Field dependencies: Mediation, addiction and anxious fieldwork at the India-Bangladesh border

Abstract

This paper explores the politics of dependency in researcher–assistant relationships. By doing so, it reflects on how these dynamics are always already predicated on broad personal histories and a range of emergent dependencies. Taking the politics of dependency in fieldwork seriously charts a path towards more fully understanding the quixotic production of ethnographic knowledge. Specifically, this paper reflects on the author’s relationship with Saiful (a pseudonym), who worked with the author during research at the India-Bangladesh border. Saiful was addicted to heroin. This addiction both compromised and enabled a productive research engagement in an unstable place. But Saiful’s heroin use was only one of a series of dependencies that structured our relationship and this research project. Using the lens of dependency to unpack the construction of the field and of ethnographic knowledge more broadly, this paper reflects on a range of questions, including access, anxiety, insider-outsider politics, and entanglement.