Along the Grain of One’s Own Diary
A 2005 Field Journal as an Archive of Elite–Rural Encounter in Southern Punjab
Keywords:
field diary, autoethnography, structure of feeling, rural Punjab, travel writing, archive, Musharraf era, internal OrientalismAbstract
This article reads a five-day field diary—kept by an undergraduate during a 2005 social-sciences village study in the Khanewal district of southern Punjab—as an archival document rather than a resource for personal recollection. Adopting Ann Laura Stoler’s practice of reading “along the grain” and drawing on life-writing theory’s distinction between the narrating and the narrated self, it treats the diary as an unusual archive: one whose archivist and subject are the same person, separated by two decades. It mines the text for the affective texture and unspoken assumptions of a particular class and generation: English-medium, faintly Marxist, post-9/11 metropolitan Pakistani youth of the Musharraf years. Through four movements—the pastoral gaze, the media-saturated “untouched” village, the politics of naming, and the ethics of the fieldwork encounter—the article argues that the diary at once deploys and dismantles an internal-Orientalist optic, and that its very contradictions are legible as what Raymond Williams calls a structure of feeling. A concluding section turns the same analytic suspicion on the present reading. The aim is neither confession nor nostalgia, but a method: reading one’s own past text as a historical source.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Muhammad Mahboob Ahmad, Adnan Tariq (Author)
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