Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (21 page)

Our aim is to make you (and eventually your family and friends) comfortable with your sexuality, and make life a bit easier.

There is nothing ‘official’ about the group. There never was and there still isn’t a membership form, registration fee, annual general meetings, minutes of meetings and voting or veto. Everyone is free to participate.

In fact, participation is encouraged, as the group has to evolve in order to survive.

The group organizes GB events to facilitate offline interaction between members. What is a GB event? Events that respect GB values of safe space, of not promoting sex and solicitation, of not being too political, of respecting the wishes of those who participate in, contribute to and spearhead decision making processes [the informal core-group]. It is also an activity where profits, if any, are used to support non-revenue generating GB-ventures.3

The central part of the homepage has direct links to the five main channels into which the topics of the site are categorized (
Events
,
Issues
,
Support Channels
,
Interactive Channels
and the
Reading Room
), as well as links to each of the sub-categories of each channel. There are alerts about the forthcoming events being organized by the group and an invitation to subscribe to the Gay Bombay mailing list. There is a prominent sprinkling of signifiers like
gay
and
homosexual
and rainbow imagery on the homepage and throughout the site. There are also small banner ads that change regularly exhorting the site’s visitors to ‘make gaybombay.org a habit’ and ‘attend GB events regularly’.

The
Events
channel contains a calendar of past and forthcoming events, including Sunday meets, parties, special outings and parents’ meetings.

There are first person reports about each of these events—written by members of the group. The highlights of the
Interactive Channels
section are the Gay Bombay mailing list (discussed below),
GBTalk2Me
(the one-on-one instant messenger service that enables users to chat with a Gay Bombay representative online) and
Neighborhood Watch
(an opportunity for interested persons to directly contact a Gay Bombay representative living in their vicinity). The
Issues
section contains very useful information
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on sex including details about safe sex and condom usage, oral and anal sex, HIV prevention information and Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

There are also true coming out stories by Gay Bombay members and sub-sections on relationships and emotional issues, religion and spirituality, gay bashing and blackmail threats and legal information concerning homosexuality in India. The
Support Channels
provide useful services for the website’s gay visitors.
Ask Doc Uncle
is an anonymous service that promises to answer visitor’s medical queries related to gay or lesbian lifestyle.
Parent’s Corner
aims to answer some common questions posed by parents of gay and lesbian children and provides resources for them to come to terms with their children’s sexuality. There is also useful information on recommended HIV testing centres in Bombay city and lists of support groups in India and around the world for the Indian LGBT

community. The
Reading Room
contains gay themed poetry, all kinds of reviews and art images. Highlights of this section are the recipes provided by the site’s regular visitors with names like
Sopan’s Sudden Tomato Pickle
for When Friends Descend
,
Hardley’s Mother’s Mutton Dhansak
and
Vikram’s
Versatile Ratatouille and Stoved Potatoes
. For a convenient overview, I present the site structure in the form of a diagram below—

About Gays

About Bombay

About Gay Bombay

Gay Bombay Homepage

Events

Interactive

Issues

Support

Reading

Channels

Channels

Room

GB Calendar

Sex

GB Alerts

GB Mailing

Coming Out

Ask Doc Uncle

Poetry

Event Reports

List

Stories

Gay Traveller

Cooking

GB Talk2Me

Gay bashing

Parent’s

In the News

Neighbourhood

Legal Issues

Corner

Reviews

Watch

Other Issues

HIV Testing

Showcase

Sunday Meets

Support

Humour

Classifi eds

Groups

Other Articles

Agony Aunt

Mailing List

Polls

Chat

Up Close and Personal
123

ETHNOGRAPHY IN FLUX

The discipline of anthropology4 has Western colonial origins, with its theories and concepts ‘formulated from the point of view of Western ideology, Western needs and a Western way of life’ (Jones, 1970).5 The early anthropologists, mostly British, stayed at home and relied on third person accounts from soldiers, missionaries and other travellers for their studies. Their research was ‘uninterested in the patterns of everyday life and grounded almost entirely in what people said, not what they did’

(Van Maanen, 1988).6 Bronislaw Malinowski, Franz Boas and AR Radcliffe-Brown changed the course of the discipline with their practice of actually living among their research subjects and documenting their daily lives and subsequently, this became a professional requirement. Thus social anthropology became redefined as ‘“the study of small-scale society—

ahistorical,
ethno
-graphic and comparative”, with extended participant observation as its distinctive method’ (Vincent, 1991).7

The method that these anthropologists used to conduct their research was ethnography, or the study of the day-to-day lives of people.

Carrying out such research involves two distinct activities. First, the ethnographer enters into a social setting and gets to know the people involved in it; usually the setting is not previously known in an intimate way. The ethnographer participates in the daily routines of this setting, develops ongoing relations with the people in it and observes all the while what is going on. Indeed, the term participant observation is often used to characterize this basic research approach. (Emerson, Fretz and Shaw, 1997)8

The work of the ethnographer tends to be published in a written account, also called ethnography. ‘Ethnographic accounts are both…

descriptive and interpretative…ethnography requires analytical rigour and process, as well as inductive analysis (reasoning from the particular cases to general theories)’ (Plowman, 2003).9

While pioneers like Malinowski advocated a detached and objective approach to their subjects, later ethnographers like Clifford Geertz chose a more involved participative style. Geertz (1973) recommended total immersion in the culture being studied for the ethnographer and the
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writing up of experiences and interpretations through the technique of ‘thick description’ or a detailed understanding and rendering of the

‘multiplicity of conceptual structures’ that the ethnographer encounters,

‘many of them superimposed or knotted into one another…strange, irregular, and inexplicit’.10

However, Geertz’s approach too was critiqued in subsequent years on both counts—‘ethno’ as well as ‘graphic’ (Witel, 2000).11 Within the
graphic
critique, key terms include ‘othering, authorial control, crisis of objectification, dialogical or polyphonic texts’.12 The critique of
ethno
was predominantly against a limiting ‘idea of “a culture out there”’.13

In recent times, anthropology and ethnography found themselves once again at a crossroad—

As groups migrate, regroup in new locations, reconstruct their histories and reconfigure their ethnic ‘projects’, the ‘ethno’ in ethnography takes on a slippery, non-localized quality, to which the descriptive practices of anthropology will have to respond. The landscapes of group identity—the ethnoscapes—around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically self-conscious, or culturally homogeneous
….

The task of ethnography now becomes the unraveling of a conundrum: what is the nature of locality, as a lived experience, in a globalized, de-territorialized world? (Appadurai, 1991)14

This unraveling has included a reexamination of the field (Gupta and Fergusson, 1997), the conduct of multi-sited ethnographies (Marcus, 1998) and the growth of insider or native or indigenous ethnography (Hurston, 1935; Srinivas, 1976; Altorki and El Solh, 1998). Some of the other major changes in ethnographic practice over the years are the University of Chicago’s urban ethnography (pioneered by Robert Park and his colleagues like WI Thomas and Ernest Burgess just before the Great Depression),15 anthropology of women (Golde 1970; Reiter 1975; Behar and Gordon 1995),16 gay and lesbian anthropology (Lewin and Leap, 1996, 2000; Weston, 1991, 1998; Walzer, 2000; Manalanson, 2003) and the use of ethnography as a qualitative research tool by scholars working under the umbrella of disciplines like cultural studies (Willis, 1977; Hebdige, 1979; Radway, 1984; Jenkins, 1992)17 and cyberculture studies (Rheingold, 1994; Turkle, 1995; Markham, 1998; Smith and Kollock, 1998; Up Close and Personal
125

Dibbel, 1999; Jones, 1997, 1998, 1999; Cherny, 1999; Hine, 2000; Schaap, 2002; Campbell, 2004). Currently, ethnography is also to be found being used in corporate circles (example, Cheskin’s ‘cultural sense-making’,18

Look-look’s ‘coolhunting’19) and fields as diverse as ‘political science, law…social welfare, advertising, public administration, marine studies, education…criminal justice, and policy studies’.20 However, the core of what constitutes ethnography still has not changed. ‘Almost without exception, ethnography still involves the study of a small group of people in their own environment in order to test the ethnographer’s hypothesis’ (Plowman, 2003).21

I want to briefly focus my attention upon two changes in ethnography that have a direct bearing on this book—the changing concept of the field and the collapse of the subject/object divide.

The field denotes the site where an ethnographer produces his

ethnography through fieldwork.22 The traditional notion of the field is a place that is geographically defined and spatially separated from the home country of the anthropologist’s origin.

This separation is manifested in two central anthropological contrasts. The first differentiates the site where data are collected from the place where analysis is conducted and the ethnography is ‘written up’. The second place the sharp contrast between ‘field’ and home and is expressed in the standard anthropological tropes of entry and exit from ‘the field’. Stories of entry and exit usually appear on the margins of texts, providing the narrative with uncertainly and expectation at the beginning and closure at the end. (Gupta and Fergusson, 1997) 23

With the various changes in ethnography, the notion of what constitutes the
field
has changed too. Marcus (1998) has introduced the concept of a ‘multi-sited ethnography’, which consists of ‘research self-consciously embedded in a world system, that moves out from the single sites and local situations…to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects and identities in diffuse time-space’.24 Gupta and Fergusson (1997) have suggested a ‘decentering’ of the field. They muse that so far, ‘location has often been elided with locality and a shift in location has been reduced to the idea of going “elsewhere” to look at “another society” ’. Instead, they propose that fieldwork be considered as ‘a form of motivated and stylized dislocation’, in which ‘location is not something that one
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ascriptively has…[but] something that one strategically works at’. They speculate that in today’s interconnected world, ‘perhaps we are never really “out of the field”’.25 On the same lines, Mary Des Chene (1997) imagines the field as ‘a period of time, or a series of events, the study of which will take the researcher to different places’ and raises interesting questions such as—‘If one’s work concerns events that have taken place in many locales, what renders one of these the primary site for research?

If one’s focus is on historical processes, what makes a geographically bound residential unit the obvious object of study?’.26 She warns that ‘to continue to valorize the face-to-face encounter will impoverish

[ethnographic] accounts’ and suggests that ‘it will be far more useful to attend to the relation between our research questions and the possible sources that will illuminate them and to follow these wherever they may lead us and in whatever medium they may turn out to exist’.27 Clifford (1997) imagines contemporary ethnography as the conduct of ‘variously routed fieldworks—a site where different contextual knowledges engage in critical dialogue and respectful polemic’.28

∗ ∗ ∗

Of all the oppositions that artificially divide social science, the most fundamental and the most ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism. (Pierre Bourdieu, 1990) 29

Traditionally, students of ethnography were taught that detachment from the object of one’s study was something that they must aspire to.

In his critique of this viewpoint, Rosaldo (1989) writes—

The detached observer epitomizes neutrality and impartiality. The detachment is said to produce objectivity because social reality comes into focus only if one stands at a certain distance. When one stands too close, the ethnographic lens supposedly blurs its human subjects. In this view, the researcher must remove observer bias by becoming the emotional, cognitive and moral equivalent of a blank slate.30

In Morsy’s (1998) equally scathing attack of this position, such a supposedly detached ethnographer would ‘behave as if he has no judgment, as if his experiences were inconsequential, as if the contradiction between his origins and his vocation did not exist…. Moreover, he will imagine that he has no politics and will consider that a virtue’.31