Paper
Doing Anthropological Fieldwork in Sikkim: Challenges and Opportunities
presenters
Garima Thakuria
Nationality: India
Residence: India
Sikkim University
Presence:Face to Face/ On Site
Parishmita Kashyap
Nationality: India
Residence: India
Sikkim University
Presence:Face to Face/ On Site
Keywords:
digital ethnography, google forms, covid-19
Abstract:
Anthropology has been known as a field discipline. The laboratory of the discipline is the ‘field’ itself. Anthropological field may be a four-walled laboratory, a village, a religious space, a family, a household, or any community as such. Although the earlier anthropologists, referred to as ‘armchair’ anthropologists, depended on the information by travelers, missionaries, etc. for representing a community or a group of people, yet later the concept changed to field anthropology. Anthropologists like Malinowski first started fieldwork with participant observation. Thereafter, many scholars focused on the ‘other’ and collected data through methods like interviews, case studies, genealogical studies. Since 1934, the focus of the anthropologists changed from traditional fieldwork to adopting new methods of data collection such as photography, videography, etic and emic perspectives. Different methods have been adopted by anthropologists to address upcoming challenges with time and space. With the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic, the world was ‘locked down’ and communication among human beings at local/ regional, national and international spaces was disrupted.
Thus, with the intervention of such global events, the traditional methods of data collection in anthropological field became a challenge. Researchers and scholars had to adopt new methods like digital ethnography that could aid them in gathering data. They had to take assistance of google forms as well as video calls to get the necessary information from far. The physical contact, face to face interaction with informants (interlocutors) have become difficult since the pandemic times. With this reference, the current paper tries to address the challenges faced by the researchers as well as the field supervisors in the discipline of anthropology taking instance of Sikkim in Northeast India for conducting fieldwork during Covid-19 and post Covid-19 times. Moreover, it also discusses about the methods adopted by them for collecting data during the said time period.