Going to Work ‘High’: Negotiating Boundaries while Doing Ethnography of Drugs

ABSTRACT

This paper is based on my experience of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Indian Himalayas to study the illegal hashish trade in the region. The work required me to spend time with cannabis cultivators, dealers, drug tourists and law enforcement officials. My informants would regularly engage in the consumption of narcotic substances. A significant part of building close and durable relationships with informants was getting intoxicated with them. Dealer and cultivator groups were generally tightly knit, and an outsider was looked upon with mistrust. I found that consuming narcotics with informants would generally induce candid conversations, which meant a good amount of data coming my way. This paper analyses the social dynamics of such interactions and  discusses the ethical ambiguity inherent in such a process of data collection. Although there have been a number of insightful ethnographic studies on narcotic substances, there have been surprisingly few studies addressing the ethnographer’s experience and potential risks involved. Through a mainly reflexive examination of my fieldwork, this paper is an account of how the ethnographic method frequently pushes the fieldworker to transgress ethical, psychological, professional, social and personal boundaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• drugs
• transgression
• risk

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The names of some places and people have been changed throughout the paper to protect the identity of informants, given the illegality of the phenomenon under study.

2. Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, commonly known as acid.

3. Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, commonly known as ecstasy.

4. Methamphetamine, locally called ‘powder’.

5. A pipe-like device to smoke hashish.

6. There have been criticisms of Castaneda’s work, many of them convincing, that Teachings of Don Juan was more a work of fiction than an anthropological document. However, the book itself is written as an anthropological text by the author and his methodology is mainly inspired by ethnographic research methods.

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Notes on contributors

Prasenjeet Tribhuvan

Prasenjeet Tribhuvan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Jodhpur, India. His research and teaching interests include studies of communities in the Himalayas, Cannabis studies, Science and Technology studies (STS) and Anthropology of Materials.