By Malvya Chintakindi, PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Oregon

The narrow lanes of Palamuru Basti in Hyderabad city carry different sounds in times of crisis. Palamuru Basti is a densely populated urban slum in Hyderabad, India, where I have established long-lasting connections and friendships with several families over multiple years of fieldwork. The settlement is home to predominantly lower caste communities engaged in informal labor, including domestic workers, daily wage laborers, and other manual workers who migrated to Hyderabad, the fifth largest city in India, seeking better economic opportunities. As my primary research site, Palamuru Basti represents one of Hyderabad’s 775 officially recognized urban slums, characterized by precarious housing conditions, limited infrastructure, and residents navigating multiple vulnerabilities of caste discrimination, gender subordination, and economic marginalization.

Where once the rhythmic clatter of daily life and the morning conversations of women preparing for domestic work marked the predictable cadence of daily survival, 2024 brought disruptions that fundamentally altered not only the acoustic landscape of this urban settlement but the very nature of ethnographic engagement itself. The familiar sounds of children’s laughter echoing between concrete walls gave way to hushed conversations about mounting debts, the mechanical hum of the water pump was punctuated by anxious discussions of job security, and a domestic abuse survivor’s careful footsteps racing home before her husband’s return carried new urgency as economic pressures intensified domestic surveillance.

As I navigated my final year of dissertation research¹ among lower caste communities, particularly women, in India’s informal labor sector, these sonic transformations signaled something more profound than seasonal change or temporary hardship. They marked the emergence of what I have come to understand as ethnography in crisis: a methodological and ethical framework that emerges when the boundaries between researcher and researched, between academic observation and human survival, between scholarly rigor and care ethics, collapse into urgent questions of mutual aid and collective endurance. This framework builds on feminist anthropological insights about the politics of knowledge production (Behar & Gordon, 1995; Visweswaran, 1994) while extending Veena Das’s understanding of how critical events reshape everyday life (Das, 2006) to examine how crisis becomes a condition of ethnographic possibility rather than impediment. Ethnography in crisis recognizes crisis not as an exceptional interruption to ethnographic work but as a revelatory condition that exposes dimensions of knowledge production, community resilience, and survival strategies that remain invisible under ordinary circumstances.

My 2024 began with what seemed like manageable challenges: visa renewals, funding negotiations, the familiar dance between institutional requirements and community relationships that defines long-term fieldwork. However, it quickly unfolded as a year when crisis became not an external threat to research but its defining characteristic, echoing patterns of the ethnography of violence where researchers must navigate the same uncertainties and vulnerabilities as their research participants (Robben & Nordstrom, 1995). The women whose lives anchor this research found themselves navigating escalating vulnerabilities that mirrored and intersected with my own emerging institutional and personal crises. Neelamma, a domestic cook and cleaner, watched her daughter Chandra face increasingly violent domestic abuse while struggling with her own health decline; Ramanamma and Saritha, who worked as cleaners in IT offices, confronted new forms of job insecurity as tech sector layoffs reduced building occupancy and cleaning contracts. Simultaneously, my journey of navigating the complex realities of long-distance research – from health emergencies that required sudden travel to family obligations spanning continents, from the intricate bureaucracies of international documentation to the evolving landscape of academic funding cycles – created a cascade of disruptions that required constant adaptation and renegotiation of research timelines and methodological approaches.

This past academic year fundamentally transformed both my methodological approach and understanding of how knowledge emerges from the intersection of vulnerability and resistance in marginalized communities. What began as traditional ethnographic observation evolved into an ethnography of mutuality as a framework that recognizes crisis not as an obstacle to research but as a revelatory condition exposing dimensions of survival knowledge that remain invisible under ordinary circumstances. When shared precarity dissolved boundaries between researcher and researched, the sophisticated systems of care, resource sharing, and collective resistance that sustain life in Palamuru Basti became accessible not as research participants but as practical resources for mutual survival.

Rather than derailing ethnographic engagement, these converging crises revealed how traditional boundaries between researcher and research participants dissolve when shared vulnerability creates conditions for genuine mutuality. Women who had initially appeared in my field notes as research participants became collaborators in survival; their sophisticated knowledge of urban navigation, resource sharing, and bureaucratic manipulation proved essential to my own continued fieldwork presence. This transformation challenges fundamental assumptions about ethnographic authority and suggests that crisis reveals essential dimensions of marginalized communities’ knowledge production that can only be accessed through relations of mutuality rather than extraction, insights that emerge not despite vulnerability but because of it.

When Crisis Becomes Method: Redefining Ethnographic Boundaries

The transformation of ethnographic practice during 2024’s cascading crises revealed how disrupted fieldwork conditions can generate insights unavailable through traditional coherent observation. Instead of viewing crisis as methodological failure, what emerged was a productive framework for understanding how knowledge production operates through discontinuity, interruption, and the kind of improvised relationships that define survival in marginalized communities. When the urgency of research completion intersected with participants’ economic precarity, the familiar boundaries between observer and observed dissolved into shared intensities of anxiety, care, and mutual vulnerability that structure daily life under conditions of systematic uncertainty.

The collapse of traditional research boundaries became most visible during moments of intimate care that emerged not from ethnographic design but from mutual recognition of need. When Neelamma invited me to sit beside her on the floor of her small government-allocated house and began oiling my hair with the same coconut oil she used for her granddaughter Honey, her weathered hands carried knowledge that emerges through practices of care rather than verbal articulation. This wasn’t a research moment I had planned or could have anticipated, it arose from her observation that I looked exhausted, that my hair was unkempt from weeks of sleeping poorly due to visa stress, that I needed comfort in ways I couldn’t ask for directly.

These moments dissolved years of carefully maintained ethnographic distance, revealing how traditional participant observation fails to capture the relational knowledge that sustains survival networks. Neelamma’s quiet humming filled silences that formal interviews had never bridged. The oil was warm from sitting in the afternoon sun, and as she worked it through my hair in slow, deliberate strokes, she began talking about her own daughter Chandra’s marriage troubles, not as research data but as one worried woman to another. The gesture of hair oiling carried decades of maternal knowledge about care under constraint, creating relationships that generate meaning through fragmented rather than totalizing encounters. Neelamma understood, perhaps better than I initially did, that my visible stress about research timelines and institutional pressures mirrored her own anxiety about Chandra’s deteriorating marriage and her granddaughter’s future. When she began sharing her evening meals with me, insisting I needed “proper food to think properly,” she was extending networks of care that create kinship through practice rather than biology. I would arrive at her doorstep after long days of interviews, emotionally drained from hearing stories of workplace abuse and domestic violence, and she would wordlessly hand me a plate of rice and dal, waiting until I finished eating before beginning any conversation about my research.

This transformation required reconceptualizing care as an epistemological framework that generates insights through attentiveness to interdependence rather than maintaining artificial boundaries between knowledge production and survival necessity. When Anjamma, another domestic laborer, spent an entire afternoon teaching me to navigate government health services during a medical emergency, she was demonstrating institutional literacy that marginalized populations develop through necessity but which remains invisible to traditional ethnographic methods. I was exhausted and dehydrated after prolonged periods of conducting fieldwork, and instead of treating this as a research interruption, Anjamma made it a teaching moment about survival. Her patient explanation of which offices to visit first, which documents to bring, which officials to approach with deference versus assertiveness, revealed survival strategies developed through decades of bureaucratic navigation. She walked me through the labyrinthine corridors of government hospitals, showing me how to read the body language of clerks to determine their willingness to help, how to time requests around tea breaks and shift changes, and how to present myself as deserving of assistance rather than entitled to it. These weren’t abstract lessons but practical knowledge needed for my immediate survival, demonstrating how marginalized populations develop sophisticated systems of mutual aid precisely because state systems fail to provide adequate support.

Similarly, when Meenakshi, who works as a cleaner in office spaces, shared her institutional knowledge during my visa renewal process, her guidance revealed ways of operating within systems of power that transform constraint into possibility through creative adaptation. My student visa was up for renewal, at the same time, I was also focusing on my dissertation fieldwork. These were competing priorities, both requiring my focus and attention. Rather than viewing this as my personal crisis, Meenakshi treated it as a c