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From Fieldsite to ‘Fieldsite’: Ethnographic Methods in the Time of COVID

In a request to develop a contribution to Studies in Indian Politics, I was asked – in the context of COVID-19 – to consider how ethnographers can respond to this new transformation of the field? With a variety of restrictions being placed on movement, travel and physical interaction, many ethnographers, researchers and students are finding their fieldwork plans curtailed or even cancelled. For anthropologists, and others who utilise ethnographic methods, these restrictions pose particularly prominent limitations. Since its inception, ethnography has built its legitimacy on the value of data gathered through ‘being there’. Indeed, the process of undertaking long -term, embedded fieldwork is symbolically constructed as a ‘rite of passage’, a ritualised initiation into anthropology as a discipline (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997). Yet, what is seen as constituting an authentic ‘fieldsite’ for ethnographic research has never been a fixed construct.