Jakob Williams Ørberg, jwo@edu.au.dk, November 19, 2015
Returning abroad – Vignette on mobility for ethnography writing work-shop at UNIKE Oslo Winter School
Prolonged stays abroad for fieldwork or studies are effective ways of gaining insides into other research and
education settings, as well as getting to know researchers and fellow students in the field of oneself. But the
long term deep relationships that sustain academic exchange and co-development often only happens when
one leave the foreign place for a period and again return back to it. ‘Leaving the field’ is similarly an often
shared trick of the trade to the doing of ethnographic fieldwork meant to deepen relations in the field, which
then can be actualized when one returns.
I have been going back and forward to Delhi throughout the last five years of my live first as an accompanying
spouse to my researcher wife and next as an ethnographic researcher and research student myself. I have just
arrived back to both my field, an Indian engineering college, and my study abroad destination, a university
department. Or rather, I have just arrived back to the country, and I am overwhelmed. Not by the Delhi air
pollution and chaotic traffic. Not by the poor children forced to beg at the major traffic crossings on my way
from the airport. Or of the dominance of idle men in the city landscape and the clear markers of class and
status in clothing and behavior constantly displayed both in peoples walk, talk and ‘appearance’. I am
overwhelmed by familiarity. I am immediately slipping into my own albeit still awkward performance of status,
I am slipping into my old habits and places. Everything seems like yesterday, although I know that for my
friends, informants and colleagues, a lot has happened.
So here is my 3-4 minute experience that tells the story of the above; the story about the need to or the
method of ‘returning abroad’:
‘I bought the ticket to Delhi last minute. I don’t know if it was a need to get out of Denmark or a real
professional need to be in the field again. I am coming here to find some sort of peace from my writing process,
and to perhaps ground myself in the lives of the students, I am writing about and who I am in a sense writing it
for. So I have booked last minute, packed last minute, reached last minute. And I have made planned and
contacted people last minute. I have written informants and colleagues either just before my trip or at my
three hour stopover in Doha on my way here asking them for an opportunity to meet. I have even chosen to
write students that were reluctant to meet me individually during my 7 months fieldwork in 2014. We have
followed each other on Facebook and Twitter, sometimes Instragram and Quora, but we have never had that
personal sit down I asked for so often during fieldwork. These are students that I have sensed as being central
to processes at the focal site of my fieldwork, IIT Delhi, that I have followed. Some of these processes have
been political in nature and often hard for my informants to have the confidence to be interviewed about.
So now I switched on my phone and messages are ticking in. They would ‘love to’ meet. They are writing me
with enthusiasm, no qualifying words, no mention of exam time or other hindrances. I feel I will be let in. Tha I
will be discussing with them in a freer and more confident fashion. I have become familiar even while being
away. Is it because of our prolonged online connectivity, because of the memory of our last encounters, or
simply because I am “returning abroad?”’