On Chintan

Abstract

<p>Difficulties are often encountered when crossing the emic-etic divide and describing relationships between the personal and the scientific in ethnographic research. The possibility of describing and embodying a <i>self-constitutive subjective relation</i> (Foucault, 2005) means that people and indeed researchers "are becoming more comfortable with the focus on the self-in-relation that this subjective relation entails" (Lea, 2009: 72). Recent literature dealing with the Indian experience of yoga practice and auto-observation and auto-reporting, e.g. Smith (2007); Lea (2009), demonstrate the prospect of the effectiveness of involving the <i>self-subject</i> not only in more common ethnographic analyses and in the analysis of 'New Age' practices but also in the cross-cultural setting. Such thought can be summarised in claims by scholars like Taylor (1991) who have argued that there has developed a massive subjective turn in and of modern culture. Such theory and current findings have serious ramifications for how researchers undertake and write ethnographies that incorporate the personal, spiritual experience. Modern ethnographic theory and methods (Jackson, 1989), self-reporting in anthropology (Salzman, 2002), rethinking the cultural divide between 'other' and 'self' (Kusserow, 1999) and doing cross-cultural ethnography pose the possibility of a new auto-writing of ethno-spiritual experience. </p>