Memory, Archive, and (Non)fiction: Mixing Methods to Trace British East-African Jain Heritage

Presenter:

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Abstract

When discussing the experience of being Jain in Great Britain today, it is common for respondents to point out an unspecified ‘difference in doing things’ between families that migrated to the UK from India and those that came to Britain from the British East-African ex-colonies in the 1970s. Previous research on South Asians in Colonial British Africa primarily focused on their economic position, and hardly dealt with religious aspects at all. The Remember Africa research project seeks to shed more light on the specificities of East-African Jain religious heritage, and its continued development and relevance in Britain from the 1970s onwards.

The proposed paper presents the methodological conundrums of this research project. By advocating a multidisciplinary mixed-method approach to make the most of the available sources, it prompts a critical re-examination of the role and limitations of the researcher. In this case, the latter functions as a historian probing archives of socio-religious organizations in East-Africa, an anthropologist conducting participative observation and collecting testimonies, memories, and stories, and an analyst looking at multi-medial remembrance projects that have been undertaken within the British East-African Jain community in recent years.

The case of British East-African Jain heritage poignantly demonstrates the necessity of mixed-method research in South Asian religious studies. Additionally, this paper seeks to contribute to academic debate on the benefits and pitfalls of combining methods, the integration of potentially contradictory sources, and the balance between methodological rigor and pragmatic flexibility in research.