Comrades, Fieldnotes, and the River

We’d spent a long summer at the Rarh last year, scraping through several volumes of scribbled text, sketches, and transcripts. Sometimes, when the electricity went out, we hung out at the town’s only bus stop with snacks, looking at the colored lanterns on dinghy boats tied up at the riverfront. I had become somewhat of an ethnographic tourist over those few weeks in the field, routinely stopping at shacks that sold thin ribbons of sticky candy pulled into strange, delightful shapes of all colours, before our supervisor eventually sat us  down to write up our field notes and findings. This was also when, for the longest time, I would sit with a barely legible copy of Khusrau’s Khamsa, with translations pencilled in above the printed lines and margins of the text, grappling with the impossibility of arriving at a definitive version. Indeed, to do so would spell the end of translation and beget the translator’s first disappearance from the textual and the social. From discourse. And there are those moments when the ethnographer arrives at the uncanny nexus of senses and spaces, faced with the impossibility of translating with certainty the affective tendencies of sounds, odours, lights, colours, and temperatures that animate the Rarh region. An impossibility and incompleteness. Of course, not everything is ethnographic data, you know? My itinerant loved object (thank you, Barthes!), my copy of the Khamsa, for instance. I set myself on trying to comb the text's layers to find meaning, bringing myself to the moment when the subject within (/without?) the text falters, marking the escape of the text. Here, then, we encounter the translator’s second disappearance, in scratch notes, and into a small town Chinese cafe; the panic-struck suspension of any singular narratable life line, and of the self inhabiting it

"When do we actually decide for ourselves that ethnographic objectivity doesn’t exist?  When do we decide that this, this is the moment, and isn’t it a relief to give in?" 

 

We look for translations of missing verbs in a nonfiction river town, in its delightful little teashop named after Bharata's sacred dualities, Bhava and Rasa. We do not find any, of course, and yet- there are friends. And the joys of messing about in unsupervised boats. And the velvet river. 

Is this river ethnographic fact or fiction?

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Uzwiak, B. A., & Bowles, L. R. (2021). Epistolary storytelling: A feminist sensory orientation to ethnography. The Senses and Society, 16(2), 203-222.