics. Second, this approach is well equipped to capture a messy and complex picture at the local level by privileging the informants’ point of view or the emic perspective. Ethnography unravels the intentions and meanings people assign to their actions. An ethnographic approach provides an opportunity to observe people in different settings through long-term engagement and immersion into their real lives in contrast to a formal interview or a focus group discussion. Third, the ethnographic approach involves not simply asking people questions but also closely observing their actions. Carrying out research in the everyday life environments of participants helps to identify discrepancies between what people say they do and what they actually do. The main objective of an ethnographic study is to capture the insider’s views or as Malinowski puts it, ‘to grasp the native’s point of view’ (Malinowski, 1922, p. 25). By extension, the idea is to delineate the inner dynamics of the functioning of a group, culture or neighbourhood in a holistic manner. Very often, an ethnographic study is also treated as a micro-study or an in-depth study in social science parlance, though there could be a sharp difference between a micro-study and an ethnographic study in their objectives and methods. While the ethnographic study is primarily based on insider’s views and interpretations, a micro-study may not necessarily involve them.
In contrast with an ethnographer who usually tries to probe the culture and consciousness, the scholar pursuing a micro-study strives to define the micro-processes evident at the grassroots level. An ethnographer not only makes observations, as a participant observer, of so-called trivial events, actions and interactions of subjects but also interprets them, both through the subjective views of insiders and of the ethnographer herself. Thus, by focusing on micro aspects of society, ethnography provides an opportunity to study politics from the insider’s viewpoint, relating it with other domains of life.
Further, there is hardly any contradiction between micro- and macro-studies. In fact, they can be made to compliment and strengthen each other. Generalizations derived from macro-studies may be examined in depth through micro-studies to find out if they are the outcomes of real inter-relations or only the accidental juxtaposition of unrelated events. Similarly, hypotheses and leads suggested by micro-studies can be tested systematically over wider regions through macro-studies (Srinivas, 1975).
In India, ethnography has been closely tied up with the emergence of sociology and social anthropology. Some of the best insights into the local-level politics and political process have come from ethnographic studies conducted in the first few decades after Independence (Bailey, 1963; Beteille, 1965; Chakravarti, 1975; Fox, 1969; Lynch, 1969; Srinivas, 1962). I will refer here, and only very briefly, to three such studies which illuminate the strengths of an ethnographic approach. For example, Bailey’s studies (1963, 1969) of local-level politics shows that the distinction between specifically political associations and other associations, though important in principle, is difficult to maintain in everyday life and practice. Such institutions are called para-political systems, whose study has illuminated the interface between society and politics in significant ways (Bailey, 1969). Focusing on the changing relations between caste and class, Beteille’s (1965) study in a Tanjore village highlights the distribution of power and the pattern of politics in the village. He shows convincingly that power has, in recent times, detached itself from caste and has become freer than in earlier periods, with a concomitant alteration in the balance of power among the various castes. In a similar vein, Chakravarti’s work (1975) in Jaipur district of Rajasthan shows ‘how political relations in the community had been affected by various measures initiated in the wider political society, such as land reform, adult franchise, and democratic decentralization’ (Chakravarti, 1975, p. 21). The development of new political skills, including what the author described as ‘political entrepreneurship’, encouraged by the changing social and economic environment, helped to weaken the traditional advantages of caste and class to some extent. Through long-term intensive fieldwork, these studies produced rich ethnographic accounts of the complex nature of local-level politics and enriched our understanding by demonstrating that village or local-level politics could not be understood in isolation from district and state-level politics.
However, since the mid-1970s, there have been few ethnographic studies of politics at the village level, and very few following the lead of Bailey (for example, Robinson, 1988). The recent dramatic expansion in the political participation of lower castes in India has spawned a considerable literature, focusing on democratic politics at the macro level. However, only a handful of ethnographic researchers have examined local-level experiences of democracy in South Asia (Banerjee, 2007; Ciotti, 2010; Gupta, 1995; Hansen, 1999; Jeffrey, 2010; Kumar, 2012, 2013; Michelutti, 2008; Price, 2006; Ruud, 2003; A. Shah, 2007; A.M. Shah, 2007). These studies draw attention to the daily lives and political struggles of non-elite and marginalized groups and challenge the generalization of liberal democratic theory which emerged in the West. For example, Gupta (1995) has shown that, rather than being an institution isolated from daily experience, people in India encounter the state’s power on an everyday basis and in intimate and mundane ways—for example, when they register a child for a government nursery or ask a police officer to intervene in a dispute. Discussions of everyday politics also frequently reveal instances of unexpected agency. In one of the more recent political ethnographies, Hansen (2001) illustrates how the deepening of democracy has created different patterns of authority and established a muscular class of local-level politicians who do not rely on ‘traditional’ ideas of respectability and practices of clientelism and patronage. Hansen’s work also demonstrates that liberal democracy does not necessarily produce liberal subjects and citizens (Hansen, 1999).
Inspired by Hansen, Michelutti’s study (Michelutti, 2008) on Yadavs, a traditionally ritually and economically marginalized caste, shows that the Yadavs were able to achieve a high level of politicization and assertiveness through the process of ‘vernacularization’ of politics. Michelutti delineates that folk theories of sources of knowledge linked to indigenous conceptions of the relations between human beings and gods facilitates the process of legitimating democracy and political leaders, thus helping the Yadavs to construct their own unique folk understanding of democracy. Michelutti’s study demonstrates how local idioms of caste, kinship, kingship, religion and politics inform popular perceptions of the political world. Furthermore, in the last few years, ethnographic studies of elections and electoral politics have produced stunning results which have contributed immensely to existing election studies. Unlike survey research which often focuses on political preferences and beliefs of respondents, Banerjee (2007, 2014) in her ethnographic study of elections asks the question: why do people vote? Her study in a village in West Bengal reveals the sacrosanct nature of voting and villagers’ treatment of elections as a sacred event. These studies bring out insiders’ views on the state, democracy, elections and voting as well as the ways in which ordinary people encounter, understand and interpret formal and informal politics, political institutions and actors in their everyday life.
My own research on youth in Meerut shows the mechanisms through which youth are recruited into formal politics and the ways in which youth politics emerges as a para-political system. The study demonstrates that, in the SSC University campus, student union elections have become a carnival, providing different ways for students to articulate their interests, goals and visions, and to reconstruct their caste and religious identities (Kumar, 2012). During fieldwork, I found that young men (my informants) behave and speak differently in different settings. For example, on several occasions, when these young men were in public spaces, such as sitting in a tea stall, eating in a ‘dhaba’ (local restaurant) or hanging out next to the library building, they would openly criticize caste and casteism, but I often found them attending caste meetings, felicitating their caste leaders or supporting a ‘goon’ of their caste. In private spaces such as hostel rooms, these young men openly expressed support for their own caste associations and showed preferences for endogamy.
Further, in a different setting, the village of Khanpur in Meerut district, where I studied politics and culture of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in 2004 and 2005, the use of ethnographic methods turned out immensely helpful and very fruitful (Kumar, 2013). While conducting fieldwork during the 2004 general elections, I was struck by several discrepancies between what villagers said and what they actually did. I will illustrate this with one example. When a Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) political leader visited the village during her election campaign, many villagers, regardless of their allegiances to political parties and factions, welcomed her and attended her meeting. To my surprise, when I asked the supporters of the Congress Party about this, their response was simple—that it was a village courtesy and nothing more. On another occasion, after a few days, villagers—again across political party affiliations—attended a political rally in Mawana, a tehsil town, addressed by a Samajwadi Party (SP) leader, Yaqub Qureshi. The following day, some villagers, who were staunch supporters of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) but had attended the SP rally, told me that they had just gone to see and listen to Yaqub. They may not vote for him or his party. Some of the rally attendees told me that they did not want to let down their neighbours who had asked them to join the rally. This example shows how participant observation allows the scholar to capture both the discursive and non-discursive aspects of politics, and peoples’ actions in different settings. This highlights the important truth that people do not always do what they say they do. Young men in Meerut say something but do something else. Further, people sometimes do things out of obligation and courtesy which may not directly relate to the present event or have altogether different intentions, as evident from the Khanpur village where people attended rallies or showed their presence in a meeting either out of curiosity or obligation. It is therefore very important not only to ‘observe’ and to ‘listen’ but also to follow people in different settings. Further, it also indicates that it is essential to study the non-political aspects of people’s lives in order to understand the political aspects. An understanding of the complex world of political meanings and processes can only be gained through the ethnographic method, which allows for the study of politics not only at the micro-level but also in holistic manner while throwing light on its connection with the wider world.
The obvious disadvantage with ethnographic research is that it cannot produce generalizable conclusions; it offers depth rather than breadth. Yet ethnography opens up opportunities which are lacking in other methods of understanding political processes and questions of meaning and discourse. Further, ethnographic research could be strengthening by integrating with quantitative survey methods since these two methods are not contradictory to, or in competition with, each other. In fact, household surveys have been an integral part of ethnographic research particularly in village studies. In a recent attempt, Banerjee in her comparative study of elections (Banerjee, 2014) tries to combine ethnography with quantitative surveys while studying elections in 12 polling stations across India. Similarly, ethnographers could use qualitative and quantitative methods in complimentary fashion rather than posing an imagined opposition between the two. Political ethnographers can advance this debate further taking studies of political and administrative units such as a polling stations, panchayats, block or district panchayats rather than simply focusing on a village and neighbourhood. There is an urgent need for methodological hybridization and ‘multi-method’ approach for understanding political phenomenon (Palshikar, 2010).
Recent work in anthropology also reminds us that ethnography must be detached from its association with imperial histories of rule to serve as a basis for examining politics. Scholars have recently interrogated the relationship between ethnography and dominant power, and rejected the claims to total description embedded in much classic ethnography (Marcus, 1986, 1998; Trouillot, 2003).The post-modern turn in anthropology cautions about the notion of bounded communities and localities and urges paying attention to a place where various flows intersect. At the same time, recent efforts to construct a ‘critical’, ‘spatial’ or ‘political’ ethnography retrieve from classic ethnography a focus on the spatial context, meaning and the politics of representation (Trouillot, 2003, p. 125). Thus, while I conclude that ethnography is uniquely equipped to look microscopically at political institutions and practices, just as it is ideally suited to explain why political actors behave the way they do and to identify the causes, processes, outcomes and discourses that are a part and parcel of political life, I stress that hybridization of methods could produce more fruitful results and a deeper understanding of the political.