Field Notebooks
With a focus on the Ho community, extensive fieldwork was done in the states of Odisha and Jharkhand, India, in a region that the Ho people identify as Ho country. The main fieldwork was conducted in 2005-06 and 2009-10 and complemented by research on shorter return visits every year or two throughout the period between 2006 and 2019.
The hand-written data from my fieldwork is accumulated in a total of 17 notebooks – all accessible through this platform. All data were generated through participatory research and direct participant observation, complemented by structured and non-structured interviews. In addition, a large amount of pictures, transcripts of interviews, maps, a census survey, video-recordings and a lot more material were also produced. Not all has been published. All this material is unique and far too authentic and precious to remain neglected for good. Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you find anything of interest that you would like to use for academic and non-commercial purposes.
Correspondence
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.
