Feminist Ethnography
By Laurie Patton
In 2004 I worked in Pune, India, supported by a Fulbright grant and a fellowship provided by the American Council of Learned Societies. There I interviewed women scholars who deal with Sanskrit literature. My research shows that women scholars not only in the U.S., such as myself, but also and especially in India have been interested in the Sanskrit tradition despite its patriarchal cast. Below is an excerpt from one of my letters home, which I wrote after the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) was ransacked by the Samhbhaji Brigade, a split off group from the Maratha group, the Maratha Mahasangha. The crowd of about 100 young men were protesting the fact that some BORI faculty had been acknowledged in a book by a Western scholar, James Laine. In that book, Laine had made what was to their minds offensive statements questioning the lineage of the great Maharashtrian hero and king, Shivaji.
One of my colleagues and friends (and one of the women in my study), Uma Chakravarty, was in the guest house when it happened. She said she thought there had just been an argument with one of the guards, until she heard the shouting stop and the chanting begin, a steady chant inside the Institute for about 3/4 hour. Then there was silence. Laine has apologized, explained that he was simply reporting common narratives about Shivaji. About ten scholars here have had armed guards with them day and night because they were thanked in the book. The Pune office of Oxford University Press, which published the book by Laine, was also vandalized, and there have been calls for Laine's and the publisher's arrest for inciting a riot…
As a religious studies scholar passing the hallways of Pune soon after the Laine incident, I am quite conscious that the key instruments—the questionnaire, and the interactions I have with the women I am interested in talking to—must be radically redefined…
What does such an approach look like for a beginning ethnographer? Twenty years ago, my interviews may well have taken place only once and then have been entered into a "field notes" folder, to be encoded later. Today, like it or not, I have an entirely different consciousness, shaped by several different things...The first is the awareness of human subjects in the United States. When I first had to take the Institutional Review Board exam dealing with research that involves human subjects, I scoffed. I am speaking to women like myself—a harmless chat over tea in which we speak of childhoods and challenges and mentors—surely there is no need for the protection of my subject's safety in such parlor talk? Yet I had no idea that, post-BORI, their safety would be the one thing on all of our minds, whether we liked it or not. Yet even if such an event had not occurred, I had taken tests in which I had to imagine pregnant women, women in prison, children, all being asked questions in a study. I had to imagine these scenarios in order to pass the test, even though I would never myself be in such circumstances. So things like "voluntariness" and “agency" and "control" took on immediate, concrete meaning. I had resented every hour of the IRB test, and yet now that I am in the field, I realize that it gave me something extraordinary—not exactly a new set of skills, but a new instinct, a new question: "How is this person going to feel when I leave the room and our conversation is over?"
My answer to that question changed my research methodology entirely. Instead of a single meeting with each woman I interview, I have at least four or even five. This decision is due to the concrete idea of agency. In each woman's eyes, there is the fleeting look, Will I be misquoted in a cavalier way? What will she do with my words? And I now explain: "This interview is just the beginning of the process. We will meet at least three times, and probably more. First, we will conduct the interview. I may ask you some follow up questions, and if there are any you don't feel comfortable with, or you want to think more about, that's just fine. Then, I make a transcript of the interview and return it to you. At that point, I become a scribe only. We will sit together, and you can change the transcript to reflect exactly how you want to be quoted. If you want to add something you forgot to say, or take out something that doesn't sound right on reflection, that's just fine. Then you return the document me, and I make the changes and give it back to you. Then, we go over it again. Only when the text reflects exactly what you want to say will we use the data. Then you sign the approval form for the data to be used."
In other words, I have created a textual exercise in which the woman has total control over the final text. After the interview, as I say to each woman, I become essentially a scribe—correcting and rewriting the text of our conversation until it is exactly as she would wish it.
And we sit together as we would over a Sanskrit work and read the text of her interview, making changes and conversing together about the kinds of ways she would like to be represented. When I realized I had done this, it made me laugh. ("You can't do anything without turning it into a textual exercise!") But it also made me even more convinced that there is something very liberatory about two people looking at a third text together—it takes the pressure off the face-to-face conversation and creates a common task. The third text principle is basic to conflict negotiation, and I think it is basic to human relationships.
Yet I think this approach also has fulfilled other ideals that I hold close. It might be taking feminist ethnography in a direction I feel is appropriate and helpful. As my colleague Joyce Flueckiger (along with Leila Abu-Lughod, Ruth Behar, and others) has taught me, the project of making women's voices matter is a life-long project, not a matter of a single book or a single interview. Focusing on their voices—down to the minutest detail—is part of that lifelong project. My own project's obsessiveness with correct phrasing, correction, and endless conversation is an attempt to give the women in the study a clarity and precision of voice. I hope such precision will feature their creativity and courage, as well as the challenges and even the banality of their lives.
I think my newly developed approach is one which addresses that elusive idea of “agency." (I have learned a great deal about the problems of this word from my colleagues Cory Kratz and Ivan Karp.) If we define agency as the power to choose for oneself, then each moment of the interview process is a form of agency. If the woman requests it, I send the interview to her in advance so that she can think through her answers. Many women have worried that their answers wouldn't "measure up," and need time to prepare. In the interview itself, I repeat what is said in the consent form, and I suggest that we sign it a second time, only after she has given her full approval and made any changes she wants. During the interviews, I preface many basic questions as well as follow-up questions with "an exit phrase"—a phrase that gives the woman a chance to say that she thinks the question is irrelevant, or that its premise is wrong. For instance, my final question, the most important in the study, is: "What is the relevance, if any, of women in the field of Sanskrit today?" Some women have said, simply, "None," or "There is no difference between men and women in this way."
All of this is perhaps exactly what any good ethnographer would do, and as our discussions of feminist ethnography have revealed, "feminist ethnography is simply good and responsible ethnography." Most of this I should be expected to do anyway. But the sharing of the transcript, together with the working through of the revisions, is new and unexpected. It means that I must transcribe my notes "in the field"—a very time consuming and tension-filled process. I had initially envisioned only a second meeting with each woman, but most women, being scholars, want to take the transcript home, mull it over and change their words many more times. So that means another, third, meeting, where we sit and go over exactly what she has changed and why. And then another meeting, to go over the next round of changes, which there may well be. Many of the changes are phrasing or spelling or titles. But many of the changes have to do with the political environment, in which caste remains an uncomfortable topic, especially in "post-BORI" Pune, where much of the Maratha political activity has anti-brahmin overtones. One woman worried that her analysis of caste relations in one particular Vedic sacrifice would now be controversial. Another woman took the whole interview home and redid it completely, in ten tightly written, single-spaced pages, because she felt more comfortable in written English.
Time consuming and tension filled. And yet in many ways the absolute best part of the process. Such a procedure creates, inevitably, lasting relationships which will be in place over years, and I hope, the rest of our creative lives. They are relationships of academic (if not economic) equals, and very frequently it becomes clear that I could have been, or might well be now, their student in certain Sanskrit skills which I do not possess. In the best (although surely not all!) of these conversations, differences have been openly acknowledged, difficult issues have been already broached, and a framework for ongoing discussion of those differences has been set up. We talk about why Indian and Western academics don't talk to each other, about whether feminism matters or not, and occasionally also about the more difficult topics of economic and social inequality—in America, in India, and globally.
Laurie Patton, a Winship Professor of Religion, visited Pune, India in 2004 on a Fulbright grant and American Council of Learned Societies fellowship to interview women scholars of Sanskrit.