Abstract
This chapter focuses on the significance of emotions in fieldwork. It explores countertransference phenomena and radical empiricism as a methodological approach to understand the field in terms of experiences and emotions, valuing them as data. It argues that field emotions can have bearings on the research methodology and the emotional build-up that occurs in the field through interactions and social relations with interlocutors over time can offer epistemological insight for approaching the phenomena being studied. Drawing upon my field encounters during my PhD project on the social negotiations and practices of the new Indian citizens of the former Bangladesh-India border enclaves that were exchanged between Bangladesh and India on 1 August 2015, I trace how my field encounters and emotions led me to conduct multi-sited fieldwork and choose to study the new citizens of the former border enclaves, from being undocumented populations to being documented citizens in the new space and place in the Bangladesh-India borderlands of Cooch Behar, through their bodily experiences. I demonstrate that emotions experienced in the field by the researcher play a crucial role in bringing to the researcher’s attention the non-obvious aspects of the phenomena being investigated and offer critical understanding for framing insightful ways of conducting research and approaching the field and the subject of study.
Declaration: This fieldwork for my PhD dissertation entitled Boundaries of Citizenship: Social Practices and Negotiations in the Former Border Enclaves of Bangladesh and India (2019) was conducted for the project “Changes in Border Policy and Border Identities: A Case Study of the Indo-Bangladesh Border Enclaves”, with Principal Investigator Professor Shalini Randeria and Co-principal Investigator Professor Alessandro Monsutti, Partner Principal Investigator Professor Ranabir Samaddar, Calcutta Mahanirban Research Group (MCRG), India, administered by Global Migration Centre, The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland. The project was funded by the Flash Research Programme, Cooperation and Development Centre (CODEV) EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.
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Notes
- 1.
The Agreement Concerning the Demarcation of the Land Boundary between India and Bangladesh and Related Matters of 1974 (referred to as 1974 LBA) attempted to find a solution to the complicated nature of border demarcation, particularly addressing three outstanding issues including an un-demarcated land boundary of around 6.1 kilometres, the exchange of the enclaves and the adverse possessions. The adverse possessions refer to pockets along the India-Bangladesh border that have been traditionally under the possession of people of one country in the territory of another country.
- 2.
PTI. “Bangladesh, India in Historic Land Swap after Nearly 4 Decades”. Http://Www.hindustantimes.com/, The Hindustan Times, 31 July 2015, www.hindustantimes.com/india/bangladesh-india-in-historic-land-swap-after-nearly-4-decades/story-gHXVmfal3DFnFdyfObEz1L.html.
- 3.
- 4.
Reece Jones in his article, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Spaces of refusal: Rethinking sovereign power and resistance at the border<Emphasis Type="Italic">. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(3), pp. 685–699. has proposed that in the “borderlands” people employ “multiple strategies that transgress, reinterpret, and ignore sovereign power but not necessarily rise to the level of overt political resistance”, “where situated ways of knowing and being continue to exist”.
- 5.
Sarkar (2015), Migration And Rural Agricultural Labourer Crisis In Nagarerbari Village Of Cooch Behar District, West Bengal, India: A Micro-Level Geographical Analysis, unpublished paper accessed from Research Gate mentions 66.63 per cent of people from the study area migrate to Delhi.
- 6.
The Kolkata Gazette No. WB (Part IA)/2016/SAR-8, Tuesday, 15 March 2016 https://ceowestbengal.nic.in/UploadFiles/Notification/CEOWB_635937479539893117_Notification6GN.pdf.
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Sen Mookerjee, A. (2023). Feeling Unsettled in the Field: Emotions and the Field Researcher. In: Uddin, N., Paul, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Social Fieldwork. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13615-3_6
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