ABSTRACT
A milieu of political conflict invites us to take our factual lens to Kashmir. We are likely to look for facts that meet this lens. A mythical tiger’s charisma invites wild-life biologists to take their factual schema to the Sunderban mangrove forests. They immerse science and fact into the project of aesthetic production – Kashmir, a place of conflict, Sunderban, a place of the charismatic tiger. A factual story is then sought about Kashmir and feeds fodder to the imaginative template of conflict. What would happen if we went to look for tigers in Kashmir and conflict in the Sunderbans? This question leads me to a conclusion that thematic situations of ethnography are not good indices for knowing what the ethnography is about. For instance, Taussig’s book about devil-worship and commodity logics being interpreted by plantation labor communities can be least understood if described as a book about labor or about plantations in Bolivia. Similarly, while urban conditions surrounding derelict industrial architectures and failing industries accurately describe Howrah’s present and feature eminently in my narrative, they do not answer accurately the question of what is this story about. This brings me to a few ruminations of geographic marking exercises that inform fieldwork.
