Paper short abstract:

This paper explores epistemological issues relating to 'truth' as an attribute of anthropological knowledge, based on fieldwork on same-sex sexual lives and life-worlds in West Bengal, India.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the experiences of people of same-sex sexuality living in regional towns in West Bengal, India. The paper is especially concerned with ways in which a sense of sexual subjectivity may not be relevant or cognizable to people in this context. People who took part in the research often refuted, or demurred at, any sense of sexual identity or subjectivity in favour of more indeterminate and indirect means of conceiving and practicing intimate relationships with people of the same sex. As such, such relationships, or connections, where typically characterized by evasiveness and indeterminacy, a way of 'being-in-the-world' that was at odds with the encroachment of public health HIV prevention interventions into this area, that sought to determine, describe and enumerate same-sex sexualities, and especially male-to-male sexual subjects. As an anthropologist, working in this context, one was predominantly aware that gathering 'facts' about sexual lives and life-worlds was intrinsically partial or inadequate as an ethnographic approach, since the characteristic feature of research participants lives was that they were characterized by an ambivalent relationship to fact or truth. This engendered broader questions about 'the facts of life.' In what ways are lives in general lived or narrated fictitiously? Are lives most meaningfully described outside of any paradigmatic claim to truth? Conceiving sexual life-worlds in these terms becomes especially complex when advocating 'up' from ethnographic work, seeking to influence broader policy and programming paradigms, for example. Such concerns are explored in this paper via my own experiences of working within national level HIV

prevention planning in India and also through reflections on the experiences of sexual health outreach workers and sexual rights advocate in West Bengal.