PARTICIPATORY FIELDWORK AND ARCHIVAL RESEARCH: COMBINING NUMBERS WITH NARRATIVES
Abhijit Guha, Reader & Head
Dept. of Anthropology, VidyasagarUniversity,
West Bengal, India
“The fieldwork data, quantitative or qualitative, which social anthropologists use to base their conclusions are all derived ultimately from observation.” J. Clyde Mitchell (1967).
Methodological Divides: Are They Really Great?
In any standard textbook on methodology in the social sciences ‘quantification’ is defined as an activity that involves ‘measurement’ and ‘counting’ while ‘qualitative’ is characterised as something which is not a product of measurement and counting but one of description and subjective evaluation (Johnson 1978). In the classroom of Anthropology or Sociology the teacher in methodology courses places the contrast between quantitative and qualitative approaches with the help of some examples from familiar domains like agricultural techniques, kinship and rituals. Through these classes the students become aware that the degree of kinship relation revealed through genealogical method is a qualitative information while the number of times a particular person gets help from his affinal kins living in a neighbouring village in carrying out agricultural activities is quantitative data. The culture of methodology in the social sciences has created amongst us an idea that clear-cut division between quantitative and qualitative data exist and they should not be mixed up for the sake of specialisation.
There is another dimension of this problem. This is related with the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ studies. The macro-micro dichotomy has created another level of methodological divide within the social sciences (Appadurai 1989). Very broadly, macro and micro studies are not only distinguished by the scale on which they operate but also by the type of data that are collected and the methods employed for the collection of the data. Accordingly, the census and the National Sample Surveys represent macro-studies while village studies by the social anthropologists in India and sociological researches of urban slums are regarded as micro studies. In the former type, large volumes of quantitative data are collected through surveys with structured questionnaire schedules and are used mainly by the economists and planners to arrive at certain large-scale generalizations about the socio-economic conditions of countries and regions. But in the micro-level studies conducted by the social anthropologists and sociologists, the whole range of qualitative data on the socio-economic life of a small group of people (usually selected in a non-random manner) are collected by employing protracted participatory type of fieldwork methods. Ironically, these methodological paradigms have become polar opposites in the social sciences and the followers of one group often views the other as ‘irrelevant’ to their own project even when both are looking at the same set of problems. For example, the major users (the economists) of National Sample Survey data look at anthropological studies as being preoccupied with trivial matters of social life having little or no value either for generalizations (since they have small and unrepresentative samples) or for development planning. The followers of micro-studies on the other hand, consider large scale quantitative survey data as “distributional” rather than “relational” and hence the generalizations derived from the latter ignore differences among various human groups and produce aggregate figure but hardly make any attempt to understand social processes hidden within such aggregates. Till today, there is very little systematic attempt in the social sciences to unite the micro and macro studies, qualitative and quantitative data as well as participatory and survey types of research. One of the important reasons behind the lack of effort towards unification may lie in the separation of the different branches of the social sciences within our university curricula.
Under this general background, we would now come to the issue of development research and its relation with the micro versus macro levels of study in the social sciences. In general, development studies have a dual character. Let us try to understand the matter with the help of some examples. Suppose a development economist in India wants to evaluate the results of land distribution among the landless peasants through land reforms programme by the Government in a region. The economist would definitely collect official data from the Land and Land Records Department of the State Government. But at the same time he or she has to conduct some micro-level studies in order to understand the actual impact of this development effort on the landless peasants on the ground. Furthermore, in order to involve the beneficiaries of the development programme (in this case, land reforms) within the research process the economist cannot remain confined only within the jungle of official statistics.
Now consider the case of a development anthropologist doing his/her research on the same problem viz. evaluation of land reforms programme in a State in india. The anthropologist may have a different starting point. He or she may select a village where land distribution has taken place and conduct a participatory type of research on the socio-economic impact of the said development programme. But in order to make this development research policy oriented, the anthropologist would have to move up from the village level and consult the Government archives for understanding wider macro-level implications of the study. In order to carry out dialogues with the policymakers in a meaningful way the anthropologist cannot remain satisfied with the rich qualitative data collected at the micro-level but also make use of legal, administrative and policy level data collected from Government archives. Examples can be multiplied, but the point is, since development research involves at least two major stakeholders – the policymakers and the people, the research would have to make sincere efforts to reach both of them along the micro-macro ladder. To put it rather bluntly, the academic divide produced by the curricula between qualitative and quantitative research is bound to collapse in a policy oriented development research.
Development Induced Displacement In West Bengal: Is It A Matter Of Numbers Only?
The literature on development induced displacement reveals that there is a major emphasis on the quantitative aspects of the problem. Most of the researchers including sociologists and anthropologists try to calculate the magnitude of displacement in terms of the number of people who have lost their traditional occupation, the number of areas of agricultural land acquired for a development project, or the number of families who have lost their homes for the launching of some development project by the Government (Fernandes et al. 1989). Researchers on displacement however already identified several dimensions of impoverishment where both quantitative and qualitative data are combined to develop risk model of rehabilitation (Cernea 1999).
The quantitative thrust in displacement research has political as well as policy implications. For example, raising of the issue of displacement owing to development projects by the author of this article in the context of West Bengal met with an inevitable response both from the policymakers as well as politicians of the ruling State Government. The response is something like this: ‘The magnitude of development induced displacement in West Bengal is not very great, at least not as much as it is in other Indian States’ (Guha, 2000). Any further discussion on the attitude and policy formulation about displacement and rehabilitation is thus closed by this type of response which is backed by a quantitative and comparative agenda. The implications of the response can be ordered in the following manner. If West Bengal does not have an appreciable amount of development induced displacement then there is no point in raising this issue. And even if West Bengal has displacements then too it is lesser than other Indian state so the Govt. does not have to be worried about the formulation of a comprehensive policy on displacement. So for the policymakers and politicians in West Bengal displacement is still a matter of numbers both in absolute and relative senses of the term.
The Micro Picture of Development Induced Displacement: Evidence From The Field
Under this background, the present author in the year 1995, selected a particular area 7-8 kilometers from the VidyasagarUniversity campus for studying the socio-economic and political consequences of land acquisition through which displacement has taken place in a recent period in the erstwhile Medinipur district (now West Medinipur) of West Bengal. The study began through repeated visits to villages where the peasants who had been affected by land acquisition were then organising a movement against the district administration for getting higher rates of compensation and jobs in the industries for which their fertile agricultural land was acquired. Group discussions and reading of the letters and memoranda submitted by the peasants were the first primary source of data in this study. Certain interesting developments took place during this phase of anthropological fieldwork. First, the displaced peasants and their leaders started to request the researcher to write popular articles and publish news items in the local as well as Calcutta based newspapers to draw the notice of the general public and the administration about their worsening socio-economic condition. The researcher accordingly, started to publish articles and became instrumental in the publication of news items in the local and Calcutta based newspapers which served two purposes. On the one hand, the researcher could gain the confidence of the affected people and their local leaders and on the other, made the local people conscious about the importance of collecting detailed household level socio-economic and political information on the displacement scenario of the affected villages. The quick and frequent publication of news items and articles in the local dailies and their circulation among the affected people was also a source of encouragement to the local leaders and these acted as a bridge between the anthropologist and the people being studied by him. This can be called a kind a research with participatory activism that was followed by collection of household level quantitative data. This constituted the second phase of fieldwork which yielded a lot of rich information (both quantitative and qualitative) on the economic impact of land acquisition as well as the attitude and views of the affected people towards the acquisition of land for industries. In short, if we consider our attempt to understand the process of displacement through land acquisition at the micro-level as an unbroken string of research activity then it is very difficult to separate numbers from narratives. Our first interactions with the peasant leaders was not only a rapport establishment activity but it also yielded valuable data on the attitude of the affected peasants towards the ruling government, various strategies adopted by the peasant leaders and also on the number of landlosers in five villages in the locality. In the second phase, which can be called the household survey phase, quantitative data in the form of numbers were collected but here also narratives of informants regarding their crises arising out of displacement played a complimentary role. The latter formed the human dimension of the survey data.
From Field To Archive: Moving Towards The Macro-Level:
The Social Anthropologists following the British Structure Functional tradition have narrowed down their field locations to specific locales (villages or urban slums) manageable for one or two participant observers and developed the tradition of collecting detailed information (mainly qualitative) on almost every aspect of social life. This Malinowskian embeddedness of the individual anthropologist within his/her locality has helped to generate a bounded definition of ‘field’ where only participant observation could take place. The wider politico-economic context within which the anthropologist’s village is located is not usually considered as the real ground of a typical anthropologist. This kind of methodology has had an important consequence as regards enquiries into macro-level policy decisions and their implementations by a powerful administrative bureaucracy backed by a politico-legal structure. ‘The anthropologist is not supposed to look beyond the field’ so goes the disciplinary folklore. Because, going outside the so called field to search for data in Government offices, record rooms and Legislative Assembly proceedings is not regarded as the job of the anthropologist. It is to be done by the political scientists or contemporary historians. But what happens when the anthropologist moves out from the typical village site and tries to reach the different levels of policy formulation and implementation? In this study this is what exactly have been done and as a result of this we could combine the numbers with narratives within the overall framework of policy formulation. In the following sections we would describe in brief the different stages of the research through which this number-narrative, quantity-quality and micro-macro combination has been done for a critical evaluation of the land acquisition policy of the Govt. of West Bengal.
STAGE I
The Peasant Movement Around Land Acquisition In Kharagpur: Combining Qualitative With the Quantitative
The protests launched by the landowing peasants of the Kharagpur region against land acquisition took many forms, even though these did not last long maintaining the same intensity. The movement reached its peak from the later part of 1995 upto April 1996 during which the farmers even went to the extent of violent means. The fieldwork for this study also began during the period. The entry of the anthropologist in the field during this time of turmoil was quite significant in terms of the type of data collected as well as the nature of participation of the researcher. The active participants of the movement provided us with the list of affected peasant households in different villages and discussed about the rationale behind their demand and we could also observed their nature of protest in the field. All these gave us ample opportunity to collect data on the (i) chronology of the movement; (ii) caste-tribe affiliation of the participants of the peasant agitation, (iii) peasant perception towards administration, (iv) government’s land acquisition policy and (v) the political dynamics of the movement. Action oriented and participatory type of field research helped us to build up a new kind of relationship with the leaders of the movement wherein the peasants were also looking into the research outputs as they were being published in the local and national level newspapers in the form of news items, popular articles and letters. We have already touched on this aspect of the research in the previous section entitled “The Micro-picture of Development Induced Displacement: Evidence From The Field.” Let us now summarise the method and the nature and type of data yielded in this phase of research with the help of the following flow-chart:
Fig. 1 Combination of the quantitative and qualitative data in the field.
STAGE II
A Journey Into The Archives: Land Acquisition As Revealed By The Documents And The Executers Of Policy:
The household surveys and case studies of a good number of families (194) who have lost all or most of their agricultural land owing to the establishment of industries revealed the disempowerment of the peasantry by the Left Front Govt. in West Bengal. Interestingly, this Govt. championed the cause of the poorest section of the peasantry through a pro-people land reform policy. Now both land reform, which involves giving land to the landless and land acquisition, which dispossesses the peasants have to be executed by the district level Land and Land Reforms Dept. This Dept. and its Land Acquisition section have to keep records of all documents related to land acquisition. The typical anthropological definition of ‘field’ did not include this kind of arena within it. The village studies in India rarely taken into account the Land and Land Records Dept. of the District Collectorate in order to understand the relationship between administration and the people at the grassroots. When we had taken up the study of the displacement of the peasants in Kharagpur villages, we found that the phenomena of displacement cannot be viewed in isolation from land acquisition. The displacement of peasants (not from their homes but from their agricultural land) took place through the acquisition of land which is basically a legal and administrative process that forms and interface between the people and the government. The documents of the Land Acquisition Department and the officers who executed the acquisition provided a rich source of data on the government-people interface. From the Land Acquisition Department we have found five kinds of data viz. (1) Gazette notifications, (2) letters and Departmental notes, (3) Departmental reports, (4) written protests and objections of the landlosers and (5) opinions and attitudes of the officials of the Department to the various problems of land acquisition. These five kinds of data sources again yielded a variety of qualitative and quantitative information which were combined in this study and suffice it to say, that this kind of combination helped us to generate certain specific policy recommendations on displacement by land acquisition. Let us now described each of the five data sources in some detail.