Notes from the Field | Roshni Brahma, Between "field" and "home": Experiences of doing ethnography with one’s own community in Northeast India
“You should have described the rituals in detail and more accurately. This is about our community, and the future generations are going to read this,” a young Boro colleague said to me after I had published a short piece on the interactions of Boro indigenous religious assertions and Hindu nationalism in Northeast India. I was unsure about how to respond to her. The intention of my essay was to highlight the historical and contemporary diversity of religious practices among the Boros, rather than to portray an ‘authentic’ version of a particular religion, and to discuss their interactions and negotiations with the claims made by Hindu nationalist organizations, broadly known as the Sangh Parivar. At that moment, I kept wondering if this was one of the many responsibilities a researcher working with their own community must face- accountability and reflexivity, much more than others who worked outside their communities.
I am a Boro researcher from Assam in Northeast India. For years, I have been working with different religious groups within the Boros, and with the Sangh Parivar. Engaging with people from different religious groups within the same ethnic group highlighted how my positionality could shift as I moved from one place to another and from one person to another. “What will she write about our religion? She is from a different faith,” was one of the few things that was common for me to hear. However, I was still a Boro, and this remained crucial to my mobility and access in the field.
The study of the “exotic other” has long dominated the field of anthropology. More importantly, debates around insider-outsider dynamics, in which it is often assumed that insider researchers or community members may take things for granted, have long been emphasized. However, doing ethnography at “home” as a “native anthropologist” brings a range of complicated negotiations, as well as potential privileges (Anderson, 2021; Madden, 1999; Narayan, 1993). More scholars have emerged, particularly from indigenous communities, studying their own communities and decolonizing methodologies in the study of marginalized communities. Briefly, my fieldwork involved working with people from my own community in the place where I was born and brought up. However, I belonged to a certain religious group within the Boro society. Yet, I was responsible for representing the community in the most “authentic” manner. My positionality in the field had a shifting trajectory.
Questions about access in the field were raised early on, from the very first days of my fieldwork. This emerged particularly around my interest in working with the Boro activists of the Sangh Parivar, an organization which was external to the Boro society. The Sangh Parivar is known for its violent approach in its endeavor towards building a Hindu nation. Often, they are termed as a fascist, fundamentalist, and communal. In recent years, they have been working towards incorporating diverse communities, including the Boros, into their fold. Some of my concerned colleagues had told me to reconsider my plan to work with its activists. A well-meaning Boro social worker said to me, “It is best if you don’t pursue anything on the Sangh Parivar. The activists will not give you any information.” It was during the early days of my fieldwork, and I was left unsettled, unsure what to do or who to approach next.
I encountered these statements often and became aware of the possible outcomes of my research. However, I was quite surprised to see the enthusiasm of the Boro Sangh activists in my work. As a Boro scholar from western Assam, several of the Boro activists were from my immediate social surroundings, and some were people I had known since childhood. I believed that working with these activists, who were also from my own community, would reveal different realities than it would for an outsider. One of them said, “We are very glad that a Boro scholar has come to know us. There are not many in our community who are doing research, and that too on our organization. People must know about us.” Their response to my presence among them and my work was influenced primarily by two things: I was a Boro woman, a member of the community. I was not a Christian, and hence, assumed to be a Hindu. On one day, I would hear “If you were Christian, we would not give you any information.” Another day, some other man would joke, “try to stay away from Christian men. They may try to lure you for information about us.” Furthermore, many of them saw me as a potential disseminator of their ideas. As such, the possibility that an ethnographer’s research may be used by their respondents to project themselves in a socially acceptable manner has been highly debated (Deodhar, 2022).
The initial days of my fieldwork were filled with anxiety. I wondered if, as others had said, I would not find access to the Sangh and its people; if they wouldn’t answer my questions, and ultimately, if I wouldn’t have any “data” at all to write my thesis. But after all, ethnography is not about what people say, it's about what people do, and even what is left unsaid (Roberts, 2016). People of the Sangh perceived me as an “outsider,” yet, for the Boro members of the Sangh, I was a fellow community member who was there to understand them. Moreover, my affiliation to a particular religious group within the Boro community shaped how people responded to me.
At this point, the insider-outsider boundaries became quite blurred. The field taught me to ask new questions and to ask the same questions in new ways. Since I was from the community, I was aware of aspects that others might not know and would not be said in the field. Being a member of the community did provide me with leverage in engaging with people. At the same time, it also challenged what I thought I knew about the field. Yet, my positionality shifted as I engaged with different sections of Boros. My gender, ethnic identity, and religion played critical roles in dictating my mobility and access to the field. As a Boro woman, I was often told to dress appropriately. It became most significant when I visited religious gatherings. Without realising, I was not only documenting other people’s lives and the things I observed, but also documenting my “self” in the field (Coffey, 1999).
Throughout the fieldwork, I continued to grapple with questions around how I represent and write about the people I spent time with and interacted with. Perhaps, there is no straight answer to these questions. While reflexivity is essential in any research involving communities, it is even more necessary for indigenous scholars working with their own communities. The chances are that they would have to live with the consequences of their research on a day-to-day basis, and so will their families and communities (Smith, 2021). It always occurred to me what the consequences of my research would be. I constantly wondered how the people I wrote about would react to what I wrote. Given the diverse forms of religion practiced by the Boros, the tussle among different religious groups and their assertions, I realized that my work on religion, nationalism, and ethnic assertions would raise questions among different sections of the Boro population. I was not only a Boro, but also a Boro with a certain religious background, within a community that practiced diverse religious practices.
I read several works on the Boros by scholars from other communities. Most of them were upper-caste scholars writing about communities historically positioned lower in the caste and social hierarchy, seeking to understand a tribal or indigenous world from above. Some are published in reputable academic journals, where it is likely that people will never have access to what has been written about them. Boro elders knew what “research” meant. They had seen scholars arrive, ask questions, take notes, and leave. Some of them told me about researchers who had visited before me and never looked back. A researcher within the community carries a different, heavier burden. One does not know where the boundaries between the ‘field’ and ‘home’ are. Further, the insider-outsider dynamics is an old issue that many have already discussed, and distinctions between them have been critiqued. To work with people and communities, the “self” continues to matter, and how the people in the field perceive and respond to this researcher’s “self” continues to be significant. Looking back at my fieldnotes, I realize that much of my anxiety was also shaped by the proximity of my home and the field — I was conscious of my movement, my questions, my approach towards the people- a voice that constantly whispered — “I will be here, even after this is over.”
References
Anderson, E. R. (2021). Positionality, Privilege, and Possibility: The Ethnographer “at Home” as an Uncomfortable Insider. Anthropology and Humanism, 46(2), 212–225. https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12326
Coffey, A. (1999). The ethnographic self: Fieldwork and the representation of identity. SAGE Publications.
Deodhar, B. (2022). Inside, Outside, Upside Down: Power, Positionality, and Limits of Ethnic Identity in the Ethnographies of the Far-Right. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 51(4), 538–565. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211060666
Madden, R. (1999). Home-town Anthropology. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 10(3), 259–270. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1835-9310.1999.tb00024.x
Narayan, K. (1993). How Native Is a “Native” Anthropologist? American Anthropologist, 95(3), 671–686. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1993.95.3.02a00070
Roberts, N. (2016). To be cared for: The power of conversion and foreignness of belonging in an Indian slum. Navayana Publishing.
Smith, L. T. (2021). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (3rd ed). Bloomsbury Academic & Professional.
Roshni Brahma is a PhD candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. Their research interests include Indigenous religious assertions, Religious Nationalism in South Asia, Religion and Ethnic Identity, and Gender and Religion.
To cite this essay, please use the bibliographic entry suggested below:
Roshni Brahma, “Between ‘field’ and ‘home’: Experiences of doing ethnography with one’s own community in Northeast India,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, April 28, 2026; https://doi.org/10.52698/GMDE9726.