Weed, dendrite, and hammer

The Bashbari char has a reputation: teenagers to adults are addicted to Dendrite, an industrial glue that is used as a cheap drug. As I was walking towards Mazid’s (participant) house, two young boys approached me with smiling faces. One of them asked, ‘Brother, do you need some patta (leaves/weed)?’ Out of curiosity, I nodded in ‘yes,’ so as to learn the price of weed in char. Upon learning its price, I told them that I did not have enough money to pay for it and if they could give it to me at a price which was almost half of what they had asked for. One of them immediately became angry and realised that I had no intent of buying the weed. He immediately told me, ‘I will break your head with a hammer, you poor dog.’ Immediately, the other boy pulled him back and both left the place. I reached Mazid’s house, and I narrated the entire incident. He said that the char had become a ‘bhang er adda’ (hub of weed smokers), and that he felt both pity and anger towards them. However, in such places where drug economies dominate, every step can be violent and can have a severe impact on the researcher’s life. There was no trouble while heading back from Mazid’s house. My own curiosity to learn the price of the weed backfired, as it was read as deception by the two boys. Even a seemingly benign question can trigger hostility in a field when the local drug economy dominates the environment.

The two instances not only demanded critical reflexivity to introspect my own actions in the field, but also an ethical responsibility on the part of the researcher. Here, reflexivity becomes crucial not only as an ethical practice, but as a survival strategy for the researcher. Conventionally, fieldwork in the social sciences provides researchers with an opportunity for deep engagement with communities who are being studied. Even though much deep engagement was not possible due to the nature of the research, it was my positionality and shared characteristics of an ‘insider’ that allowed me to build trust with the community and facilitated access into the ‘field.’ However, my ‘familiarity’ with the ‘field’ came with its own challenges in unexpected ways. 

In the above cases, trust could not be established with the local inhabitants or the community during the fieldwork: first because in one instance the field demanded intervention of the police, a state machinery and second, due to my curiousness towards learning about the local drug economy from the drug dealers. The “field” then, besides being a site of knowledge creation and knowledge production, also becomes a site where the researcher is often confronted with vulnerabilities, risks, and suspicion, especially when it comes to politically and socially sensitive settings such as the chars in lower Assam.

Note: All the names of people and chars are pseudonyms.

Bio: Mamoon Bhuyan is a doctoral researcher in Sociology, at Brunel, University of London. He is also a researcher at the Brent Arts Therapy, National Health Services, England.