Village life starts early – people are already up and about from around 5.30am – and I try to do the same, albeit with varying degrees of success. Today, however, I really must leave my mud hut in time: I’m supposed to meet Mangra, one of the adivasi (tribal) villagers I’ve befriended, at 6am outside his house, and follow him to an area at the back of the village where he and many others usually start their day. When we arrive, the place is already quite busy: around numerous small black piles, people are packing coal into large woven sacks, and loading them on bicycles. Like Mangra, they make their living primarily as coal peddlers: collecting coal, illegally, from the edges of the edges of the nearby government mine, and taking it, on bicycles which they push, to sell on the highway on the other side of the village, to households and restaurants that use it as cooking fuel. We are in Jharkhand, eastern India: one of the country’s coal mining strongholds, as well as home to a significant tribal – and largely marginalised – population. With much of the coal reserves lying in areas they inhabit, tribal communities and especially livelihoods have been among the most impacted by the expanding coal industry in the region. Land acquisition by mining companies, declining agriculture, and lack of employment opportunities have together led large numbers of people to turn to illegal coal peddling, making use of the coal produced by mining projects near their villages. Through trying to understand, in my fieldwork, the lived experiences of tribals who depend on gathering and selling coal, my intention was to engage with a few broader issues that have been increasingly occupying anthropologists: about the rising masses, globally, of people trying to eke out a precarious living in various informal economies, the processes of inequality they are caught up in, and the ways in which they are dealing with them. The condition of tribal coal peddlers in Jharkhand seemed like a particularly apt context in which to explore, ethnographically, some of the questions that these issues raise. ‘Ethnographically’, here, meant to study the everyday lives of some of the people involved in gathering and selling coal: to spend over a year in a village where they live; to observe and participate in, as far as possible, their daily routines and activities; to ask and listen to their stories and views about themselves and their world – all in order to try and get a sense of how it feels to be in their position, on the margins of economy and society. Being able to do this required, basically, making friends with coal peddlers, and, more generally, having my presence accepted in the village. Unlike in stories about seamless ethnographic immersion into a new community, in reality this can be a tedious, less-than-smooth process. Around the beginning of my fieldwork, when I just arrived at the village, most people in it simply didn’t understand why I’m there and what it is that I want to do. In one particularly unpleasant incident, I was accosted, during a stroll around some of the houses, by a local man who accused me of coming to the village only to steal from its people. Others, however, were more receptive to my presence – after all, I was also somewhat of an amusing attraction – and agreed to sit down for a chat. Some of these chats led to more conversations, and developed clumsily – on my part at least – into a kind of relationship. More or less by default, the people who opened up to me the most became my main informants: those who were willing to share with me their opinions about the effect of industrial mining on the community, who didn’t mind my (sometimes ignorant or irritating) questions about work and labour relations, and who didn’t find too odd my requests to accompany them when they go looking for coal in the mine’s dump, to the weekly market, to work in the field in the monsoon season – or in other practices that make up their routines. Indeed, apart from (mostly informal) interviews, mostly while visiting people in their houses, much of my fieldwork involves spending time with them in the places where they and other villagers carry out their day-to-day practices – of work or other obligations, with family or friends, in the village or outside of it. Sometimes there would be a lot to do and observe; other days would be duller, with not too much going on, and I would find myself wondering how to pass the time. Even on more active days, though, participant observation can easily be perceived simply as a form of hanging out; in fact I’m pretty sure that this is how many people in the village – not to mention my own research assistant – think that I often spend my days. Admittedly, doing ethnography does include a good amount of hanging out: for me, it has been part of the ongoing process of observing, listening, and trying, in as non-pushy way as possible, to become more comfortable with people in the community, and for them to get used to you. But ethnographic ‘hanging out’ is very different from just hanging out: if done properly, it involves both meticulous preparation and pre-planning, and constant alertness and awareness. Essentially, every minute in the field requires acting like a human recording device, continually trying to absorb, capture and record – mentally, on a sheet of paper, or in your phone’s notes app – as many details as possible of what’s happening, in order to try and make the most of the limited time the ethnographer has with the people he or she are researching. Moreover, ethnographic hanging out is not done without purpose, in a random place you happen to be in, or with people who happen to come your way. Rather, behind it lies a lot of thought about exactly where and with whom to spend your time. For doing ethnography, ultimately, is much about situating yourself in the right place: the one where the people, events and interactions are likely to generate the most fruitful data for the research, and, not less importantly, where is it possible for you to work as an ethnographer. Before settling on the village in which I’m now based, I spent a significant amount of time scouting for a field site – a crucial yet less often discussed part of fieldwork. This entailed many hours of driving in a small Suzuki Maruti, visiting different villages in different areas, collecting basic preliminary data, and trying to assess their suitability for the research. My selection of field site in the end was based on various factors, both research-related and practical: for example, a livelihood scenario that included selling coal but also other types of work – to be able to understand coal peddling in a wider context; manageable number of households and spatial structure – to be able to get to know as many people as possible in the village and get a grasp of the community as a whole; possible access – that is to be able to find, through my contacts in the region, someone in the village who could be my first point of entry to the community; and relative vicinity to the nearest town – where I would need to go occasionally to back up and go through my notes, and write progress reports. The concern with where to best place myself as an ethnographer also continued into my actual fieldwork in the village: life in a community invariably consists of multiple, interrelated social aspects and domains – livelihoods, kinship, rituals, politics, and so on – which can also stretch across different hamlets and sites within the village and its surroundings. All this represents an amount and variety of ethnographic data that at times can certainly be overwhelming. In order not go get lost, I find it useful to keep going back to the main questions I want to explore, and continuously examine what the most productive locations and occurrences in my field site are for this purpose: for example, those where I can actively take part in the action, or where social interactions between different groups come to the surface. But at the same time, I try to keep my eyes and ears open to things that might extend beyond my direct research questions, but which I notice play an important role in the lives of my informants. While it’s essential to have a research plan to follow, it’s no less important to be able to put it aside when needed and follow where conversations, events and people lead you. Hanging out ethnographically therefore also involves a constant need to balance between focus and openness, structure and improvisation. As I hope I managed to give a sense of, it is an activity that occupies you mentally more or less fully – which is probably why, in bad ethnographic practice, often at the end of day I’m simply too tired to type up my notes.Itay Noy is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics (LSE). His PhD project, for which he’s currently doing fieldwork, focuses on livelihoods in a tribal community in eastern India’s coal mining tracts. He previously worked as a consultant on social protection and policy for UNICEF and the German Development Agency in South and Southeast Asia.