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Interpreting India, Identity, and Media From the Field: Exploring the Communicative Nature of the Exotic Other

Wright State University

This study explores the process of interpreting interviews and media collected during two visits to India. Looking at the communicative nature of Indian identity, the author takes into account his own identity as an American exposed to a lifetime of exotic representations of Indian culture. Recognizing the limits of time for study in the field, recorded media provide valuable evidence and open discursive avenues to greater understandings of our world. As a discursive space, the camera’s gaze focuses attention back to the ontological conditions of the researchers’ experiences as a forum for the negotiation of values and beliefs. Evidence of the process of communication provides a better understanding of the construction of meaning and identity. Thus, the mediated data, reconsidered later, recall the eidetic essence of existential knowledge supporting the process of ethnographic writing.

Key Words: semiotics • India • identity • exotic Other • representation

Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 11, No. 4, 518-534 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1077800405278204


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