When your interlocutors can google you

Over the past year in the field, I've googled myself assiduously. This I've done not out of vanity, but to make sure I knew and managed what information about me was out there.  To have control over what is to be known about me is an entirely reasonable thing to want. But out in the field, where one hopes to share confidences with one's interlocutors, the willful withholding and management of information about myself enters an ethical grey zone.  One begins to tread that fine line between being a private individual and being disingenuous.

I’m not being naive here. I really don’t believe that my interlocutors, as close as my relationship with them may have become, share every detail of their lives with me.  I am not even presuming that they always tell me “everything” that is relevant to my area of research. And that is their prerogative. 

But I approach them as an ethnographer knowing that they are part of a certain social/economic/political/religious/linguistic group. And most likely, it is their membership to any or all of these groups that has led me to them.  So while I may not claim certain knowledge of their inner motivations, I do know a great deal about who they are in these milieux, what their backgrounds are and, in many cases, what their public activities in these spheres are. They, on the other hand, cannot claim the same. Most of them only know that I am a student from a university in the United States who is doing research in India on Sufism; they know of course that I am an Indian Hindu.  Some who have heard of anthropology would know that I am one of that breed; some would know I am married, have no children, and have relatives who still live in India. They may have a faint idea about my economic and social, but would really have very little idea of my political and social views, my hobbies, my friends…unless I choose to tell them.  It is clearly an imbalanced equation. 

I am sure that they have constructed and deconstructed me. I’m sure they have imagined what my life in America must be like, and what my routines and motivations might be.  But on many accounts, their imaginings would be off the mark by miles because they only see me out of the context of my usual life.  I change my mores and lifestyles so that I may fit in better with them and learn more from them by not being a jarring presence in their midst. And it is this “modified me” that they know and construct their imaginings from.  And it is with this “modified me” that they interlocute, and in so many cases accept within their homes, their families, their sacred spaces.  And all of this makes me wonder…would they tell me the things they tell me, permit me the kind of access they do, consider me an equal in many measures, if not all, if they knew all they would if they saw me in my “natural habitat”?

I work with people who are for the most part, socially conservative.  They are wonderful people who are extremely generous and kind to me when they really have no reason to be; they get nothing much out of my research, and yet give me so much.  But these are also people who quite clearly believe that homosexuality is a sin, or that drinking alcohol, wearing clothes that don’t cover you from neck to ankle is a sign of moral lapse.  And so I again wonder: How would my interlocutors react if they saw photos of me carrying supportive banners at a Queer Pride parade, or knew that I drank and wore sun-dresses?  Would they still think me worthy of the information they give me?  And this is especially pertinent since my research is on issues of religion and spirituality—topics deeply entangled with questions of morality.

     We no longer live in an age where what biographical details we wish to disclose is entirely within our control. Doing research in urban areas among folks who have access to the Internet means that your interlocutors can google you.  And as it stands, I certainly don’t want them to have access to those photos from the Pride parade or that picture of me with the tankard of beer!

But I struggle with this.