Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 25(1), 2004, 51-63  Copyright 2004 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishers Ltd INTRODUCTION On a cool and sunny afternoon in January 1995, I disentangled myself from my fellow passengers after an hour-long ride and stepped out of the cramped interior of the autorickshaw that deposited me in Jamtala, a village in the South 24-Parganas district of West Bengal state in India. I was all set to embark on fieldwork for my dissertation in the rural area of Kultali block, 1 while living in villages for extended periods of time. I remember the simultaneous feeling of excitement and trepidation as I looked at my “study area”. My goal was to investigate the reproductive health of low-income women in the area and their ability and willingness to use locally available health care, particularly the services offered through the various schemes and initiatives of the government of India’s Family Welfare Programme. I had decided early in my graduate career that I would do field-based research, following long-established traditions among anthro- pologists and geographers. The relative ease of acquiring secondary data sets amenable to quantitative analyses as well as expenses of time and money has made active fieldwork a select activity (Rundstrom & Kenzer, 1989). POSITIONALITY AND PRAXIS: FIELDWORK EXPERIENCES IN RURAL INDIA Elizabeth Chacko Department of Geography, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA ABSTRACT This paper provides a reflexive account of conducting fieldwork as a graduate student in the Sunderban area of West Bengal state, India, in the mid-1990s. Reflecting on my personal experiences of research in a setting that was simultaneously familiar and foreign, I use frames of positionality to understand the impact of explicit and implied power structures on the research process, the relationships between the researcher and those researched, and the transfer of knowledge. This paper argues that the multiple subject positions and identities of both scholar and subjects as presented in the field vary with setting, and that these positionalities affect access to informants, the tenor and outcomes of encounters, and knowledge production. While self-reflexivity is endorsed as a strategy for critically informed research, active measures such as openness about the agenda and activities undertaken, self-disclosure, making conscious accommodations for the research subject’s work schedule and time constraints, mutual sharing of information, and explicit recognition of the research subjects’ expertise through lived experiences are proposed as strategies for equalising the power balance between scholar and subject. Keywords: positionality, identity, reflexivity, fieldwork, women’s health care, India