Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, very aptly expresses one concept of field research experience, in his book 'Outline of a Theory of Practice'. When in 1989 or so, when I was conducting a group of my friends in a cultural understanding practice employing phenomenological constructs, through a couple of years, to temples like Srirangam, Thirupathi, Kancheepuram and Melkote, the idea I was beginning to have then, was very near to what is expressed here in this book by Pierre Bourdieu.
"The anthropologist's particular relation to the object of his study contains the makings of a theoretical distortion inasmuch as his situation as an observer, excluded from the real play of social activities by the fact that he has no place (except by choice or by way of a game) in the system observed and has no need to make a place for himself there, inclines him to a hermeneutic representation of practices, leading him to reduce all social relations to communicative relations and, more precisely, to decoding operations."
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The author speaks of the necessity of the theory developed to be at variance in some aspects from the object studied. The accountability question does not arise. The research has to fulfill the accountability criteria. The point is even if participatory exercises are incorporated into the module, still the faith commitments or the lack of them, make a large difference in the presentation. And in the research methodology, it fails at the start if you uphold the faith positions.
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"The anthropologist's particular relation to the object of his study contains the makings of a theoretical distortion inasmuch as his situation as an observer, excluded from the real play of social activities by the fact that he has no place (except by choice or by way of a game) in the system observed and has no need to make a place for himself there, inclines him to a hermeneutic representation of practices, leading him to reduce all social relations to communicative relations and, more precisely, to decoding operations."
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The author speaks of the necessity of the theory developed to be at variance in some aspects from the object studied. The accountability question does not arise. The research has to fulfill the accountability criteria. The point is even if participatory exercises are incorporated into the module, still the faith commitments or the lack of them, make a large difference in the presentation. And in the research methodology, it fails at the start if you uphold the faith positions.
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