Welcome to Adivasi Fieldnotes, a living archive of ethnographic research conducted by anthropologists and other scientists over extended fieldwork among the adivasis.
Discover original field notebooks, interviews, photographs, videos and historical records documenting Adivasi communities in India. Explore the evidence alongside the people and circumstances that shaped its creation.
Every record has a researcher behind it. Their published and unpublished material is also made available here, to show how those records eventually acquired meanings and a narrative.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.
These records are left in their original form, revealing 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?
Keep your records alive!
If you have conducted extensive fieldwork among the adivasis of India, why not making your field notes and other research material available to the scholarly community and the new generation of adivasis? Join us to grow this ethnographic archive together!
Don’t worry if your field notes and other material are chaotic or hard-to-read: they reveal the “messiness” of qualitative research and how researchers gradually “make sense” of the world that surrounds them! Critically, they may reveal inconsistencies or ambiguities leading to new research questions.