Welcome to Adivasi Fieldnotes!
A platform that aggregates and shares primary ethnographic and historical data collected by anthropologists and other social scientists during extensive fieldwork among the Adivasi communities of India. There are only a handful of online archives of ethnographic data, and none with a focus on the adivasis of India.
Whether you are a scholar, a researcher or a curious mind, you’ll find journals and diaries, household surveys, interviews, pictures, video and audio material, and other primary sources collected and recorded by anthropologists who have conducted extensive fieldwork among Adivasi communities.
Their entire body of research is also made available, to provide a one-stop access point and to show how their primary data eventually acquired meanings and a narrative.
We consider original research material as cultural artefacts that make visible the processes through which insights are recorded and explored, and understanding takes shape.
Our goal is to make these unique resources available to the wider community in their authentic and chaotic form, as they capture the unfinished and often hidden processes of “doing” ethnography. How were research questions generated, hypotheses formulated, and conclusions drawn? How did the anthropologist grasp what “went beyond saying” and how was that contextualised and attributed a meaning?
Don’t worry if your field notebooks are messy:
Messy, personal, or hard-to-read notes are valuable because they show how ethnographic ideas actually form and evolve—not a polished end result, but thinking in motion.
They reveal the research process: what caught our attention, how and why our focus shifted over time, and how we learned to interpret the world around us.
Doubts, inconsistencies, and ambiguities matter most, as they often mark areas of struggle that can become fertile ground for future research and alternative interpretations.