Abstract Book of the 9th International Academic Conference on Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2025
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Caste and the Movement of Ethnographers: Navigating Social Boundaries, Mobility and Acceptance in the Field of Caste Studies
Angira Dhar
ABSTRACT:
Ethnographic research often assumes the unrestricted mobility of the researcher—an ability to move across spaces, access communities, and immerse oneself in the field. However, in caste-stratified societies like India, movement is not just a logistical consideration but a deeply political and contested act. Caste hierarchies regulate who enters which spaces, who speaks to whom, and whose knowledge is recognized as legitimate. For ethnographers engaging in caste studies, movement is neither neutral nor incidental; it is determined by social networks, structural constraints and social capital.
This paper critically examines how one’s caste position, whether that of a researcher or a research subject, restricts or facilitates their movement amongst different target groups and/or social settings, shaping the very process of ethnographic knowledge production.
Drawing from fieldwork with Dalit communities and anti-caste activists, I explore how caste segregation operates in everyday life—not just in settlements, temples, and workplaces but also in academic spaces, which are often labelled as “liberal” and void of social/casteist cultures and practices.
The paper points towards not only the structural but also the cultural and ‘silent’ segregation that occurs within academia, which are often unexplainable in theory but are undertaken in practice. This silent segregation hinders the very development and existence of knowledge and silences, in turn, the voices of the “other”, leading to restrictions in opportunities and social/intellectual development.
As a researcher, moving through caste-marked spaces often involves negotiating permissions, building trust across hierarchical social structures, and confronting the limits of access imposed by both dominant-caste gatekeepers and the internal politics of marginalized communities. By centering and focusing on this ‘movement’ of a researcher as an embodied, social, and epistemic act, this paper interrogates the methodological challenges of caste ethnography.
How do caste-based restrictions on movement shape the process of knowledge production, who is allowed to conduct fieldwork, whose perspectives are considered authoritative, who can ask which questions and to whom and whose lived experiences are labelled as either marginalized or privileged?
How does the ethnographer’s own caste identity mediate access, field relationships, and the narratives they are able/allowed to document? What happens when the researcher’s movement is perceived as transgressive—by Dalit respondents wary of exploitation or by dominant-caste institutions seeking to control and manipulate knowledge production and consumption?
Beyond physical mobility, this paper also examines citation politics and intellectual movement—whose voices are recognized within the academic discourse, and how knowledge about caste is circulated, contested, or silenced and whether “lived experience”, or the lack thereof, of a researcher impacts the validity and authenticity of the produced research. The politics of movement and mobility thus extends beyond the field, shaping the ways in which ethnographic research is received, validated, and institutionalized.
This paper, by foregrounding movement as a structuring force in caste ethnography, argues that methodological reflexivity must go beyond individual researcher bias to engage with larger structures of exclusion and power. Caste is not merely an object of study but a force that actively conditions the ethnographic process itself, requiring scholars to rethink (their) movement not just as a research tool but as a site of inequality, negotiation, and resistance.
Keywords: caste, ethnography, mobility/movement, access, knowledge production, lived experiences