Mander Research

‘Words from the Heart’: Researching
People’s Stories
HARSH MANDER
Centre for Equity Studies, Delhi
manderharsh@gmail.com
Abstract
This article argues that detached, impersonal and ‘objective’ social science research
Downloaded from http://jhrp.oxfordjournals.org/ at North Dakota State University on May 24, 2015
is inadequate to investigate complex social phenomena such as poverty and devel-
opment. ‘Engaged’ research into the subjective realities of people’s experience
leads to a more nuanced and complete understanding of not only those elements
which can be objectively measured, such as income and consumption, but the full
complexity of poverty. Listening to the stories and ‘words from the heart’ of
people who, as partners in the research, reconstruct their own lived experiences,
and their analysis, knowledge and aspirations, democratizes knowledge, and leads
to a more complete and nuanced understanding of elements such as hunger, dis-
crimination, social exclusion, stigma, and disempowerment. Such research, done
with empathy and respect, ethical concern and personal accountability, and without
compromising the search for the truth, is both legitimate and has academic and
practical value. The knowledge and insights derived from it can be invaluable in
efforts to secure the human rights of disadvantaged and oppressed people, and in
the design and evaluation of public policy.
Keywords: individual testimonies; participatory research; social exclusion;

democratization of knowledge; research ethics; India
‘Words from the heart are more alive than your scribblings. When we
speak, our words burn.’ (in Slim and Thompson, 1993)
It is often believed that social science research must be detached, impersonal,

and ‘objective’. This article will argue that social science research is not an
investigation into inert, static, external realities, but into the fluid subjective
worlds of people’s lives, as experienced, interpreted, recalled and mediated
by them. Therefore research into these lived subjective realities – conducted
with empathy and respect, ethical concern and personal accountability – has
both legitimacy and academic value. Especially in poverty and development
studies, apart from a range of other quantitative and qualitative research
methods, listening to the stories and ‘words from the heart’ of people –
through which they reconstruct their own lived experiences, and their analy-
sis, knowledge and aspirations – makes them partners in this research,
democratizes knowledge, and is of significant epistemological validity and
value. It can in particular enable nuanced and authentic understanding of
the experience of processes like deprivation, discrimination and coping. The
Journal of Human Rights Practice Vol 2 | Number 2 | June 2010 | pp. 252– 270 DOI:10.1093/jhuman/huq007
# The Author (2010). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
253 Researching People’s Stories
knowledge and insights derived from these processes can be invaluable also
in efforts to secure the human rights of disadvantaged and oppressed people,
and in the design and evaluation of public policy.
Engaged Research?
Millions of men and women, boys and girls, struggle each day of their lives
with poverty and want. Many are unable to feed their children and them-
selves, others sleep on begrimed pavements under the open sky on city
streets. Multitudes grapple with fear and violence, because they are women,
or because they follow a minority faith, or because of the colour of their
skin. Large numbers are uncertain every morning about finding work; they
toil for long hours in fields or on factory floors with slave wages, or live in
debt bondage, or are forced into humiliating professions like cleaning human
refuse or involuntary sex work. Many children are unable to enter school,
and instead search for waste in city dumps, or graze cattle, or labour in
eateries, farms, factories or in people’s homes.
There may be many reasons to study, record and understand the realities
of these dispossessed people: ‘we’ may study ‘them’ in several capacities and
with diverse objectives. We may investigate as human rights practitioners, as
public servants, as development workers and as poverty researchers. Our
aims may be to comprehend, acknowledge, document and analyse their lived
social, economic and political realities, but we may aspire also for this new
knowledge to inform public action, and in the end to try to contribute to
reducing the injustice and avoidable suffering of their worlds.
I came into poverty research as an extension of my human rights engage-
ment with hunger, homelessness, destitution, ethnic conflict, and caste dis-
crimination. I took up research because I encountered the need for better
knowledge of these realities to inform actions, struggles and solidarity to
advance human rights, and also to illuminate judicial interventions and
public policy advocacy. It was my concern for the human rights of disadvan-
taged people that primarily spurred my social science research.
But I realized early that research should not be reduced to a partisan
instrument to advance any cause, however worthy. The most basic ethic of
all of research must be an uncompromising search for truth. When a prac-
titioner seeks to research people’s realities so as to help change these in ways
that she or he regards to be more just and humane, it never justifies any com-
promise with the search for ‘truth’, which should motivate all research
efforts. The research of human rights practitioners should therefore never be
selective with truth, for instance, by hiding from public knowledge or dis-
carding those findings which may weaken the human rights advocacy of the
researcher on an issue.
It is possible to assume therefore that the researcher in social science and
poverty research must at all times necessarily be detached and ‘objective’, or
that there is no epistemological legitimacy to studies which are avowedly
Harsh Mander 254
engaged and activist. The majority of social science research tacitly adopts
this assumption, that avowedly ‘engaged research’ is indeed an oxymoron. It
therefore attempts to apply to social and development studies positivist
methods which were fashioned for the physical sciences: the studies are
intended to be objective, detached, de-contextualized, and predominantly
quantitative. These dominant modes of social science research require the
researcher to be unencumbered by emotion and ethical concerns in the
process of studying what is posited in effect to be a static objective external
reality. This applies also to most of development and poverty investigations,
which try to measure and survey the ‘conditions’ of people in poverty: their
consumption, their incomes, their livelihoods, their wages and work con-
ditions, their nutrition and health status, their access to public services, and a
range of other aspects of their lives and situation.
Patricia Hill Collins (1998: 205) summarizes what she sees as the main fea-
tures that typify what she describes as ‘eurocentric’, ‘masculinist’ and positi-
vist methodological approaches:
Several requirements typify positivist methodological approaches. First,

research methods generally require a distancing of the researcher from
her or his ‘object’ of study by defining the researcher as a ‘subject’ with
full human subjectivity and by objectifying the ‘object’ of study. A
second requirement is the absence of emotions from the research
process. Third, ethics, and values are deemed inappropriate in the
research process, either as the reason for scientific inquiry or as part of
the research process itself. Finally, adversarial debates, whether written
or oral, become the preferred method of ascertaining truth: the argu-
ments that can withstand the greatest assault and survive intact become
the strongest truths.
But, as Anton Chekhov reminds us, impoverished people are more than
‘mute statistics’. They cannot be reduced to mere ‘statistical cannon fodder’
(Beck, 1989: 24). The specific methodology for poverty studies that is out-
lined in this article – of listening to people’s own stories, and learning from
their constructions and analysis of their lived realities, from their own
‘stories’ as recalled by them – is consciously not detached: it is based on
ethics of caring and accountability, and its search for truth involves both the
researcher and the researched. It calls for a joint interactive process, of the
researcher and the researched in a shared enterprise of subjectively recon-
structing and learning from the lived experience of people in poverty. It
assumes that the search for ‘truth’ about the lives of disadvantaged men and
women, boys and girls, can and possibly even should be engaged.
Collins (1998) describes the alternative features of what she calls an ‘afro-
centric’ feminist epistemology. The first of Collins’s principles is the acknowl-
edgement of the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and the
importance of lived experience to bridge these. The second is the importance
of dialogue, based on mutual respect. A third is an ethic of caring, especially

empathy, and of personal accountability. To my mind, these are the precise
principles which must guide research by or for human rights practitioners, as
well as by academic researchers, into the realities especially of disadvantaged
and vulnerable people. The ethical principles that must guide such research
are further elaborated in the last section of this article.
The ethic of caring and personal engagement does not reduce or negate the
‘scientific’ validity of the findings of such research, as positivist social scientists
may assume. Drèze (2002) suggests on the contrary that the value of scientific
research can, in many circumstances, be enhanced if it is combined with real-
world involvement and action. He finds value in mainstream scholarship and
academic rigour, but sees action-based research as a valuable complement to
this. Drèze maintains that personal commitment does not necessarily interfere
with an objective appraisal of facts. Objectivity, he declares, ‘requires intellec-
tual honesty, not an abdication of all convictions’ (Drèze, 2002: 818). It is
possible (and I would argue it is professionally and ethically imperative), even
for a researcher who is deeply involved in action and personally committed to
certain social and philosophical beliefs, to accept findings that run contrary to
her or his convictions. This requires the researcher to have intellectual integ-
rity. However, if this is lacking, even more detached research may still be
coloured in less visible invidious ways by a person’s preconceived beliefs.
Drèze tries to clarify this with the notion of ‘positional objectivity’. An obser-
vation is positionally objective if it is seen in the same way by different persons
in the same position, bearing in mind that ‘what we can observe depends on
our position vis-à-vis the objects of observation’ (Drèze, 2002: 818).
This article does not reject positivist, rationalist, detached and predominantly
quantitative poverty research. But it recognizes the limits and limitations of
these methods to understand many social realities, especially impoverishment,
hunger, discrimination, stigma, and disempowerment. We therefore seek here
to try to enrich the insights of positivist poverty research with radical alternative
methodologies of life histories and life stories. We acknowledge the relevance of
quantitative research for understanding some aspects of poverty, but at the
same time emphasize the need to continuously engage directly with poor and
marginalized people themselves, to listen to and learn from their voices, their
experiences and observations. People’s voices and perspectives are not just anec-
dotal embellishments to ‘scientific’ quantitative surveys, in ways that have
become fashionable in current social science literature. The conviction under-
lying this article is that ‘words from the heart’, or in other words people’s own
testimonies of their lived experiences, shared with an empathetic researcher, can
yield knowledge (and wisdom) of significant philosophical and practical value.
The Experience of Poverty and Exclusion

Conventional statistical methods are often unequal to the challenge of cap-
turing the subjective, fluid and complex realities of people’s lives, even more
Harsh Mander 256
so when the purpose is to study phenomena like exclusion and discrimi-

nation. A man living with leprosy in Ghana remarked poignantly: ‘It is
neither leprosy nor poverty that kills the leper but loneliness’ (quoted in
Kabeer, 2000: 85). Insights such as this are impossible to gather through
statistical methods: insights into the experience of poverty and marginality.
I have worked for many years with leprosy patients in Madhya Pradesh and
Chhatisgarh in India, and heard from many leprosy patients stories of
immense suffering associated with being cast away by one’s family, loved
ones and local community, being denied work and any kind of social inter-
action, and being hated only because of an affliction which terrifies both the
one who suffers and the one who observes it in others (Mander, 2001b: 87).
It would be hard to capture through quantitative research methods this sense
of complete social devaluation (which I have also observed with other desti-
tute people as well, such as people who live with hunger, the homeless, the
castaway aged, the mentally ill, and the disabled). But this entire experience
is evoked with great eloquence with the remark of the leprosy patient in
Ghana.
A woman engaged in the socially despised manual vocation of scavenging
or cleaning human excreta with her hands in a town called Anantpur in
South India said to me:
‘Ai, municipality come, clean this’, is how most people call out. . . It is
as though we do not have a name. And often they cover their noses
when we walk past, as though we smell. We have to wait until someone
turns on a municipal tap, or works a hand-pump, when we want water,
so that these are not polluted by our touch. In the tea-stalls, we do not
sit with others on the benches; we squat on the ground separately. Until
recently there were separate broken teacups for us, which we washed
ourselves and they were kept aside only for our use. (Mander, 2001b:
39 –40)
And here are the words of an old tribal man, displaced by a large develop-
ment project:
When I am on a boat, in the middle of the reservoir, and I know that
hundreds of feet beneath me, at that very point, lie my village and my
home and my fields, all of which are lost forever, it is then that my
chest rips apart, and I cannot bear the pain. (Mander, 2001b: 116)
What research can better evoke the anguish of being expelled from one’s
homeland than this gentle lament?
Peter Coleridge collected the voices of people with disabilities. Nawaf
Kabbara of Lebanon said to him:
When you are managing a life outside society, you have to make
society aware that you are there. Only then can you be integrated into
society. We have hardly started at the beginning of this process. I mean

you can’t be integrated if you are not even recognised as being there!
This is what people do not understand. I have been challenged on this
many times in Lebanon. (Coleridge, 2006: 56)
The large majority of studies of poverty rely primarily on quantitative

measures, mostly of income and consumption flows. It is now widely
acknowledged that these studies are limited because they typically measure
only those dimensions of poverty which lend themselves to statistical
measurement. These studies exclude a multi-layered and nuanced under-
standing of poverty, as an extremely complex heterogeneous phenomenon,
which manifests itself in a dense range of overlapping and interwoven econ-
omic, political, social and psychological deprivation. These include denials
and want in many forms – assetlessness; low income levels; hunger; poor
health; insecurity; physical, social and psychological hardship; social exclu-
sion; degradation and discrimination; and political powerlessness and
disarticulation.
Chambers et al. (1990) usefully distinguish between poverty defined to
cover a range of economic, social and political conditions of deprivation,
and what professionals actually measure in their assessments of poverty.
They argue that the latter are measures not of deprivation in many of its
aspects, but only of one or two of its elements, of income and consumption.
They find that this grave lapse is not merely an academic failing; it also has
serious implications for policy. Policy instruments are themselves designed to
address poverty mainly as narrowly defined by professionals, and they
neglect its larger and complex social and political dimensions, and the
aspirations of people living in poverty.
The implication of this default is a greatly flawed understanding of the
phenomena of poverty, and the neglect of several critical elements like
gender, caste, class, race, stigma, and disability. If our major aim in analysing
poverty and discrimination – especially as human rights activists – is to
combat and try to eradicate it, the imperative to find new ways to document,
comprehend and analyse poverty becomes even more urgent. Qualitative
methods like life stories and life histories can enable a more complete and
nuanced understanding of the social, cultural, political, and psychological
dimensions of the experience of poverty.
In a recent article, I wrote of what I perceived to be the severe limitations
of ‘objective’ methods to study and measure poverty and hunger:
A flourishing intellectual cottage industry has grown in India, and

across the planet, around the worthy enterprise of measuring and esti-
mating poverty and hunger. Much of the published reams of this
debate – to which economists, nutritionists and public planners tire-
lessly contribute – would appear strangely remote to a person who
Harsh Mander 258
lives with and battles hunger. She would recognise little in their
involved, sophisticated, bitterly contested and often opaque calculus,
assumptions, arguments and conclusions. She would not find adequate
acknowledgement of the struggles that dispossessed people the world
over wage every single day against want and injustice, to feed, clothe
and house themselves and the people they love. The debates would
probably seem strangely detached to her from their daily triumphs and
defeats, from the profound suffering and powerlessness of watching
one’s children cry themselves to sleep on a hungry stomach, from the
shame of depending on charity, from moral victories and collapse, from
the loneliness of migration, from the helplessness of debt bondage, and
from love and longing which is so terrible because it is so hopeless.
(Mander, 2010a)
Instead we1 tried to use alternate methodologies based on empathy and
respect to understand phenomena like hunger and destitution. For two years,
a team of sensitive trained researchers, who included unlettered destitute
people themselves, was deployed to listen intently to the stories of people
who routinely live with hunger. The outcome was many fresh and important –
and incidentally heartbreaking – insights into the ways in which destitute
people cope with hunger, by cutting back on food intakes, by eating poiso-
nous tubers and grasses, by foraging and begging, by accepting humiliating
and low-paid work, by debt bondage, and by putting out small children to
work (Mander, 2008: 87). It highlighted the loneliness and social devalua-
tion of destitution and hunger; the anguish of being unable to feed one’s chil-
dren; the unreasonable choices between food and life-saving medicine, and
so on. These insights have been found invaluable by human rights activists
in campaigning for a law to secure the right to food as a legal right, and in
the design of the architecture of such a law, which is being debated and
actively considered by the government of India at the time of writing
(Mander, 2010b). Similar insights arose from listening to homeless people,
and this is being used for public policy advocacy for the rights of homeless
people in India (Mander, 2009: 287).
Whose Truth? The Role of the Researcher

I was involved with some colleagues in a large study on the practice of
untouchability against Dalits in rural India.2 We found very different find-
ings from those research teams which included Dalit researchers, compared
to those with researchers who were entirely from the ‘upper-castes’. In the
same villages, studying the same realities, the Dalit researchers tended to find
1 ‘We’ here refers to the Centre for Equity Studies, Delhi, a policy research and action group
avowedly dedicated to research to change policy and law in ways that promote justice and
the rights of impoverished and marginalized people.
2 The findings of this study are documented in Shah et al. (2006).
significantly higher numbers of cases of untouchability than non-Dalit

researchers. For instance, Dalit researchers would report discrimination
against Dalit children in schools, but upper caste research teams would not.
The mystery was investigated, and we found, for instance, that non-Dalit
researchers tended to not regard as discriminatory (but instead as ‘normal’)
the fact that Dalit children were separately seated at the back of the class-
room or during the midday school meals, but Dalit researchers recognized
these practices to be discriminatory and humiliating.
A great deal of survey-based social science research appears to be
‘objective’, but its findings are coloured by the social and political beliefs
and perspectives of the researchers. The problem of such intrinsic and
inevitable ‘bias’ is that it is unrecognized and unacknowledged, and the
analysis and presentation of findings is not qualified by the acknowledge-
ment of the possibility of such bias. Qualitative research, including
research based on listening to the lived stories of people – and their own
reconstructions of these realities – does not make similar claims of ‘objec-
tivity’, and therefore it is possible to qualify and assess the findings to a
much greater degree.
The required methodology in studies based on individual testimonies also
democratizes the relationship between the researcher and the subject of the
research. Portelli (1991: 31) points out:
An interview is an exchange between two subjects: literally a mutual

sighting. One party cannot really see the other unless the other can see
him or her in turn. The two interacting subjects cannot act together
unless some kind of mutuality is established. The field researcher, there-
fore, has an objective stake in equality, as a condition for a less dis-
torted communication and a less biased collection of data.
He feels that one way in which the researcher may reconcile her political
commitment with her research is due to the fact ‘that our presence may
facilitate meaningful change in the self-awareness of the people’ (Portelli,
1991: 44).
In research into poverty and discrimination, it is important also to build a
relationship of trust over time with the subjects of study, and this again can
yield very different insights as compared to a questionnaire-based survey.
I led a team of researchers3 to study reasons why Dalit parents did not send
their children to pre-school feeding centres in their villages, even though
their children were the most severely malnourished. In four different states,
we found a similar pattern of initial responses from parents, who tended to
3 In my capacity as Special Commissioner appointed by the Supreme Court of India in Writ
Petition 196/2001, People’s Union for Civil Liberties v. Union of India and Ors, to
monitor whether governments at state level are doing enough to prevent hunger and malnu-
trition through various food schemes.
Harsh Mander 260
blame themselves or their children (‘we do not have the time to take our
children to the centre’, or ‘our children are too naughty’). It was only after
persisting for many days and building a relationship of trust between the
researchers and the Dalit parents that very different answers emerged. The
parents of the Dalit children explained that they did not send their children
to the feeding centres because the upper caste workers at the feeding centre
tended to treat their children in many humiliating ways.
It is for this reason that engaged research, undertaken with empathy and
respect, responsibility and a democratic attitude, rather than its ‘detached’
equivalent, is often not less but more likely to yield best insights into
poverty, social exclusion and discrimination. In a later section, I elaborate
techniques of engaged research into individual people’s lives, and their per-
spectives and testimonies.
The Democratization of Knowledge

Among several other reasons why we should listen to people living in
poverty, one of the most important is that it leads to the democratization of
knowledge itself. There is something essentially democratic about the spoken
rather than the written word. It is a resource available to all people, regard-
less of race, class, gender, caste, and ethnicity (with the exception of speech
and hearing-impaired persons who develop their own languages of com-
munication). It has been used to transmit knowledge spatially and across
generations in most cultures. The written word, even more so when it is
expressed in the language and idiom of the dominant group, excludes the
majority of poor and marginalized people. It tends to discount, by impli-
cation, their wisdom and experience, their analysis and aspirations.
Robert Chambers (1983) led the development sector’s belated acknowl-
edgement that rural development professionals undervalue the knowledge
and experience of people living in poverty, and this failing contributes
greatly to faulty understanding of poverty and strategies to change it. He
called for, and accomplished in partnership with development professionals
worldwide, path-breaking research techniques which aimed at ‘professional
reversals’, by which development workers became ‘learners’ and people in
poverty become ‘teachers’ and ‘experts’. In particular, a range of method-
ologies was developed, which was broadly designated Participatory Rural
Analysis (PRA). Later, as similar tools were applied in urban areas, they
were further widened into Participatory Poverty Analysis (PPA). Its prac-
titioners use a variety of instruments such as mapping, trend analysis, tran-
sects, timelines, chronologies, modelling, diagramming, ranking and scoring
(Kumar, 2002). Typically, these methods are used with groups of poor
people facilitated by an outsider.
There is a great deal that has been achieved by these methodologies. Above
all, they have succeeded in bringing the analysis and aspirations of people
living in poverty into development planning and evaluation, to a much

greater degree than in the past. As summarized by Chambers (1997: 130):
The PRA experience has led to insights and discoveries: that local
people have largely unexpected capabilities for approval, analysis and
planning; that the behaviour and attitudes of outsiders are critical in
facilitation; that diagramming and visual sharing are popular and
powerful in expressing and analysing complexity.
Beyond the research techniques developed, participatory research methods
have also altered the unequal relationship of power between the researcher
and the researched. They have strengthened the confidence and collective
analysis of people living in poverty. A Tembomvura woman in Zimbabwe
said after a PRA exercise: ‘And we thought we were foolish because we
could not write. Yet look, we had all the information, inside us’
(Marindo-Ranganai, 1996: 188). There is irony in the fact that even human
rights workers often do not find it necessary to consult with or even inform
disadvantaged people whose battles they choose to fight, in courts, in gov-
ernment offices or on the streets. The impoverished and excluded people
tend to become over time peripheral to decisions about the battles that are
being fought in their name, and in theory ‘for’ them. Human rights practice
has tended to become more and more ‘professional’, as though the knowl-
edge of the problems of want and oppression, and their solutions, lie not
with those who live these experiences, but with those human rights pro-
fessionals who research them and fight on their ‘behalf’.
A great strength of participatory research has been precisely that it respects
the oral traditions, capacities and idioms of most people who live in poverty.
It does not demand literacy, or involve them in vertically imposed techniques
like questionnaires. It has succeeded in making development more account-
able. It is outside the scope of this article to review the full impact of
participatory techniques on poverty studies and development practice.
Nevertheless, it is acknowledged here that in its conception, and its best prac-
tice, it has succeeded in democratizing to a degree the knowledge around
both poverty and the ways to change it.
At the same time, some of the practices of participatory techniques world-
wide have become routinized and ritualized. Also, there are limitations that
have surfaced in the use of participatory techniques which involve working
with people in groups, which can at least partially be overcome by individual
life stories and histories. The first, and now possibly the most widely
acknowledged, limitation of the general practice of PRA is the ‘myth of the
community’. In the words of Guijt and Shah (1998: 3): ‘participatory pro-
cesses have been increasingly approached as technical, management solutions
to what are basically political issues, including the micro-politics of gender’.
They summarize that:
Harsh Mander 262
many participatory development initiatives do not deal well with the

complexity of community differences, including age, economic, reli-
gious, caste, ethnic and, in particular, gender. Looking back, it is
apparent that ‘community’ has often been viewed naively, or in practice
dealt with, as an harmonious and internally equitable collective. The
mythical notion of community cohesion continues to permeate much
participatory work, hiding the bias that favours the opinions and pri-
orities of those with more power and the ability to voice themselves
publicly. (Guijt and Shah (eds), 1998: xxi)
Individual testimonies that are carefully focused on the experiences of
people who are most in the margins – which we will elaborate in the next
section – carry the potential to overcome the dangers of research predicated
on mythical communities, because they begin with the acknowledgement of
difference.
Among other failings in the application of participatory techniques has
been that although group processes may throw up many more insights about
poverty than conventional statistical techniques, they still fail to capture
several aspects of the experience of living with poverty and exclusion. This is
because many of these are intensely personal to those who have undergone
the experience. People may be unwilling to share such experiences and feel-
ings in groups, even less in heterogeneous groups including people with
greater power.
Related to this is that several insights achieved from group processes are
relatively superficial, like a ‘snapshot’. What we may capture is the outcome,
not always the processes that led to that outcome; what we may miss is the
why and how. To carry forward the metaphor, we may learn much more by
seeing a full moving film about the individual, which describes more fully the
lived experience, than the ‘snapshot’ contained in a thick photo album. To
return to the Ghanaian informant referred to earlier – who said during a
PRA exercise that a person with leprosy does not die of leprosy or of
poverty, but of loneliness – he needed to be heard at length, in seclusion,
with empathy and support, to understand in depth what experiences led him
to this painful insight and observation about his life, and the experience of
living with leprosy.
In summary, participatory methods have paved fresh and significant path-
ways for democratizing knowledge and the ways that it is collected, evalu-
ated and used. They have yielded valuable insights for both researchers and
human rights practitioners about poverty. But by themselves, both statistical
and participatory methods are not enough to encompass a full understanding
of complex human and social phenomena like impoverishment and discrimi-
nation. They need to be complemented by research methods based on listen-
ing to people who live in poverty and with discrimination as they recall and
evaluate their lived experiences.
The Importance of Individual Testimonies

This section will discuss further research techniques including life histories,
life stories and case studies, which I describe together as ‘individual testimo-
nies’. The approaches of individual testimonies have many variations, but
have the common thread that they incorporate the actors’ points of view
within the study of the subject which is being investigated. The importance
of this is brought out by Becker (1970: 64), as follows:
To understand an individual’s behaviour, we must know how he (or
she) perceives the situation, the obstacles he (or she) believed he (or she)
had to face, the alternatives he (or she) saw opening up to him (or her).
We cannot understand the effects of the range of possibilities, delin-
quent subcultures, social norms and other explanations of behaviour
which are commonly invoked, unless we consider them from the actor’s
point of view.
A ‘life story’ is the story a person chooses to tell about the life he or she
has lived, told as completely and honestly as possible – what is remembered
of it, and what the teller wants others to know of it, usually as a result of a
guided interview by another. People’s narratives would include not just their
recollection of events, but also of their feelings about these events, and of
their perceptions, analysis and aspirations. The ‘life history’ (related but
somewhat distinct from the ‘life story’ methodology) has long been used in
anthropological field work. This is mainly a third person description of what
the subject of the research said and did, and not a verbatim recreation of the
words of the subject of the research (Atkinson, 1998).
The life history may also not be only about an entire life of the social
actor, but about a certain set of events or experiences. The latter may be
described as ‘single issue testimonies’, which focus not on the entire life of
the narrator but only on some specific aspect. Such life histories are useful to
understand people’s experiences of difficult situations like disasters, drought
or discrimination, how they cope, and what their analysis is of causation and
how causes can be combated. Equally, it may be useful to understand the
impact of specific programmes from the perspective of people whose lives the
programmes are supposed to change. Related to these are also ‘case studies’,
which describe aspects of individual people’s lives, which are often related to
specific deprivations, such as of land and housing, or experiences, such as a
disaster or riot, or government interventions, such as of micro-credit or
social security.
What is common to all these methods of individual testimonies is that in
order to actually hear and value people who are most invisible, voiceless,
and powerless in any society, these approaches try to seek them out, and to
listen to them with empathy, trust, and respect, in groups, but also individu-
ally. In listening to individual testimonies, their reconstruction of their lived
Harsh Mander 264
experience can help illuminate the processes of impoverishment and

exclusion, their coping mechanisms, worldview and aspirations. These indi-
vidual testimonies are the result of ‘free-ranging, open-ended interviews
around a series of topics, drawing on personal memory and experience’ of
the individual (Slim and Thompson, 1993: 1).
Some other benefits of individual testimony are that it:
† shows the complexity of individual experience – people’s lives are not sec-
torally divided, there are frequently no neat divisions between the different
aspects of their lives, and there may be contradictions and conflict, as well
as connections;
† brings home the reality of everyday life – the spaces in between significant
events which constitute the majority of people’s lives;
† reveals generally hidden spheres of experience (for example, family life),
and hidden connections (between, say, social relationships and economic
decisions, past experience and future priorities). In the development
context in particular, it can shed useful light on links and gaps, between
policymaking and implementation (Slim and Thompson, 1993: 3;
Bennett, 1999) (emphasis of the author).
However, techniques of personal testimony have been attacked on many
grounds, including the lack of objectivity, imprecision, and difficulties in
ensuring the veracity of the data. But these very failures, that the narratives
are ‘subjective, anecdotal, selective, partial and individual are actually the
strengths of the technique because ultimately, they tell us less about the fine
details of events and experience than about their meaning for people. . . what
people believe to be important and true, and why’ (Slim and Thompson,
1993: 1) (emphasis of the author).
To reiterate our earlier observation: all research is a search for truth, and
truth is an effort to illuminate reality. But when the subject of research is
human lives and social processes, there is no ‘objective reality’ of the intervie-
wee that can be elicited by any interview. At best what an interview can yield
is a person’s interpretation, a conscious or unconscious mediation of her
memories, of a particular experience or event or of a series of such experi-
ences or events. Therefore, an individual testimony expresses a person’s own
subjective narrative rendering of her own experiences.
What is more, it is most unlikely that exactly the same description by
exactly the same interviewee would emerge from interviews by two or more
different researchers of varying skills, perspectives, gender, age or social
background. The way an interview is conducted, the questions asked, the
attitude of the researcher towards the interviewee, would all greatly influence
the outcomes of this study. Therefore the subjective description of reality
that forms the content of any interview is the outcome not only of the subjec-
tive mediation of her experience by the interviewee, but also by the inter-
viewer, as stated earlier. (However, whereas this is admitted, an effort must
be made in practice to reduce as far as possible subjectivity on the part of the

researcher. The reader also should be informed about the ideological or
social perspective that the researcher brings to the narrative.)
There are further subjectivities imposed inevitably by the limitations of
language. Riessman (1993: 10) speaks of the ‘inevitable gap between the
experience as I lived it and the communication about it’. Nietzche (quoted in
Jameson, 1972; and Riessman, 1993) eloquently describes the barriers
imposed by the ‘prison house of language’. People living in different social
and cultural situations may have several variations in articulation, born from
social, cultural or even physical contexts (the last refers for instance to a
speech-impaired person). There would be differences of idiom, the import of
words and phrases, in varying contexts. These problems would be further
aggravated in the process of translation, which would very often occur
because the language of the interviewee and the language in which the
research is being conducted may be very different.
We must also be alert for nuances of language, of idiom. In an interview
with an educated sex worker, I noticed that she used the English language
words ‘field work’ to describe the phases of her life when she engaged in sex
work. In social work and public service, the term ‘field work’ has acquired a
soft halo, associated with giving of one’s time to people in need, in difficult
physical conditions, and offering service. Since the sex worker being inter-
viewed was educated up to high school, her use of the term ‘field work’ to
describe her vocation led me to speculate whether it held for her the same
positive connotations.
What may be far more important than what a person says is how a person
says it, or what a person does not say. A pause, a whisper, a sigh, an aside,
sarcasm, laughter, body language, or reluctance to speak, all may be ex-
tremely significant. The skill of the researcher would need to be what can
best be described as the ability to listen to a person’s silences. We may also
be able to more fully interpret a person’s experiences by observation of body
language and of practices, rather than words. For example, a woman
engaged because of her caste and gender in the socially most despised pro-
fession in India of manually cleaning with her hands human excreta in
public toilets and carrying this excreta on her head, when interviewed by a
human rights activist, initially denied that she was engaged in this profession
(Mander, 2001b: 42). Her denial in a literal sense was an untruth, but it tells
a more important truth of humiliation and shame experienced by the inter-
viewee. The ‘untruth’ of her denial, because of shame, was therefore as much
part of her reality, as her actual involvement in the work. It is such denials,
such silences, that we must be able to hear in these stories.
At the same time there may be a great deal communicated consciously or
unconsciously through deeds. It is therefore important to spend time with
the person, at work and in the personal sphere, if she consents to this and it
does not interfere with her privacy. During my interview with the manual
Harsh Mander 266
scavenger in the large public toilet in which she works, I was struck not only
when I observed the degradation of the vocation, but also when I saw how
spotless her sari was, and the bright fresh flowers she wore on her well-oiled
hair (Mander, 2001b: 39). On that same head, she would carry leaking
baskets full of human shit. But the defiant cleanliness of her appearance told
me more than most of her spoken story.
And finally, an individual’s experience has meaning in a larger historical,
social, cultural, and political context. Therefore, for instance, when I recorded
the life history of a survivor of the Bhopal gas tragedy, I wove into the narra-
tive essential events about the gas leak and its legal and political aftermath
(Mander, 2001b: 1). Without these, the reader would not be able to fully inter-
pret and comprehend the events of the survivor’s life. The experience of the
social actor, as described by the social actor herself, and elicited and recorded
by the researcher, has enormous sociological value. This experience can be
recorded in the first person language of the social actor herself. But I prefer to
record these as third person accounts, because I believe that a third person
account acknowledges the mediation of the researcher, of language, and of
wider socio-historical processes, as well as the non-verbal communication of
the person being interviewed (Mander, 2001a: 4–5).
The Ethics of Collecting Individual Testimonies

The ethics of life history and other individual testimony collection are vital
because ‘your sources are not dead documents or statistics, but living people’
(Slim and Thompson, 1993: 4). What is more, these are people who – in
most cases of poverty and development research – are far less powerful than
the researcher and therefore are deeply vulnerable. It is vital for the
researcher to enter into such investigation with responsibility, and real
respect. There must be great sensitivity to the fact that in any such interview
there is inherently a relationship of unequal power between the researcher
and interviewee, to the consistent advantage of the former (Asif, 2001).
Therefore the responsibility rests on the shoulders of the researcher to estab-
lish a more egalitarian inter-relationship in this acknowledged collaborative
enterprise between the investigator and the narrator.
We have already observed that among the values that this methodology
requires from the researcher are ‘patience, humility, willingness to learn from
others and to respect views and values which you may not share’ (Slim and
Thompson, 1993: 3 – 4). There may be many elements of distance between
the interviewee and the researcher, of class, caste, gender, education,
language, idiom and age. The onus is on the researcher to bridge these
chasms, and to build a bond of mutual trust and respect.
I believe it is vital also for the interviewer to aspire to be as non-
judgemental, sensitive and accepting as possible, to try to take no moral pos-
itions overtly or by implication, particularly when dealing with people who
follow a different set of social mores from the interviewer. It is difficult for the
researcher to estimate what ethical choices she would have made when placed
in as difficult circumstances as the person who is being ‘researched’. I may
otherwise harshly judge those who sell their bodies to survive the streets or
famine, including homosexual transactions, or youth and children who steal to
eat, and so on. But I have no way of knowing what choices I would have
made in the same dire circumstances. I have friends who do admirable and
compassionate work with prisoners under trial: they tell me they are willing to
extend legal aid and counselling to all prisoners, except those charged with
rape, child abuse or ‘dowry burning’ (a peculiarly grotesque Indian crime, of
setting aflame a bride who does not bring in sufficient dowry). There is great
wisdom and compassion in Mother Teresa’s words: ‘If you judge people, you
have no time to love them’. But both a researcher and a human rights prac-
titioner may legitimately argue that they never claim or aspire to love those
they research – or serve, or fight for or with; therefore they can reserve their
personal right of judgement about these people. However, would I have the
right to carry and communicate these judgements against people charged with
crimes I regard to be dreadful, if I choose to ‘research’ their lives? ‘They’ did
not invite ‘us’ to research them. There are no easy answers.
Respect must be intrinsic, but it also requires certain skills which the
researcher must consciously learn. In the conducting of the interview, the
major skills of the researcher would be of active listening, of not just treating
the subjects with respect, but actually communicating this respect to the
person being interviewed, drawing the respondents out, encouraging them to
speak freely and at length, and supplementing questions to elicit the
maximum of details. An interview in which the researcher, by words or
body language, is completely passive, is bound to fail. On the other hand,
one in which the researcher dominates, interrupts, structures excessively –
on the basis of the interview schedule, research agenda or predictions of the
researcher – is also bound to fail.
Respect is reflected in many ways. The interviewer must be sensitive to local
customs, including those related to interaction between genders, and respect
privacy and the choices of interviewees. The interview must be held at a place
and time convenient to her. Bennett (1999: 22–23) gives an example of how
respect is put into practice:
An interviewer in Peru was careful to give his elderly narrator the

respectful title ‘Don’, and took care to ask for personal details in a non-
obtrusive or judgemental way. Instead of simply asking if he was lit-
erate (as some interviewers did) he enquired: ‘Tell me, Don Ignacio, did
you have the opportunity to go to school?’
Another well-known ethical rule in researching life testimonies is to secure

the informed consent of the person whose story is being investigated. It is
Harsh Mander 268
important to let a person know in advance the purpose of the interview,

whether it is for research, publication or to assist planning for action, and to
maintain confidentiality if this is the choice of the interviewee (Mander
2001a: 6).
Because in such research we are dealing with often highly vulnerable
human beings, there is an obligation not to breach trust in any way. In case
it is possible for the researcher to commit to further action, form a more
enduring relationship with the interviewee, or engage with the issues of injus-
tice and denial that she raises, these commitments must be scrupulously hon-
oured. But in case the researcher does not feel able to make these
commitments, nothing should be done to communicate directly or by impli-
cation that commitments are being made.
Also, great care should be taken to ensure that the interview itself should
not render a person more vulnerable, such as – to take one example – by
breach of trust of a woman’s confidences about her husband’s violence.
Research into failures to pay minimum wages or into debt bondage or land
reforms may similarly threaten the people whose testimonies have been
recorded by the researcher, after the researcher withdraws.
To reiterate a theme which has run through this entire article, the most
important ethic in research based on individual testimonies is of engagement,
caring and being personally accountable to the subjects of one’s research. In
research connected with people who live in desperate situations – such as of
hunger, destitution, homelessness and ongoing conflict – an ethic of caring
and personal accountability also includes, I believe, an ethical obligation not
to abandon the person who is the subject of research, especially in life-
threatening situations. Researchers, journalists and human rights activists,
for instance, document stories of starvation deaths, and are justly critical of
governments which, even after their reports are published, do not come to
the rescue of the survivors. But very often in effect they do the same. The
story of the destitute family in which members died of prolonged hunger is
investigated and documented; sometimes the widow or children are given a
small sum of money – often not even this – and then the researcher moves
on. There is a high likelihood that the family which lost members to star-
vation will continue to live with conditions of destitution and hunger –
aggravated if the person who died was a breadwinner – and possibly other
people in the same family or community would also eventually die because
the situation of their lives does not change. Researchers and human rights
activists may legitimately claim that they do not have the resources to
support all those people whom they investigate who subsist in very difficult
and life-threatening circumstances, and such an ethical obligation may even
paralyse and stymie potentially invaluable research. However, I believe that
researchers and human rights activists must commit themselves to try to do
whatever they can, such as linking them to local government programmes, or
work by non-governmental organizations.
It is significant and illuminating for poverty researchers to listen to people

beyond statistics. But if we research people who live in conditions of destitu-
tion or violence which threaten their lives, or which render them vulnerable
and hopeless, we cannot ethically only extract our research from them, and
write and publish their life histories.
And then just walk away.
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‘Words from the Heart’: Researching

Keywords: individual testimonies; participatory research; social exclusion;

It is often believed that social science research must be detached, impersonal,

Several requirements typify positivist methodological approaches. First,

of dialogue, based on mutual respect. A third is an ethic of caring, especially

The Experience of Poverty and Exclusion

so when the purpose is to study phenomena like exclusion and discrimi-

society. We have hardly started at the beginning of this process. I mean

The large majority of studies of poverty rely primarily on quantitative

A flourishing intellectual cottage industry has grown in India, and

Whose Truth? The Role of the Researcher

significantly higher numbers of cases of untouchability than non-Dalit

An interview is an exchange between two subjects: literally a mutual

The Democratization of Knowledge

living in poverty into development planning and evaluation, to a much

many participatory development initiatives do not deal well with the

The Importance of Individual Testimonies

To understand an individual’s behaviour, we must know how he (or

experience can help illuminate the processes of impoverishment and

be made in practice to reduce as far as possible subjectivity on the part of the

The Ethics of Collecting Individual Testimonies

An interviewer in Peru was careful to give his elderly narrator the

Another well-known ethical rule in researching life testimonies is to secure

important to let a person know in advance the purpose of the interview,

It is significant and illuminating for poverty researchers to listen to people

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