Fieldwork’s Return: Troubled Steps Towards A Multispecies Imaginary

Abstract

For many anthropologists, longterm ethnographic fieldwork does not end when they leave the field, as the journey towards ethnographic understanding evolves for years after physically returning from the field. In an auto-ethnographic mode, this paper traces the author’s return journey from the field, through transformations in their understanding of soul abduction and spirit-revenge among upland members of the Nyishi tribe in the Eastern Himalayas. The paper traces the author’s journey from initial ontological immersion in fieldwork materials, through a reductionist withdrawal from the data, to the “redemptive symmetry” of a multispecies approach: one which recognizes the human and more-than-human origins of such spirit phenomena.

Keywords: :

• fieldwork
• participant observation
• rites of passage
• spirits
• conservation
• multispecies imaginary
• redemptive symmetry

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the British Academy and Economic and Social Research Council for funding the ethnographic research in the Eastern Himalayas which forms the basis of this paper. My thanks also to Paul Basu for helpful comments on an earlier draft. My deep thanks, as ever, to the Nyishi residents of Kurung Kumey District for their generosity, hospitality and wisdom. Special gratitude goes to the hunters of Talum village for sharing their stories, and to Bengia Chongpi, Bengia Amit, Pige Ligu and Bengia Takio for their friendship and extraordinary support in the field.

Notes

1 Enhanced transport infrastructures and electronic mass communication, and changing fieldwork practices, have destabilised the traditional border between “the field” and “home,” with existential implications. As a result, some fieldworkers “never really leave the field entirely and thus their fieldwork never really ends” (Sluka and Robben 2007, 24).

2 Shaw attributes the prevalence of this incomplete alchemy to a contemporary capitalist culture in which “we have become adept at a kind of faux Severance—we separate from family, lovers, jobs, and countries with greater speed than ever, but are adrift at the Return… The gifts of the forest are not brought back to the village” (2011, xxiv).

3 Of the three major anthropologists who had visited Arunachal Pradesh—Verrier Elwin, Christof von Fürer-Haimendorf, and Ursula Graham-Bower—none visited the high Nyishi uplands. Graham-Bower only dreamed of the high uplands from afar, and Fuhrer-Heimendorf based himself in Ziro, which then amounted to several days” trek through dense forests from Koloriang.

4 In this patrilocal society, around a year after marriage, a bride will often return to her natal village with a gift of meats, as a final farewell to her family.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander Aisher

Alexander Aisher is an environmental anthropologist with interests in conservation, multispecies ethnography, climate change, storytelling and adaptation. In 2007, he was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to develop a new methodology for environmental decision making. In 2018, he returned to Arunachal Pradesh and the Nyishi tribe to offer policy recommendations to conserve wildlife and preserve tribal identity and oral traditions in the Eastern Himalayas. [email protected]