An Indian fieldworker in the Netherlands
Reverse Anthropology?
Anthropological or fieldwork-based studies of the welfare state are few and studies of Western Europe by anthropologists from Asia or the South are rare, making for a crucial point of departure in this study. It has been undertaken within the framework of collaborative research between Indian and Dutch scholars (IDPAD). It aims to address theoretical and policy debates centering on the interrelationships between state, society, and gender, through case studies of vulnerable categories in the Netherlands.
By RAJNI PALRIWALA
Over the last fifty years an extensive welfare system has been developed in the Netherlands. With a booming economy, citizenship and economic independence allowed individuals to bypass mediating social units and networks and deeply affected the material dimensions, intensity, and emotional content of personal relationships. In broad terms, this was a general pattern in much of Western Europe. The Dutch system ranked very high in conferring state benefits by family unit rather than by individual. While social legislation transformed inter-generational responsibilities of family members towards each other, policies assumed notions of gender / parenting responsibilities as seen in the concept of the male breadwinner and full-time mother. This led to an unequal division of benefits within families and earned the Dutch welfare system the reputation of being simultaneously progressive and traditional.Bowing to the pressures of the economic recession and the shift in the international balance of power, government spending and West European welfare systems have come under increasing pressure over the last decade. Moreover, it is of interest that even as cutbacks have become the benchmark in recent years, the Dutch system has again received accolades. Among the terms in which the current retraction of the state welfare system and its future have been argued are the moral implications of 'being on welfare' and the need to strengthen 'social connectedness', revive 'family values' and reduce the presence of the state. Simultaneously, the process of individualization is stressed as inevitable and desirable as is demonstrated in recent proposals in the Netherlands regarding work-obligations of single parents with infants.
In the first phases of the project, structural shifts in and the contemporary debates regarding the future of the Dutch welfare state and its gendered conjunctions have been examined by Maithreyi Krishna Raj, while Carla Risseeuw has analysed the literature on and historical trends in familial relationships in the Netherlands. The two fieldwork foci in the project are the age group of 65+ (Kamala Ganesh) and single parents (Rajni Palriwala), both in the Randstad and primarily within the Leiden municipality. The category of single parents includes divorced, never-married, and widowed parents both mothers and fathers. Some of the specific issues which arise pertain to the gendered access to work, income, institutional support state or community based, and social networks, the paucity of public childcare, changing marriage arrangements and inter-generational ties, child custody, financial responsibilities and care arrangements, and concepts of relatedness. Pervading the discussions and the organization of everyday life are strongly ideological notions of parenting (mothering) and upbringing. Despite the emphasis on the individual, the cohabiting couple appears as the core unit of social life.
Mystique
Fieldwork is not complete and I think it is fruitful to look at some issues and problems raised by the fieldwork process itself, though considerations of space force me to condense the discussion considerably. The relationship between the anthropologist/the researched-the field/the ethnography has been taken center stage in much of the recent critique of anthropological theory and ethnography. There has been an attempt to dismantle the mystique that surrounded the creation of ethnography. However, there has been minimal change in anthropological and fieldwork practice in one direction in particular. Obscured by all the clamour over globalization is the continuing expectancy that social science scholars from the South are still expected to focus on the South, while scholars from the North may research either South or North. A number of presuppositions are thrown into disarray with the reversal of Asian scholars studying the 'West'. These include the international scale of power and 'progress' that ranked the societies of the researcher above those being researched, in the mind of both the layperson and the scholar. As is well known, the international economic and political order is reflected in and markedly skews the distribution of funds in favour of scholars from the USA and Western Europe. And they continue to predominate in studying themselves and others.
It was puzzling for many people - including some university colleagues and prospective interviewees - as to why an Indian should wish to study the Netherlands. The possible answers others put to me were (1) to inform people in India about the Netherlands; (2) there is much a poor country like India has to learn from the Netherlands; or (3) that the aim of the research is a comparison of the welfare state and family in India and the Netherlands. However, given that India and the Netherlands were so vastly different in material wealth and values, the possible success of the second and third intentions were doubted.
The desire to inform her/his own society of another, learn from the 'Other', and comparison are legitimate motivations for research as is being undertaken here and were not absent from the founders' and/or the researchers' motivations. However, I think it is useful to set these answers against what would be the most common answers and pedagogical propositions, even today, as to why a scholar from the North sets off to study a development programme or the welfare state in the South. In the simplest terms, the scholar from the North is to bring her/his considerable non-partisan expertise to analyse what is going wrong in the South and how it can be set right. The scholar from the North is undertaking the study to make policy input primarily in or about the South, not in the North. The scholar from the North has something to tell the members of the society she/he is studying which they do not already know or understand about themselves.
Reversal
That the negation rather than the reversals of these propositions is desirable is germane. Nevertheless, for the time being what is of interest is that the reversals have rarely occurred to the range of people who asked why Indians were studying the Dutch welfare state. When they were articulated, it was as irony. The reversal of who studied who could not dislodge the pedagogical assumptions, variously voiced or left unsaid, which filter development and anthropological research. Perhaps it is because they are rooted in the above-mentioned international economic and political order, little touched by globalization.
One experience relevant to this issue and the fieldworker-field relationship is striking. About two-fifths of my single parent informants in this first round of fieldwork were self-selected. A large number of them came from 'non-Dutch', coloured backgrounds or had had partners from such a background. They chose to speak to an Indian researcher a non-Dutch, coloured woman. And many had questions not just as to why an Asian was doing this research, but about life and society in India.
Among the people who were the most ready to accept the legitimacy of an Indian researcher with the aim of producing input in the Netherlands itself were some single parent informants, despite my expressions of personal scepticism regarding the extent of policy impact. Why was this so? A crucial factor was their vulnerable position and their experiences of the 'other side' of the Netherlands. They needed to hope that things could change in their favour, but another aspect was also at work. Many of them came to know me and of me through an interview in a Leiden newspaper section devoted to Municipality information. I was with the University. I was not an Indian alone, but with and of institutions that are believed to make policy inputs. I could talk to civil servants about their and my work much more easily than their 'clients' could about their problems. Thus the unequal power relationship between the individual researcher and the informants/ individuals researched has not been entirely reversed. This also highlights the immense symbolic power of education in Dutch society, an issue to be explored later.
'Other'
There is another sense in which the present study does not reverse the dominant trend in anthropology, although it has meant a shift for the present researcher. I am now studying a society and culture viewed as very 'Other' from my own. Past fieldwork has been in areas in my own country where my relationship with the field was one of sameness and difference, and where I often had to explain why I asked about things I should know about. What this also means is that I carry implicit comparisons not just with my own background, but with past fieldwork.
An anthropology of the Dutch welfare state and family has meant the necessity to innovate in the traditional modes of entry and introduction into the field, establishing contact, rapport, and residence and the methods of fieldwork. Anthropological fieldwork in urban settings is not new. However, rather than a community, institution, or organization which the researcher may enter to live and work in, as has been commonly the case, here the fieldwork is focused on a category of people distributed over a large and complex space: single parents of various classes, ages, marital status, and gender living in the city of Leiden. They do not form a community in terms of locality or residence, work, religious or social life. Therefore informants had to be individually 'found'. The proposed methods of entry were along well-tried anthropological lines contacting influential institutions, organizations, and individuals, which would then snowball into a range of informants. On the face of it, the contact-introduction-snowball effect method has proved effective. But that is not strictly true.
The anthropological method tends to assume a society and culture where social space and time is organized very differently from that to be found in contemporary Dutch culture and capitalist societies in general. It assumes that the fieldworker and informants will meet not only by appointment, but also informally and casually, of and on. However, social life in The Netherlands is by appointment. The casual visitor usually comes with a specific purpose, is received politely, and leaves at the earliest opportunity with little likelihood of a good gossip session taking place! It assumes informants who are willing to and can have the fieldworker accompany them through their day. For most informants the work situation and ethos makes this unthinkable. It assumes that once rapport is established, informants will be happy to introduce the fieldworker into their families and social networks. However, the compartmentalization of life and processes of individualization meant that I met most informants as an individual alone in her/his house, a café, or my office. By and large each single parent informant was the end of the chain, except to other single parents who would tell their own stories, related to the first informant only thematically and laterally. One factor was the social isolation and poverty of many single parent-mothers.
The Dutch sense of self, time, and sociability are not easily compatible with the assumptions of participant observation, whether by an Indian or a Dutch, based as they are on non-capitalist and Third World societies. On the other hand, undivided attention is expected and given when an appointment is made. Each 'interview-conversation' session tended to be very intense and concentrated, with informants speaking with apparent frankness. However, the anthropologist's time could be the break here. In the immediacy the anthropologist cannot concentrate any further and must break the conversation. In the longer run the anthropologist is not allowed/able to remain in the field as long as used to be the case. Despite the absence of an idiom, a fabric, through which we could easily cross the barrier between work meetings and personal, social and informal interaction, rapport developed as informants realized that there was a genuine interest in their stories. Here was somebody who was prepared to sit and listen to them for as long as they wished to talk. They wished to share their problems and sorrows, their accomplishments and views, despite difficulties in language. *
Dr Rajni Palriwala was an IIAS affiliated fellow (IDPAD) 1 April 1 November 1999.
She will join the IIAS again 1 May - 30 November 2000.
E-mail: rajnip@hotmail.com