Extra-terrestrial landings: An ethnographic account of doing ethnography

Abstract

The field site is the retail showrooms of a fast-expanding organized retail company selling budget eyewear products across shopping malls and high streets of urban India. Through a thick description of 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork – arriving, forging social relations, recording and writing – this article traces the practical, ethical and epistemological paradoxes in doing ethnography. The article identifies these paradoxes as inherent to ethnography given its radical intent. Not studying them as limitations or failures, the article makes the case for a more honest and critical reckoning with these internal contradictions by making them more present in ethnographic practice and writing. It is argued that in so doing we enrich our understanding of the complex and contradictory social worlds we inhabit and study.