What is in a name? How caste names affect the production of situated knowledge

Abstract

Patel, Desai, Kothari … to those literate in the workings of caste these names describe a network and its power in relation to other networks, they infer the rules of engagement within and between network members, and they ascribe a geographical terrain to home. In research, rules of behaviour and assumptions of place that are coded into names can affect access to respondents, their disclosure of data and subsequent claims to validity. This article explores the coded expectations of knowledge embedded in a name as seen by someone (me) fairly illiterate in the workings of caste by utilising the principle of Bourdieu’s doxa – a ‘pre-reflexive intuitive knowledge’ – to untangle and explore the effect of names on the production of partial and situated knowledge. Drawing on fieldwork in Gujarat, India, I analyse reflexive accounts through the lenses of feminist geographers and critical race scholars to illustrate the effects of being unknowingly and unwillingly placed into a social hierarchy of power in the field, introduce the idea of ‘us-ing’ (an opposite of othering) to describe researcher-respondent relations, and explore how readers might interpret the presence or absence of data and claims to validity. These accounts make visible the effects of positionality on knowledge production in ways that speak to feminist-postcolonial research, and specifically to feminist researchers of colour conducting research away from ‘home’.

Keywords:

• Positionality
• reflexivity
• diaspora
• names
• doxa
• caste

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the journal editors and three anonymous reviewers for their encouraging comments and very helpful suggestions to improve the paper. My sincere thanks to the 2016/2017 cohort of doctoral candidates at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit who heard a first iteration of this paper and in the ensuing discussion convinced me of the demand for more literature that speaks to race, ethnicity and positionality in research. The original research project that led to the fieldwork discussed here was funded through the Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) – a Marie Curie Actions International Research Staff Exchange Scheme of the European Union – The Bartlett Development Planning Unit’s state and market research cluster, and was supported by CEPT University, Ahmedabad.