Travelling East as Walter Kurtz: identity, performance, and collaboration in Goa, India

There has been a renewed intellectual concern with the politics of geographical research in recent years, which has expressed, at times, the need for an engagement between the often separate worlds of academia and activism. Interventions by critical geographers such as Ian Maxey, and feminist geographers, including Cindi Katz, Heidi Nast, Gillian Rose, and J-K Gibson-Graham, have provided important insights into the political commitment geographers bring to their research, critical and reflexive forms of engagement, and the politics of fieldwork, representational strategies, and collaborative research. This paper examines the author's collaborative critical engagement with two organisations-the Goa Foundation and the Jagrut Goenkaranchi Fouz (Vigilant Goan Army)involved in resisting tourism development in Goa, India. Collaboration took several forms, particularly the author masquerading as a tour operator, Walter Kurtz, in order to elicit information concerning the contravention of Goan environmental laws by hotel developers. Drawing, in particular, upon the insights of the aforementioned feminist geographers concerning identity, difference, and power in the conducting of fieldwork, I examine the problematic ethical and power relations that were encountered during the performance of collaborative research. In so doing, I argue for a relational and reflexive ethics of research that is attentive to difference in seeking a common ground with resisting others.