The Doll’s Marriage: An Ethnographic Encounter with Rural Children and Childhood

The pictorial representations of activities and social interactions provide the researcher with a sensory experience both during and after the fieldwork. I had interesting encounters with children and families during my ethnographic research on the social value of the child in rural Punjab (2019). Some of these encounters were also photographed. Attending a doll's marriage ceremony was one of those encounters that refreshed my fieldwork memories while also providing insight into child socialization through play activities. An ethnographer's scientific task after fieldwork is to read, describe, and interpret the pictures. As a student and researcher in childhood studies, I was fascinated by the pictures' explicit and implicit details. Hence, I developed a picture reading technique that I used to read pictures as field notes. I named this technique 'SAFSI,' which stands for See, Ask, Find, See, and Interpret. Here, I elaborate on this process by using my participation in a doll's marriage as an example