Day 2 (Jan. 30) – Lab work is clean, fieldwork gETs MEsSy

To quickly clarify from my previous post, Day 1 breaks down to this:

ü  Iowa City to Chicago: 4-hour bus ride (survive malfunctioning A/C system)

ü  Chicago to Delhi: 14-hour direct flight (enjoy the coziness of economy class)

ü  Delhi to Udaipur: 12-hour overnight bus ride (witness traumatic car crash and midnight brawl)

 

Miss-communication left us stranded on the side of a highway for a couple hours in Delhi as we waited for our bus to Udaipur. Best (worst) bus stop imaginable.

 

 …& so the story continues from “Day 1” to Day 2, our first working day in Udaipur. Uday (engineer), Matt (anthropologist, archeologist), and I (engineering student, global health studies focus) met in the morning to clarify our key research questions:

 

v  How do different groups interact with the same technology?

v  How do social and cultural issues play into and affect the usage of technology?

v  What are the demographics of region we are studying (community structure, movement of people, socioeconomics)?

v  What are the proportional causes of deforestation in this region?

 

My follow-up question…how can we answer our questions? Language was at the forefront of our conversation. There are literally hundreds of spoken languages in India. For example, Hindi is recognized as the national language and is commonly spoken in northern India. However, most people living in rural regions of northern India speak their own tribal language and do not know Hindi. (India used to be a complete jungle, so communities formed remotely and independently of one another. A diverse collection of languages resulted.)

 

Protected forest land in Karech village (a picture of what most of Rajasthan used to look).

 

We were going to need translators, from English to Hindi, and then Hindi to each unique tribal language. This was no surprise to Uday and I. But in talking with Matt, an expert in conducting participatory interviews, I now fear that much of what we gather from the women in villages will literally get lost in translation. Accents, tones, inflections, passion, sarcasm, seriousness, genuineness, all of these social subtleties do not translate well. For example, there is a difference in meaning between a “YES!” and a “well I suppose so, yeah.” There is also a difference between a “yes” from a woman because there is a male in the room, especially when the true answer is no but such a reply cannot be spoken or accurately translated. In all of these cases, the message on the receiving end is the same: yes. More than ever before I am concerned the information we gather will be a flat compression of the truth, a juicy story after all the juices have been squeezed out.  

Another challenge, perhaps more perplexing than the first, is the population we have selected to sample. Our experimental design involves a total of nine homes, three homes in the village of Karech, three homes in the town of Gogunda, and three in the city of Udaipur. Each of the nine families have been carefully selected for us by our partners called the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), a local nongovernmental organization that combines human and government efforts to restore and conserve land and water resources for ecological sustainability in rural villages across India.

Me and my new friends.

As an outsider, I have been advised and whole-heartedly agree that having some sort of a local connection to the people I hope to interact with for research is a precursor to international fieldwork. The logic makes sense: it takes time to develop good working relationships with people. A local organization can provide access to long-established ties from which there can and often is immediate mutual trust. I do not take lightly the privilege I have when I come, am trusted by the people who give up their time to help me, and benefit graciously as an extension of this well-established relationship.

But what…what if the very relations I seek are actually biasing our findings? I ask this because the people we are engaging in our fieldwork are well trained by FES to say and do things based on FES’s approach to economic land development. Whether this is good or bad is not the point. What is of importance is considering the extent to which the long-term relationship FES has had with this particular village may be skewing the perspective we gather. If the significance of any study depends on random sampling, then how significant can our findings be?

 

First all-group planning meeting with FES in Udaipur.

For multiple reasons, the three of us quickly realized we need to texture our investigation with as many raw connections as possible. Otherwise, the information we gather may not be an average depiction of the aggregate. If one thing is for sure, it’s this: We face great obstacles and many limitations now that we are working outside of our research lab. I anxiously proceed…with caution.