”I thought you were one of those modern girls from Mumbai”: Gender, reflexivity, and encounters of Indian-ness in the field

Abstract

This paper is a reflection on my experiences of doing fieldwork in Goa, India (1999-2000) from my position as a „halfie‟ anthropologist, born in India, and raised and educated in the United States. I discuss three „significant fieldwork events‟ that shaped how I was perceived by „others‟(locals and tourists) in the field in order to both illuminate and complicate the gendered, racialized, and diasporic postcolonial politics of conducting anthropological research on the topics of tourism and religion. Further, I pose these encounters as dilemmas, not to be resolved but rather to be explored as impacting and complicating the fieldwork process as well as access to domains of knowledge. Thus, my point here is less one of elaboration on the details of these moments, but rather the utilization of them(as ethnographic data) to think through a set of larger issues concerning the nature of fieldwork, the writing of ethnography, and researching tourism. I both suggest the study of tourism as lending itself to more nuanced analyses and develop a theory of participation, one wherein the researcher adopts a stance of „reflexive anthropologist‟ and „reflective tourist‟ at the same time.