Abstract:

Ethnographic fieldwork is an anthropologist's “signal form of practice and expression” to produce knowledge through long-term immersion in social and cultural worlds. Ethnography is the “science” that gives social anthropology, and other social sciences, their claim to “scientificity". But what happens when the field does not behave according to the researcher’s frameworks and the communities do not comply with his/her analysis models? What happens when the researcher is met with epistemic opacity and collaborative refusals from the community? What are the sources and reasons for these reactions? This talk presents one researcher's experiences from two years conducting ethnographic research with the mahigeer community in Gwadar, Balochistan, and the many challenges, reflections and changes to methods that the field encounters demanded.

Bio:

Asim Rafiqui is a PhD candidate at  The Delft University of Technology , The Netherlands and has spent the last two years conducting ethnographic fieldwork with the mahigeer community of Gwadar, Balochistan, to understand and record their seascape epistemologies and literacies.