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Introduction
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp 1-25
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Summary
Ours is a century of uprootedness. All over the world, fewer and fewer people live out their lives in the place where they were born.
– Michael Jackson, At Home in the World, 1995In the last decade, the migration of indigenous youths from the uplands of Northeast India to metropolitan cities across India has become one of the most significant social and economic transformations of the region. Since India's independence, the region has captured the limits of India's cultural and political imagination, and its citizens and histories have been refracted through the prism of militarization and an extractive resource regime. In this book, we examine the increasing trend of migration among indigenous youths from Northeast India and illustrate how these movements offer us new insights about the insecurities, desires, and expectations among indigenous citizens in global India.
Until recently, the journey of young indigenous migrants who travel across metropolitan cities in India, constantly looking for new employment possibilities and opportunities, was unthinkable. Indigenous mobility in the highlands of Northeast India was associated with jhum at best, and with violent ethnic conflicts at worst. In addition, the imagination of indigenous people as attached to their land to be able to inhabit their culture and history was a powerful one. Therefore, the experiences of indigenous migrants we highlight in this book offer a new trajectory about citizenship, mobility, and indigenous experiences in contemporary India. By interrogating the myth of isolation, insularity, and remoteness that has defined Northeast India, we present the struggles, aspirations, and vulnerabilities of young indigenous migrants who constitute the underbelly of the service industry in global India today. The presence of young indigenous migrants, once regarded as savages, backward, and primitive, and their experiences in this book draws our attention towards new ways of generating a theoretical framework about the everyday experiences of a section of the population previously categorized as ‘simple’ and ‘childlike’ and disqualified from having elaborate ideas about serious and sophisticated matters in contemporary India. People from Northeast India have also earlier moved to the Indian mainland to work, for example, as civil servants in various government departments or as soldiers in the Indian army. Yet the large-scale migration of young people we account for here is a different and novel phenomenon.
References
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp 139-149
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Contents
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp vii-viii
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3 - Departures and Returns
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp 60-82
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Summary
When he wasn't looking, Barisha slipped rice into his bag. A small plastic container of red-husked uncooked grain that he probably wouldn't notice on his travels. If it was nothing she could do to keep him from leaving, perhaps this would somehow bring him back. Every time she left Shillong, her mother would do the same – ‘to always bring you home safely’. It was what the Khasis believed, that rice, commonplace and ordinary, carried the power of the earth where it was grown, and would lead you back to where you belonged.
– Janice Pariat, Boats on Land, 2012The author, Janice Pariat, describes beautifully in one of her short stories how the young Khasi woman Barisha seeks to make her lover eventually return when he sets out on an uncertain journey to seek out his family's past. Barisha, like her boyfriend, is from the colonial hill resort of Shillong, today capital of the hill state Meghalaya. While she belongs to the indigenous Khasi community, her boyfriend is Jewish and his family ended up there after fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany. The opening scene, quoted above, takes place in the south Delhi neighbourhood where, like many other migrants from Northeast India, they have taken temporary accommodation. Looking out from the balcony, Barisha thinks about them (her fellow migrants from the Northeast) as ‘perpetual pilgrims… always journeying elsewhere’ (Pariat 2012: 168).
Pariat's story takes us to the heart of the matter of this book – young people from Northeast India travelling out in the world, some to return and others to seek out yet other places, on a journey seemingly without a fixed end-station. In this chapter, we address various matters relating to such mobility, that is, ‘wayfinding’ – what it is to leave, how one stays in touch with people at home, how to balance individual desires with expectations from the family, kin, and community, and what it is to return or the hope or fear to do so. While the stories vary greatly, the focus in this chapter is on the indigenous youths who hail from a city or small town and who mainly leave home to pursue higher studies.
6 - Talking about Method
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp 113-128
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DK:I think it is important for us to reflect on the migration project we started in 2013. The chapters we ended up writing are deeply ethnographic and describe the lives of young indigenous migrants. What was your experience? I ask this because we were working together in many places but at the same time we were also travelling to different cities and meeting groups of migrants.
BGK:It might sound strange, but the topic of migration does not come easy for me. I still feel kind of reluctant or hesitant about it. I mean in my department in Stockholm, migration is one of the key issues discussed; almost everyone engages with it in one way or another. Its effect is there all around us. But I have stayed away from it; I have not felt the compulsion to engage with it myself. Perhaps, I take it as something rather self-evident; I mean, it is as if you know beforehand why people move, nothing that requires years of research. Some leave to escape war, conflict, poverty, natural hazards, oppressive regimes, or miseries of various kinds, yet others to seek out new opportunities or fulfil aspirations and dreams. But of course, once you get into it, it grows on you and as pointed out in the chapters of this book, migration becomes endlessly more intricate, challenging, and exciting. It is as if you have to approach it sideways, as I recall Slavoj Žižek's writing about violence (Žižek 2008). I guess there is also something about my own sensibility, the fact that there is something inherently sad about it, which also kept me away from migration studies. Leaving a place is always leaving behind loved ones, family, people you grew up with, sites, and relations forged over time and that have made you what you are. Mayori, one of Nandita Haksar's (2016: 240) interlocutors, told her after reading the draft manuscript of the book, ‘I did not realize how sad our lives are.’ Something always seems to be lost in the transition. And this, I think, holds true more generally. Just think of our own journeys or histories of mobility.
1 - Wayfinding
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp 26-41
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The sooner you wise up, the sooner you realize Home is real vibes. Real guys. Real ties. Please don't get me wrong NE is where I'm from NE is where I'm born NE is where I belong….
– Feyago, Khasi Bloodz, Symphonic Movement, and Stunnah Beatz, Anthem for the North East, 2016It was the second time we were meeting with Choro – this time in his home, a two-bedroom apartment, where he lived with his wife and a three-year-old daughter. A few weeks earlier, we had visited his workplace, one of the top five-star hotels in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala. Choro had heard about our research and, as soon as we sat down, he started narrating a story about a magical stone he had found in the village where he grew up, which was situated in the hills of Manipur, a state adjacent to the border of Myanmar. It was a rare blue stone, traditionally used for ritual purposes, which he had brought along to Thiruvananthapuram. During the last year, Choro's family had faced exceptional misfortune and Choro had been forced to travel back and forth to his village, exhausting most of his savings on airfares and medical treatments for sick family members. In a dream, he learned that it was the stone that was causing all this ill fate. After consulting his mother, he threw the stone into a lake. After this, things started to improve, he conveyed cautiously.
Despite a successful career in the service sector that has made him a senior manager of one of the hotel's restaurants, Choro claimed he could think of nothing else than to return home, to the hills of Manipur. His family was there and he had several younger siblings in need of monetary support and encouragement to finish school. The plan was to settle in Ukhrul, the nearest town and the district headquarters, mainly populated by Tangkhul Nagas, the ethnic group to which his wife and he belong. The question they struggled with was how to make a living there. They wanted to start some kind of business but were still trying to figure out what. Choro was from a family of musicians and he was considering taking up music again, perhaps to start a music school.
Dedication
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp v-vi
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2 - Light Skin and Soft Skills
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp 42-59
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Summary
Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
(Message on white board at The People Channel, 2015)
The People Channel (TPC) is a placement centre that offers grooming classes. Most of the students come from rural Nagaland. Located in Dimapur, the biggest commercial hub of Nagaland in Northeast India, TPC has proven highly successful in providing placements for its trainees in the high-end hospitality sector, for example, in five-star hotels across cities like Mumbai, Delhi, and Pune. The term ‘five-star’ is an international hotel rating based on luxurious service and facilities offered to customers. This ranking in the hospitality industry is premised on a wholesome experience of service and care. Each five-star luxury hotel explicitly spells out the high-quality facilities it offers, such as spas, world cuisine restaurants, banquet halls, swimming pools, and the different categories of rooms and suites. For example, the Mumbai JW Marriot, a five-star hotel in India that employs students from TPC Dimapur, describes the quality of the bed and its fabric in microscopic details. The official website states: ‘Plush beds include the Marriott Revive Bedding Package with custom duvets and cotton-rich linens.’ But more than the material comforts, high-end hospitality is about personalized services. The more exclusive the hotel, the more personalized the care will be, even to the extent of the staff being able to anticipate and satisfy demands that have not been explicitly articulated by the guests, as Rachel Sherman (2007) convincingly elaborates in her study of the workers that care for and cater to the rich in luxury hotels in the USA.
It is the making of such labourers, turning rural youths into exclusive service personnel, that interests us here. While the hospitality sector to a large extent is built on universal formats, we still have to consider the specific backgrounds, experiences, and aspirations of those who make up its workforce. Important in this case is the recent history of prolonged civil war and massive human rights violations as well as popular struggles for rights to ancestral territories, indigenous livelihoods, and cultures in Nagaland. As outlined earlier, the young indigenous migrants are vested in this history, concerned with the welfare and political mobilization of their respective communities, yet, obviously, still seeking a life outside the geographical confines of imagined ethnic homelands.
Index
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 23 May 2019, pp 150-155
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Conclusion
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp 129-133
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Summary
It is significant that the phenomenon of indigenous migration is as diverse as the individual communities involved.
– Carlos Y. A. Trujano, Indigenous Routes, 2008For two days, the 25th and 26th of February 2016, ministers, senior government officers, scholars, and business people gathered in the posh, newly built, five-star Radisson Blu hotel – situated on the outskirts of Guwahati, close to the airport – for the international ‘Advantage North East India’ conference on the potential of the service sector in Northeast India. At these types of government-sponsored events in and on Northeast India, speakers tend to focus on the untapped potential of the region. It was also the case during these two days. However, instead of focusing on the natural resources that could be tapped, this conference was focused on the untapped human resources. As stated, the estimated rate of creation of new jobs in Northeast India will not be able to keep up with the number of young people graduating from schools and colleges in need of jobs. The good news, though, is that the level of education and more importantly fluency in English among these young people are comparatively high. This speaks, as the organizers pitched it, to a potential for young people to get employed elsewhere in India or abroad.
The person at the conference who most elaborately described such potential was the chief guest from Thailand, Professor P. S. Narula. He compared the people of Northeast India to an ‘unpolished diamond’ in terms of skills and service potential. According to Professor Narula, people from Northeast India and Thailand are similar. They share the same qualities, or as he puts it, both possess ‘an inborn quality to put up a smile and to extend hospitality’. It is a matter of passion, he stated with emphasis. And as Professor Narula explained further, being passionate about one's work is critical in the service industry. If you go to work seven days a week and you are always on time and you do not keep looking at the clock for the shift to end, then there is passion.
In this book, we have engaged with the ongoing movement of indigenous youths from the Northeastern borderlands to metropolitan cities in mainland India and further abroad.
Frontmatter
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp i-iv
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Acknowledgements
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp ix-xii
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5 - Dreams and Desserts
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp 97-112
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Summary
Are you sleeping well? Are you eating well? I ask my son. I worry if he is doing okay in Mumbai.
– Narola, mother of a migrant during an interview in Dimapur, 2007This chapter describes how dreams and food capture the experiences of oscillating between the places migrants call home and away. We specifically focus on conversations about dreams and food to connect with the layered articulations of sensory experiences of mobility and consumption. Food, as Kikon notes in her work on consumption of fermented food in India, are deeply intertwined with experiences of citizenship. In our work on migration, we noticed how accounts of dreams and food were, ‘… connected with people's lives and small details or passing comments (were) necessarily not just ignored’ (Kikon 2015: 330).
We present accounts of dreams and food to highlight how leaving the land, a theme we highlight in this book, captures the experience of indigenous youth who are moving away from ancestral territories. By focusing on dreams (as nightmares to describe the anxieties and alienation of families and homes) and food (as items that produce new values and knowledge about community), we describe how indigenous migrants negotiate their way in the hospitality industry as servers fraught with standards and definition about world-class service, taste, and luxury. The reason we juxtapose dreams and food is to elaborate the different levels of signification about migration among indigenous communities in Northeast India. The effect of migration is deep and emotional. It is a movement that involves displacement and circulation, and embodies the essence of what Ghassan Hage refers to as the element of haunting that migration encounters. Haunted by the places and the homes, Hage notes that these are not merely nostalgia but the deep ways migrants experience another place (and life) simultaneously in their new destinations.
As indigenous migrants move away from their families and homelands, there is a sense of sadness among the parents and loved ones who stay behind. They recount how their worries come to haunt their dreams as well. Accounts of mobility and food have been captured well stretching across the Indian Ocean (Ho 2006), colonialism (Mintz 1985), migrant workers (Holmes 2013), immigrants’ experiences with taste (Ray 2015), and ethics (Desoucey 2016).
4 - Interlude: Photoethnography
- Dolly Kikon, University of Melbourne, Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholms Universitet
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- Leaving the Land
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019, pp 83-96
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Summary
It is possible, for example, however roughly, to describe the way somebody walks, but it is impossible to say anything about that fraction of a second when a person starts to walk. Photography with its various aids (lenses, enlargements) can reveal this moment.
– Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography, 1972At what moment do you become a migrant? When does a journey away from home begin? Some of our interlocutors told us that they wanted to go out to study or work from an early age, whereas for others it seemed to have happened out of a whim, a decision in the spur of a moment. Many just dreamt about setting out on such a journey. But more or less all those we talked to knew someone – a friend, a relative, or a neighbour – who had gone out and now lived in the big cities of the Indian mainland. In addition, as numbers of migrants increase, more of those who stay home are also drawn in to and participate in the new migratory culture where their lifeworld encompasses sensory experiences from work in five-star hotels, beauty parlours, or spas in distant megacities like Mumbai and Thiruvananthapuram.
Early on in the project we felt that we wanted to bring some kind of visual element into the research. Just think of the landscape, the contrast between the green, rolling hills dotted with villages and jhum fields that the migrants have left behind in the Northeast, and the metropolitan cityscape with fashionable designer interiors in hotels and spas where they now work in the south. The service industry is also about looks: Having the right appearance, being the face of the company, as discussed in Chapter 2. All this, it seemed, called for images. Photography can also, as Walter Benjamin suggests, capture a transitory moment: a particular expression, a passing sentiment, or a feeling (1972). More generally, we both appreciate photography and were inspired by anthropologists who incorporate images, for example, the work by Joao Biehl who collaborated with photographer Torben Eskerod (2005, 2007) and Fillip de Boek who worked with Marie-Francoise Plissart (2004), and that of anthropologists who themselves are skilful photographers, like Rebecca Empson (2011) and Jeffrey Schonberg (Bourgois and Schonberg 2009).
Leaving the Land
- Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India
- Dolly Kikon, Bengt G. Karlsson
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- 04 May 2019
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- 23 May 2019
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During the last decade, indigenous youth from Northeast India have migrated in large numbers to the main cities of metropolitan India to find work and study. This migration is facilitated by new work opportunities in the hospitality sector, mainly as service personnel in luxury hotels, shopping malls, restaurants and airlines. Prolonged armed conflicts, militarization, a stagnant economy, corrupt and ineffective governance structures, and the harsh conditions of subsistence agriculture in their home villages or small towns impel the youth to seek future prospects outside their home region. English language skills, a general cosmopolitan outlook as well as a non-Indian physical appearance have proven to be key assets in securing work within the new hospitality industry. Leaving the Land traces the migratory journeys of these youths and engage with their new lives in cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Thiruvananthapuram.
4 - Bonnie Guest House: Fieldwork and Friendship across Borders
- from Section II - Creating Presence
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- By Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholm University
- Edited by Yasmin Saikia, Arizona State University, Amit R. Baishya, University of Oklahoma
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- Northeast India
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- 23 July 2017
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- 10 January 2017, pp 93-110
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Summary
In anthropology, then, we go to study with people. And we hope to learn from them.
– Tim Ingold, 2013Age, fame, spectacular experiences and things out of the ordinary usually call for legitimate autobiographical introspection. None of these applies here. It is instead the present book project that gives me an excuse and an opportunity to recollect my journeys in the part of the world we know as Northeast India. For me, this is still an unfolding story, one that goes back almost twenty-five years in time. Anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork is the underlying frame for my entanglements with the region. This is critical. Other forms of travel and ways of knowing the world probably produce radically different engagements and experiences. The late Clifford Geertz asks, in his recollection of four decades of research in two provincial towns, the town of Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, how to make sense of change when everything is in flux: the two towns have changed drastically and so have the respective countries they are located in and eventually the world itself; the discipline of anthropology has also changed as has he, the observer, and pretty much everyone else. In such a situation, he writes, ‘there seems to be no place to stand so as to locate just what has altered and how’ (1995: 2).
Geertz's observation seems poignant for what I seek to do here. I am not after change per se, but would prefer to think about what prolonged fieldwork and investment in other places does to your anthropological sensibility and how you come to see and engage with the world. My contention is simple; as you bring experiences, connections and imaginings from the field back home, it spills over into your life more generally. Likewise, the attraction of a particular place or places relates to earlier predispositions, desires and aspirations. I will ponder about the significance of this in relation to my research and writings on Northeast India. Among the many people you meet and interact with during fieldwork, some become friends and what friendship might entail in the anthropological encounter is another issue I will grapple with in this essay.