Steppin’ in it: postcoloniality in northern Pakistan

Abstract

This paper examines the transcultural relations between researchers and research subjects ina postcolonial research setting. I draw from my experience doing dissertation research in northern Pakistan to discuss how my research subjects' effectively constructed me as a sahib, or what I saw as a colonial subject position. I examine the ways that my research subjects and I co-constructed, although unequally , my position and location as a researcher. The asymmetries of power relations in research are exacerbated by postcolonial relations in this contact zone. The contribution of those I researched is significant towards understanding our locations as postcolonial subjects in this research setting, and the location from which I produced the research. While it was difficult to do research as anyone other than a sahib during my research, the stories I tell and metaphors I employ in this paper attempt to destabilize my location as a colonial sahib, an authority. The scatological references that run throughout this paper are an attempt to write against the inherently colonial epistemologies that underpin geographic research more generally.

Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the ‘field’

“…Feminist geographers working in the global south have valuably contributed to these debates, focusing on cultural and class-based difference and the uncomfortable victim/savior binary produced through (D)development discourse and practice (Rankin 2003;Butz and Besio 2004;Pearson and Paige 2012). In connection, some feminist geographers have situated contemporary research in a history of empire, advocating for postcolonial methodologies to redress lingering asymmetries of power (Besio 2003(Besio , 2010Robinson 2003;Raghuram and Madge 2006). However, while analyses of the global south have richly interrogated race and racialization (Mullings 1999;Peake and Trotz 1999;Sundberg 2004;Mollett 2010Mollett , 2011 and various forms of difference including caste (Nagar 2002;Raghuram and Madge 2006;Sultana 2007), sustained feminist geographic attention to race as it shapes the research process remains limited.…”

Personality: a new positionality?

“…However, as I spent time interacting with people in an Indonesian village, I became aware that my positionality and the external meta‐categories to which I belong (female, ‘white’, Canadian, graduate student, middle class and so on) quickly diminished in importance to the people I was researching. While this is not to deny the ‘complexity of my multiple subject positionings’ (Besio 2003, 31) with regard to different people in the village, I found that it was aspects of my personality, such as my social skills, my emotional responses to and interest in local events, how I conducted myself and the manner in which I navigated the personalities of others that were the main criteria by which I was judged. This in turn affected my access to certain people, the degree to which they opened up and shared their stories and views, and ultimately had an impact upon the material gathered.…”

Telling Stories to Hear Autoethnography: Researching women's lives in northern Pakistan

“…In my research, I was particularly interested in and embedded within the day-to-day politics of (post)colonialism. During the course of fieldwork, I came to understand better my privileges based along my positions of class, ethnicity, race and coloniality in ways that archival research never brought forth for me (Besio, 2003). In this research context, participant-observation placed me in interactions where the relations of colonialism and neo-imperialism(s) were in daily negotiation.…”