This article brings anthropologist and research assistant into mutually reflective critique of one another, the researcher-assistant dynamic, and the challenges of fieldwork in contemporary India. The authors have worked together in the politically charged, ethnologically saturated context of tribal' Darjeeling since 2006. To realize the potential of their partnership, Middleton and Pradhan were forced to come to creative terms with the problematic legacy of anthropology in South Asia. Working with - and ultimately through - the colonialities at hand, they have pursued a postcolonial ethnography' replete with new objects of analysis, new modes of study, and new forms of ethnographic connectivity. Asking what made them work as a dynamic duo and what ethnographic possibilities exist in the postcolonial era, ethnographer and assistant here come together to reflect upon and reproduce the dialogics of ethnographic practice, so as to explore the characters, conditions, and im/possibilities of contemporary ethnography - postcolonial and otherwise.
