Abstract
This chapter is about everyday encounters while conducting research in India. It interrogates those moments of feeling like I belonged, like I had a stake, and how that might change through time. It is about intimacy, it is about friendships, and it is about betrayal. Ultimately, it is also about how we do archaeology. There was an everydayness to interactions with my colleagues, research partners, staff members, and people who became friends; this chapter reflects upon how that quotidian interaction became an integral part of the project. It was also that everyday intimacy that allowed for a certain trust to develop that was not one hinged on labor but on living together. In some sense, our social and emotional relationships were constitutive of the community-based and participatory archaeological practice we were engaged within: we were the project and the project was us. Thus, once the project ended, so did our made pathways of relational intimacy. The traces of the project, however, were heavy and long-standing, emerging and revealing feelings of betrayal that now, with over two decades of experiencing such work, I can see as the emotional labor of archaeology.
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Notes
- 1.
Personal Communication, 2003. Please note: names have been changed in this text.
- 2.
I have turned to Richa Nagar’s work, Muddying the Waters (2014), many times to understand the impact of such intimate work with communities, in particular as my previous experiences in India bleed into my more contemporary research work with creative communities in the United Arab Emirates.
- 3.
See also Anne Pyburn and Caroline Beebe’s project on “Grassroots Resource Preservation and Management in Kyrgyzstan” http://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/project-components/community-based-initiatives/grassroots-resource-preservation-and-management-kyrgy/, Accessed 5 May 2019.
- 4.
Panchayat can be translated to the village council or council of five villages, and sarpanch is the head or chair of the panchayat in India. These are political positions and recognized by all levels of government. A tehsildar is the tax/revenue officer, often linked to the District Magistrates office, and the patwari works close with them as a local authority who maintains the ownership records of a specific area, also to collect land taxes.
- 5.
I have long argued a distinction between community-based practice and public practice (see Rizvi 2006). For me, this distinction is important as “public” for me is a political/civil society term that is contingent upon citizenship. For many communities and populations who may be documented in different ways, I believe community praxis holds a different form of belonging through sociality in a different way than belonging to and with the state. More recently, I engaged in a conversation around the differences with Carol McDavid and Laurajane Smith, which may help elucidate the many ways of engaging with public and community (see McDavid et al. 2016).
- 6.
This is why, in large part, I am choosing to write about this now – so that the next generation of scholars has access to the ways in which archaeological projects are simultaneously many other projects that need to be handled with the same rigor.
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank the Heart Collective (Sonya Atalay, Jane Baxter, Natasha Lyons, and Kisha Supernant), for the invitation to be a part of this important conversation and turn toward a more emotionally intelligent archaeological praxis. I would also like to thank “Shanta Bai” for all the care and many hours of company, laughter, and cups of tea. Many thanks to the community-based programs and workshops in Neem ka Thana and Kot Putli, as well as the Panchayat in districts Alwar, Tonk, Sikar, and Jaipur. I would also like to acknowledge the collaborative efforts of my colleagues at the Rajasthan State Department of Archaeology and Museums and the Archaeological Survey of India offices (Jaipur and Delhi).
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Rizvi, U.Z. (2020). Community-Based and Participatory Praxis as Decolonizing Archaeological Methods and the Betrayal of New Research. In: Supernant, K., Baxter, J.E., Lyons, N., Atalay, S. (eds) Archaeologies of the Heart. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36350-5_6
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