Rethinking Field and Fieldwork in Qualitative Research: Decolonial Insights From Sampang's Cultural Ways of Knowing in Nepal

Conventionally, the field in qualitative research is understood as a community or social setting, often located in distant areas, for extracting data, thereby privileging the researcher’s control. Drawing from Indigenous and decolonial epistemologies, this article theorizes the research field is not just a community but the Indigenous lands which is relational, emergent, and living space that serve as a source of knowledge. Taking Nepal’s Sampang Indigenous community as a case, we argue that the field is a fluid and co-constructed space embedded in everyday life, ritual practice, history, culture, spirituality, and an assemblage of multiple living and non-living entities. We propose five community-grounded fieldwork methods, such as Dapla Khaa (hearth talk), Sakela -informed inquiry, Talk of Indigenous Artifacts (ToIAs), land-based interviews, and Mundhum recitation as storytelling which facilitate in participatory, shared, and collective knowledge generation. These methods of fieldwork in Indigenous cultural lands foster responsible, accountable, ethical, relational, and culture-sensitive engagement in research.