Decolonising ethnography in the field: an anthropological account

Colonialism does not end with the withdrawal of colony from occupied territories but it exists across time. There is a constant dialogue between colonial domination and post-colonial transformation both in principle and practice. Doing ethnographic fieldwork therefore involves justifiable positioning of researcher in the interface between subjectivity and objectivity whilst ethnography itself is struggling with the question of representation in connection with the colonial tradition of imaging anthropological object as ‘uncivilised others’. There is an overdue need of decolonising ethnography since Malinowski’s field dairy was published. However, an ethnographer still encounters colonial ideology in the field in making meaning of ethnographic data. How does an ethnographer encounter colonial inheritance in the field? How does s/he position herself/himself in the context of ethnographer’s supremacy in object’s world? These are the questions the article explores with the personal experience of doing ethnographic fieldwork in the borderland of Bangladesh and Myanmar during 2005–2007.