Researching Indian Society Exploring the elusive elephant

The Power of Knowledge: Asia and the World

NANDITA CHAUDHARY University of Delhi

India

Six wise men of India An elephant did find And carefully they felt it’s shape (For all of them were blind). The first he felt towards the tusk, “it does to me appear, This marvel of an elephant, is very like a spear”. The second sensed the creature’s side, Extended flat and tall, “Ahah!” he cried and did conclude, “This animal’s a wall”. The third had reached towards a leg, And said “it’s clear to me, What we should all have instead, This creature’s like a tree” The fourth had come upon the trunk, Which he did seize and shake, Quoth he “this so called elephant, Is really just a snake” The fifth had felt the creature’s ear, And fingers o’er it ran, “I have the answer never fear, The creature’s like a fan”. The sixth had come upon the tail, As blindly he did grope, “Let my conviction now prevail, The creature’s like a rope”. And so these men of missing light, Each argued loud and long, Though each was partly in the right, They all were in the wrong! Charles Hampden-Turner (1981, p. 10)

Exploring the elusive elephant

Examining culture • Primitive society, an older way of living and Europe was

believed to have developed faster towards a common future for humanity (Tylor, 1874)

• Assumption that all societies move in a similar direction is questionable

• From the outside, the majority world is constructed as an older way of life, a natural experiment

• Evidence of modern society as intellectually superior has meagre support (Scribner, 1976)

• Conflation of history and culture is problematic

• While examining culture, we tend to simplify and homogenize people and practice, underestimating internal difference, external similarities and exceptional instances

Research and cultural processes

• All research has political overtones with an unequal equation between the researcher and researched, predominantly privileging the researcher: “We the experts will decide how your actions will be interpreted”

• With subaltern communities, this inequality is more pronounced

• ‘Thinking locally and acting globally’ has dominated research (Gergen, Gulerce, Lock & Misra, 1996)

• Acting as if this doesn’t exist further marginalizes the majority

• Humanistic and democratic principles are essential to adopt: theory, approach, method and interpretation

Inter-cultural communication and intersubjectivity

• Intersubjectivity is never completely attained or completely absent (Rommetveit, 1979)

• ‘Prolepsis’: the indirect entry of relevant information (Rommetveit, 1974)

• Research consists of both explicit and implicit messages

• Successful research assumes full agreement between participant and researcher. This can only be assumed and never fully attained

• A person’s conduct in any given situation is guided not only by what he or she thinks, but also by what THEY BELIEVE that YOU ARE ASKING “Attunement to the attunement of the other” (Rommetveit, 1992)

• Intersubjectivity becomes even more problematic when contexts are not shared

Research and interobjectivity • Communication is collaborative understanding: both between

individuals (intersubjectivity) and between and among groups (interobjectivity) (Moghaddam, 2003)

• Interobjectivity: The collectively shared ways of understanding the world, and incorporates power relations (Moghaddam, 2010)

• To communicate successfully, there must be a common ground of knowledge and skills, thus cultural knowledge (Rogoff, 1986)

• Usually ignored while crossing borders in cross-cultural research, creating further distancing

Prolepsis and research procedures

• Prolepsis is highly developed in literature and cinema. This is why we can understand stories from other cultures

• Research mostly chooses to ignore subtlety since it can be difficult to ‘measure’

• Greater collaboration between disciplines is required to capture meanings in culture

• We have to be alert to meaning-making

Examples of errors • Abels (2008) Instruction: “Play as you would usually do” to rural

Gujarati mothers. Generated laughter, surprise and responses like: “Wait till the sibling comes back from school, he plays with her!”

• Researcher to child out of school: “Where does the sun come out from?” Child looked up, surprised .... “You don’t know?” Questions are asked only when you do not know the answer

• A foreign researcher asked a daughter-in-law in a rural Indian home: “How many children do you have?” She covered her face with a dupatta and looked away; and her mother-in-law answered for her. He concluded that Indian women were not clear how many kids they had!!

• Using rating scales to represent opinion, strongly agree to strongly disagree. No opinion was found by us to be used for several reasons: “I don’t understand”, “I don’t agree with this”, “Sometimes yes and sometimes no” “We should not say something like this” (eg. Old people are stubborn and biased)

Example of errors on account of intersubjectivity and interobjectivity • Language assessments, eg. Describe a picture of a girl lying

under a bed. ‘Schooled language’ like ‘The girl is sleeping under the bed’ is culturally specific, responding to the demands of a particular learning environment. In homes that are distanced from schooling, the responses are more likely to be like: ‘What is SHE doing THERE?’

• This is marked with HALF the scores since nouns and positions are relative and not context-free

• Compliance study for young children: Once adults understood what was required from the children in the situation, they modified instructions into a social task, “Your grandmother is thirsty, take this glass to her” (Bhargava & Chaudhary, 2006)

• Culturally, much more focus on comprehension than on labelling (Where is the dog?, rather than What is this?)

INDIA

India: Selected history • As an idea, India is ancient, as a nation, 66 years old

• Loosely connected conglomerate of kingdoms until its consolidation by Ashoka (1st century BCE)

• Moghul invasions, 10th century onwards

• Colonial rule: British, Dutch, Portuguese, French and Danish presence for trade 17th – 20th century, Negotiations between nations for monopoly. English presence was dominant

• Partition between India and Pakistan shattered communal harmony, deliberately fuelled by political motivation of the departing British. Still returns to repeatedly haunt the sub-continent

• India is prominently defined from outside perspectives, as the ‘other’, the exotic, prescient, peculiar or poor. The majority was marginalized, even within India

India from the outside • Colonizers: Dominate and exploit rather than understand

• Missionaries: Convert and educate the natives to a ‘better’ way of living

• Social scientists: Exploration of exotic, remote and ‘peculiar’ practices

• Psychologists: Test standardized methods to explain culture as a variable of core humanness

• Economists: Attempt to deconstruct the burgeoning market for consumer projects

• International aid agencies: Intervene in community life to improve health, nutrition, social practices and individual performance, based on international standards

• Political scientists: Understand how a democracy can be sustained with such diversity

• Peace studies: Non-violence, peaceful and cooperative society

• Also: Individuals in search of spiritual liberation and peace

India from the inside

• History of plurality in all spheres of life, internal as well as external (adopting selected foreign ways)

• Difference was not simply ‘tolerated’ (to use a contemporary expression), it was fundamental to the fabric of society (Malhotra, 2013)

• Through history, no record of invasions outside its borders

• Acceptance and adaptability without losing tradition has been the hallmark

• Complexity and even contradiction are comfortably (or otherwise) incorporated within social life. Getting along with and respect for ‘others’ is highly valued

• This complex mosaic of culture defies simple classification, and interpretations from the outside are frequently erroneous, like the elephant story

Indian culture, the elusive elephant • Ethnic, economic, religious, regional, culinary and sartorial

diversity

• For instance, 28 official languages, 850 counted languages (1500 if we consider dialects) (Devy, 2013)

• Four major religions originated here (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism), Others: Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism since centuries, as also Judaism

• There are many Indias: Rural, Urban, Tribal

• Although most labels apply, like the Elephant story, no label is complete in itself

• Anything that one can say about India, its exact opposite can also be true (Ramanujan, 1981)

Selected contradictions • Political: Democracy sustains despite deeply divisive factionalism

• Familial: Joint family sustains as an ideal form despite significant differences and recent social changes. Coexistence of tradition and modernity (Thapar, 2000)

• Gender: Women are highly valued, even worshiped alongside sustained statistics of gender discrimination. Some of the most highly educated, successful women in industry, academics (Sen, 2005)

• Collectivism: High level of cooperation within groups sustains along with apparently chaotic and individualistic forces on the street

• Spirituality and science are not at odds. Science was practiced within the frame of spirituality. Secular in India means allowing everyone the freedom for religious practice. Not seen as a contradiction

• Success, survival, adaptability and sustenance are driving forces. However, if the pattern is not understood, it can be highly confusing (Pattanaik, 2013) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DV0XFIVZMY

Collective and personal cultures (Valsiner, 2008)

• Culture and person make each other up

• Individuals actively recreate cultural meaning

• Specific events are over-determined by meaning

• Cultures place variable emphases on specific elements of the natural and social environment and endow it with specific meanings

Meaning-making, the case of motherhood in India

• An area of tremendous cultural significance

• Mothers are central to family life

• The mother-child (filial) bond and not the conjugal (husband-wife) is central to family life (Uberoi, 2003)

• Mamta is a dramatic and frequently invoked sentiment, primary meaning: A mother’s love for her child

Mamta

Mamta: Collective and personal views of a cultural construct (Chaudhary & Bhargava, 2008)

MAMTA

Pride

Love

Love for self

Sense of belonging

Father’s love Love for a vulnerable person

Love for a pet

Selfless love Natural devotion to offspring

A mother’s love for her child

COLLECTIVE MEANINGS INDIVIDUAL RESPONSES

Cultural psychology: An important way forward (Valsiner, 2008)

• Culture and psychology make each other up

• Context and person cannot be isolated, culture belongs to person just as person belongs to culture

• Inter-disciplinary as well as inter-cultural approaches

• Re-appropriating conceptual tools from various sources, thereby expanding the base of knowledge

• Enhanced reflexivity and critical self-hood rather than hegemony and domination in research procedure

• This dynamic co-construction explains the sustenance of diversity rather than dissolution, both of the person within culture and cultural difference in a globalized world

In conclusion: Considering humanity

• Diversity is fundamental to humanity, tension between universal science and cultural difference should not dissolve into meaningless simplification or exaggerated ‘exoticization’

• We need to understand the ‘other’ not just to understand them, but also to understand ourselves (Valsiner, 2003)

• Positions of superiority and arrogance (however evolved) are fundamentally anti-human

• We must be more accepting of tension, ambiguity and ambivalence, these are features of human conduct