South Asia InstituteRajasthan Fieldwork Retrospective: Four Decades

Prof. Gold began her doctoral research in rural Rajasthan towards the end of the rainy season in 1979. Her most recent formal fieldwork project was in 2010-2011. Since then she has revisited the same region frequently to connect with old friends, observing and photographing informally. This lecture offers a visual and narrative account uniting personal and intellectual history while sketching longitudinal transformations in the region. Needless to say, over these four decades Prof. Gold has also changed – as have anthropology, the natural environment, and postcolonial conditions. Her local and partial knowledge is inevitably embedded in many broader contexts but her fieldwork methods rely on intimate ethnography and stay close to the ground.