Correspondence with my supervisor, Georg Pfeffer: Letters from the field 2009/2010

While I was in the field in 2009_10, I was lucky to have Georg Pfeffer, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin, as the supervisor of my doctoral thesis. He was interested enough in what I did and how I performed and progressed by accepting the letters I sent him, and often, he immediately answered back. From 7000 km away!! Of course, he refrained from directing me through the field by setting observation tasks or controlling my efforts in any way, so all the decisions and responsibility remained with me. I hadn’t entered the field with a fixed agenda brought along from home. “Let the field decide for you”, he had taught his students, which I had considered quite irrational at the time, but also very intriguing.

For me he turned out a great supporter by listening to what I wanted to say, which was so outrageously different from everything I had experienced so far in my life and which I was privileged to become part of. Every once in a while I took a short leave from the field and stayed for a night in Rairanpur, a market town in the research area, by bus about an hour and a half away from my fieldsite. Here was a small hotel and a tiny, though highly efficient computer store. It was here where I wrote my letters – fieldnotes, as it were, in printed form, unordered, chaotic, unreflected, straight from the field into the computer. Often there was an answer waiting for me the next day from my supervisor.

This is the collection of our correspondence during the course of that part of my fieldwork in 2009/2010. 28 pages.