My first experience of doing ethnography felt like stepping into the unknown. It was demanding and unpredictable. What followed was a series of unexpected encounters, questions beyond the scope of my research, and moments that challenged everything I thought I understood about doing fieldwork.
As I begin the deep-dive ethnographic phase for RELIABLE, I find myself recollecting my earlier experiences- those came alive again during the online Ethnography Workshop, along with the anticipated challenges that the fieldwork brings. I wonder, if finding reliability through the lens of mid-level actors is tricky, so too is making sense of the space between ‘going to the field’ and being ‘in the field’.
What started as a simple question – what does it mean to do fieldwork? – evolved into a deeper reflection on how the field stays with us. Rather than viewing ‘the field’ as geographically and temporally bounded, I wanted to explore the experiences that stay.
This reflective blog explores the space between ‘going to the field’ and being ‘in the field’, drawing on my previous fieldwork in the East Kolkata Wetlands, suggesting that the two are far more entangled than they might initially appear.
Seeing fieldwork as a journey of becoming
As someone formally trained in Philosophy, thinking through texts, arguments, and concepts comes naturally. But the transition from Philosophy to doing ethnographic fieldwork was not effortless. Ethnographic fieldwork is an immersive approach to understanding people and their social worlds through sustained participation, observation, and engagement with everyday lives. Since my early undergraduate years, fieldwork has intrigued me and shaped my journey as an interdisciplinary researcher. It continues to influence how I think about research, knowledge, cultural spaces, and the relationships that make fieldwork possible. Doing ethnographic fieldwork can be both exciting and unsettling.
The ‘field’ sounded like a place to collect information and then return to make sense of it. My first fieldwork happened in a realm of ignorance: the unstated sequence of identifying and justifying the choice of a field, pre-fieldwork preparation, mode of transport, rapport building (in case you are unfamiliar with the chosen field), questions about whom to interview and how, and finally the analysis. Let alone the bigger challenges of insider-outsider, researchers’ positionality and reflexivity, process of decoding fragmented fieldwork experiences and encounters, and the long-lasting emotions afterwards.
Undoubtedly, ethnographic fieldwork is demanding and perhaps, can be understood as a journey into the unknown. One of the things that the field trains you in is that very little happens according to the plan. Conversations move in unexpected directions. People ask you questions as they must, but you may not have the answers. An interlocutor you thought will be important hesitates to talk. The carefully prepared questionnaire becomes irrelevant.
As Pravindharan Balakrishnan reminds us in Fieldwork, Frictions, and Fabrications: Making Sense on Uneven Ground, fieldwork can push theory into the “realm of the tangible”. But making things tangible does not necessarily mean it becomes clearer or simpler. Sometimes, it makes them messier. Fieldwork unfolds you precisely because it unsettles the categories you arrive with. It is in this way a journey of becoming.
The Wetlands that came home with me
After conducting a month-long rigorous fieldwork in the East Kolkata Wetlands, I found that I could not quite get over the conversations I had with the people living and working there: a seasonal migrant couple from the mango orchards, a caretaker of a fishing co-operative who accompanied me around and introduced me to her colleagues, an old resident who insisted on having an afternoon meal, and a group of men who refused to engage as dusk fell. I kept (and still keep) returning to those encounters, anecdotes, transect walks, and more-than-human relations that together sustain these wetlandscapes. A mango we shared while discussing the challenges faced by an orchard caretaker, that peculiar smell of the fish farms, the discomfort of being denied a conversation, and meeting Chocolate, a dog, and Minnie, a cat, as co-owners of an aquaculture farm; none of these images have faded.
This resonates closely with the long-lasting effects of fieldwork on how the emotional effects of doing fieldwork can persist beyond the researcher’s geographical departure from the field. Returning to your home does not necessarily mean leaving the field behind; rather, experiences can continue to revisit you through memory, reflection, and writing. For me, it was these more-than-human encounters and seemingly ordinary moments that continued to shape how I understood the Wetlands.
It is through these instances that I began to understand how the field cannot be neutral or strictly bounded. Being in the field involves building relationships, acknowledging one’s positionality, negotiating decisions and access, and being attentive to experiences that may lie beyond the immediate scope of the study. Yet, these seemingly peripheral experiences can ultimately shape the researcher and the ways in which they come to understand the field and their own journey within it.
Finding reliability through fieldwork
The field may be uncertain, but that does not make fieldwork unreliable. Reliability emerges through the researcher’s ability to recognise, respond to, and learn from that uncertainty. A field evolves, shifts, surprises, and sometimes refuses to conform to what we expect of it. By this, I do not mean to convey that reliability guarantees smooth transitions. In contrast, it provides a sense of capacity to engage with the unpredictability of the field responsibly. In reality, the East Kolkata Wetlands as a field expanded both in depth and in width, extending beyond the boundaries I had initially imagined.
Fieldwork begins from curiosity, builds through texts and expectations before arrival, and continues through relations, encounters, emotion, memory, interpretation, and writing after departure. Rather than worrying about uncertainty around fieldwork, acknowledging these trails as continuities may offer a more reflexive understanding of the field itself. And so, the question is not really about challenging the boundary, but about reorientating the idea of fields themselves.
In RELIABLE, the attributes of the field change, but its core character – fluidity, uncertainty, and evolution – remains constant. From navigating the ever-busy desks of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation to visiting pumping stations, the field takes different forms, where uncertainty remains a defining feature. It is only through doing ethnography that one realises that reliability emerges gradually. From the initial struggle to secure permissions to waiting for even a brief visit, uncertainty has surfaced in all its forms. Yet these uncertainties, whether anticipated or unexpected, do not negate reliability; they merely delay its realisation.
As I move towards undertaking intensive fieldwork for RELIABLE, I carry this understanding with me. I do not expect the field to remain fixed or entirely predictable. Instead, I hope to carry the lessons that uncertainty has taught me- to remain open to what emerges, to recognise the relationships that make the field, and to understand that some of the most meaningful aspects of fieldwork may lie beyond what I initially set out to find. Perhaps, then, reliability is not something we bring to the field. It is something we learn through being in it.
