Changing Position, Field-site, and Topic: Protection and Reciprocity

approach to the poetics and politics of ethnography. I however agree with its critics (e.g. Abu Lughod 1991; Haraway 1988; Bourdieu 2003) that we must employ this instrument such that it enables a better understanding about the character of anthropological knowledge production.

The knowledge being produced is, at the same time, determined by “what takes place in the field as an intersubjective practice” (De Neve 2006, 73) as by the discipline introducing the biggest authority framing this process.

In this part, I reflect on several situations and contexts which introduce the entanglement of my changing position within the field, the character of the field and that of the topic.

Over time, I became rather convinced about the efficacy of Ayurvedic treatment of certain dis- eases⁵⁷ and, perhaps because of that, I started to feel that I was blending in. Also, I had been taking detailed notes from the lectures and was, soon after the start of the school year, asked to provide my notes from the classes. Of course, I agreed⁵⁸—though it did mean often having to type out eight-hour (and even longer) lectures, writing my fieldnotes on the side to then spend hours and days making and editing lectures´ notes so they could be shared publicly, not just in terms of grammar and stylistics, but also stripped of my notes, which had been written all over the documents.

Helping with the school’s establishment (cooking during seminars, completing innovations meant to entrench Ayurveda in the country) was a common activity for anyone who wanted to participate. Alike most of my classmates, I rotated through a few volunteer jobs for the school even though in my case it was not exactly undisclosed. I must admit, I was just one of many, and also far from the most hardworking of the volunteers recruited from the students’ base.

Although I have always felt indebted to the school for letting me conduct research there (and they have had their objections), I understood by time that that, especially for the Teacher, it may have been quite uncomfortable for me to be researching the methods in a way. Once, when we discussed with the Teacher’s wife my feelings regarding my acceptance, she, using a metaphor typical of the field, explained the following:

I am the only one of the students here who is studying for another purpose, and the Teacher is very aware of the fact that I am here rather as an observer—not as a student. She asked me to what extent am soaked up in Ayurveda, comparing the expected level to “when a drop of red wine falls on wood and completely soaks through, that it’s infested completely. That’s how much the people who come here are infested.” Continuing with explanation, she claimed the best students are the people who have never studied anything like that before, because once they compare the knowledge they acquired in previous study it “is difficult to forget”.

(fieldnotes, 12/ 2016)

Despite being considered an intruding observer by the Teacher most of the time, I at least felt useful when I was able to help them with something. Later, it also came in rather handy. I did not have enough funding⁵⁹ to cover my tuition (i.e., as an Ayurveda student), and thus continue the research, but I was able to reach another deal with the Sára: I would help them with legislation research for the reconstruction of their Ayurvedic products shop so they could handle (pack, etc.) food supplements (a status ascribed to all Ayurvedic medicine in the Czech Republic and across the European Union). I also concentrated on other concerns of theirs, such as the restriction of some Ayurvedic medicines (e.g., for lactation) to certain groups of people (typically pregnant and breastfeeding women) or a cancelled Ayurveda massage therapy

57 Here I do not refer to classical distinction between objective “disease” and subjective “illness”, but rather to much broader category of a struggle as certain and literal dis-ease.

58 This continued throughout the first two years of my research (master’s and first year of my PhD studies).

59 Even though I got always a funding (even after the first application fiasco, see p. 44).

certification as a legitimate supplement in sport or health masseurs’ education. This codetermined Ayurveda institutionalization as my topic and field shape for a while. I assumed it would be safer in terms of my informants’ potential feelings of endangerment from my side.

I therefore dedicated some research time to bottom-up institutionalization, including the establishing a network of schools and negotiating the recognition of Ayurvedic remedies or massage therapy. Nevertheless, I soon discovered, this topic is perhaps much less safe than others. It seemed to me the Teacher often distinguished himself from what he himself thought I was doing, not forgetting to interlace it elegantly into his lecture or other kinds of speech.

Once, at a group meeting among current and former students and friends of the school aimed at helping with translation of the basic Ayurvedic texts and widening the networks of Ayurvedic schools in the Czech Republic, the Teacher, referring to legitimizing the process from above, stated that they could “go to Wolfová from Prague with that”. (fieldnotes, 8/ 2015)

It was just a moment of time. Nonetheless, I could not avoid my emotional perception of the situation: I had gone from something of (a) a medical student who wanted to criticize everything they were doing as wrong to (b) an Ayurveda activist who fought for its top-down legitimization and standardization, possibly endangering them. In the end, I fulfilled many more roles in the field. Besides that of a researcher, I was also a part of a community, helping to disseminate Ayurveda by translating the canonical text, providing an English translation of an interview with a Teacher for websites, or helping Sára navigate the legislation concerning certain adjustments to the Ayurveda centre. Moreover, I also became an Ayurveda authority to some and, several times, a self-proclaimed practitioner.

Thus, starting my master’s research almost as a “non-believer” and certainly a doubter as to the possible efficacy of Ayurveda as a way of establishing or maintaining wellbeing, I soon had to admit to myself that, in many cases, the opposite was true. Reflecting on the difficult process of having the gatekeeper to accept my presence at the school, I found myself in a “safe” topics phase focusing on the material politics of Ayurveda remedies. Making a stop by the topic of institutionalization practices which research, at the end, seemed to disturb my informants, I finally ended up with people. I started to focus on their ways of coping with life, being in the world and perceiving themselves and their environment with and from their body differently because of Ayurveda practice. At the final part of the research, I therefore followed people (Marcus, 1995) to their home environments, conducting interviews with them, their partners, even clients and engaging in participant observation of their everyday life.

Field-sites, Sample, Methods Environment

For the initial first two years, the central field of research was a single Ayurveda school.

Mid-research, when dealing with the institutionalization of Ayurveda, I extended the field site to another school founded and led by a former apprentice of the Teacher. Both schools had been functioning for over ten years before I started my research. Together, they represented the only possibility for long-term, structured theoretical and practical Ayurvedic education in the Czech

environment. As part of my research, I studied Ayurveda in both. I completed two years of study in the initial school, including joining for a half year the “lector” module, designed for the future lectures of basics of Ayurveda. I also paid tuition fees in both schools, although the first allowed me to attend only classes appropriate to my current Ayurveda education (I was studying the programme linearly as formal students do). In the second school, I was welcome to attend any class I wanted⁶⁰. Nevertheless, whereas I “recruited” key informants from the first school, the second school, apart from following some of the key informants there, served mostly as a validation of the findings. Moreover, it adds an important ethnographic context, as is shown in following chapter.

After the first two years of research in the school, the Teacher argued he wouldn’t forbid me to keep coming, because it would count in his samskar⁶¹. (fieldnotes, 12/2016)

In the second school, I was considered a visitor for the first academic year and then did part- time studies for the subsequent two years, where I joined by some of my former classmates.

This enabled me to organically follow most of the main informants from the beginning of their Ayurvedic studies. Since summer 2013, I observed and inquired as to what was happening in relation to their Ayurveda practice, first within the borders of the school and later during our informal meetings where I finally accessed their home environment and gathered a fuller picture about their everyday life. Furthermore, my student status also opened the possibility for me (or pushed me) to try Ayurveda “for/on myself”. The involvement of the autoethnographic method provided me with access to participation and understanding of both the in- and outside-class experience, including student discussions. Moreover, it allowed me to deepen my insight into areas that I would have had limited access to through ethnography, such as bodily experience (or the perception of changing subjectivity), which is at the core of Ayurvedic study and practice. My position in relation to the topic under investigation is thus on the boundary between that of an interested observer and an observing participant. However, at the same time, I take actor (Ayurvedic) conceptualizations of the world seriously, in terms of welcoming them to transform mine to some extent (cf. Viveiros de Castro, 2004, p. 5). Ayurvedic concepts also partly guided my analysis, although I often found support for them in the literature. Finally, I negotiated my own interpretations with informants, including consulting their written form.

Data Construction Methods

In this text, I draw primarily on participant observation of lectures and seminars on Ayurvedic theory and therapeutic techniques; events organized by Ayurvedic community; free time spent together during seminars that lasted for two or more days; informal meetings with individual classmates or between larger groups of us; twenty-five interviews with twenty-eight people altogether, including semi-structured ones; two group interviews and autoethnography (L.

Anderson 2006). In addition to the group interviews, interviews ranged from one to three and a half hours in length, mostly with individuals, and exceptionally with pairs of colleagues or

60 As I had already completed two years of Ayurvedic study in the initial school, I did not face the same dilemmas with the gatekeeper of the second school as with the Teacher.

61 An expression to something like a background for karma.

partners. Half of the interviews were accompanied by participant observation, where I spent at least one day with my informants and gained some insight as to their homes and work environments. Autoethnography (L. Anderson, 2006) and carnal sociology (Wacquant, 2015) played an essential role in the empirical part of the research concerning my position within the field and is connected to the kind of reflexivity, that is, treatment of emergent ethical dilemmas.

In this thesis, nevertheless, data related to my experience specifically (but, as shown above, only that regarding the kind of experiences my informants refer to) are considered everywhere as relevant. This kind of data is needed to build the argument, but conventional qualitative data- construction methods do not allow me to enter, in other words, where the phenomenon was not accessible discursively—as a speech or observable actions.

Although I build upon data generated throughout the research process, I explicitly work with the stories of ten people (key informants), including my own. Excerpts from interviews and fieldnotes serve as models and illustrative examples of the typical (reflective) Ayurvedic ways of dealing with bodies that I have identified. Autoethnographic notes are used especially for descriptions primarily to describe of the specific concrete of the kind of bodily experiences I have (learning from our discussions) shared with my informants.

People

All of the people that are quoted in the thesis or referred to through the fieldnotes quotations have been my classmates or lecturers, even some of them for a shorter period of time. More importantly, all of them practice Ayurveda at some level, so they are referred to as (Ayurvedic) practitioners, even though for some, the label Ayurvedist (i.e., Ayurvedic practitioners) refers to person who mastered certain form of knowing (see chapter 4.1.1).

The broader research sample consists of about thirty people (with ten key informants) who entered and left throughout the duration of my research mainly in relation to changing field sites. Demographically they are mainly Czech except for a few Slovak people, with exactly one-fifth male representation. Within my close sample of ten people, three are men and seven are women. Age-wise, there are people from 21–70 years old, although the majority are productive in age (i.e., 30–55 years of age). My research participants are occupationally involved in the financial and cultural sectors, have their own business or are otherwise employed in various industrial fields (e.g., hospitality). They also represent public service professionals (e.g., healthcare workers). A substantial number of them nevertheless run their own Ayurvedic consulting or therapeutic practices (although this was not the case for most of them at the time we met) or are massage therapists, where they also make use of their Ayurveda training. In terms of educational obtainment and socioeconomic status, the sample is rather heterogeneous, although I am convinced all of them have at least a secondary education.

Moreover, since a year of study was equal to half the average monthly wage in the county at the time I started the research, and has almost doubled since that time, no one from the lower classes would be able to afford it. Nevertheless, in relation to most of the CAM literature I work with, the sample consists of people who have studied Ayurveda consistently for at least one year. They therefore differ from the “ordinary” clients that most studies focus on in so far as they often do not need to consult a therapist to practice Ayurveda, relying, as they do, on their own knowledge and acquired skills. In most cases and in the case of all ten key informants, they

are people who have been practicing Ayurveda for a long time, whether on the level of mind or body, as a lifestyle, for self-healing or using it in their own consulting practice. Thus, they are not “just” people who stop practicing Ayurveda after completing the recommended therapy, after solving one dis-ease; all of them practice it on a variety of levels and at differing intensities as a part of their everyday life. It is in this way that I speak about my positionality within the field, that is, a CMR, which Leon Anderson (2006, 378) considers one of the assumptions of autoethnography and I too have employed.

Ethics

Concerning procedural ethics around data construction (Fassin, 2009), informed consent was recorded on a voice recorder for semi-structured interviews. However, regarding participant observation, I have chosen non-resistant consent so as not to undermine the emerging relationships between myself and the informants in the early stages of the research (ibid.). I also engaged in communicative validation, always being very open about my writing and curious about what my schoolmates think. I believe with Latour (2000), that some sort of objectivity can be achieved only when the people or wider phenomenon we study with are let to object our findings. In terms of respecting the privacy of informants, I have anonymized the field and individual actors. Nonetheless, even this anonymization has its limits within the broader Czech Ayurvedic (and hence, CAM) community as, according to the descriptions, individual actors might recognize each other.

In the first months of my research, I found it necessary to consider the principle of respect as regards human dignity and well-being. The Ayurvedic school is a very specific environment in terms of intellectual and emotional demands. For over eight hours a day, variously aged people would often sit on the floor listening to lectures of complicated Ayurvedic theory, including Sanskrit terminology. The lectures argued about the themes of illness (from which some of the students or their loved ones often suffer) and the rightness and wrongness of daily routines and actions in relation to maintaining illness or health—a kind of a personal or existential goal for many in attendance. Moreover, there is only a lunch break between lectures, and it is often late, after the afternoon lecture. Therefore, at the beginning of the research, I decided not to press informants with any unexpected questions at moments when they wanted to rest, eat or meditate. All the data generated from informal interviews from the fieldwork within schools are thus mostly the fruit of natural discussions during and also outside classes.