Death, Priests, Pollution, and Me

The dynamic dialogue that goes on between the researcher, the field, and the researched is a complex amalgamation of emotions and experiences. This chapter will examine this issue through presentation of an autoethnographic account of the challenges I faced while trying to explore the lives of MahaBrahmins, or the Hindu death priests, in a village in North India. The chapter focuses on my interactions with death priests, who are considered to be in an indefinite phase of pollution. Through this autoethnographic account, I will elaborate on how I vicariously became a part of this impurity/pollution through a constant search for a probable “covert contamination” by turning my “gaze” inward. I believe that the silence, the anxious undercurrents, and the relief in the field need to be understood. From a psychosocial vantage point, through this chapter, I want to provide a glimpse into the subjectivity of a researcher in the quest to understand the tabooed existence of “death priests” and how as a “death researcher” I constantly negotiated those boundaries. This also brings to the fore the outer and inner encounters in the journey that shape how a researcher looks at and witnesses the world.