Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
This paper examines the methodological and ethical challenges the author experienced while conducting ethnographic research with a spiritual community in India between 2022 and 2024. Focusing on the author’s fieldwork with this eclectic New Age organization that outwardly promotes pluralism and universalism, this paper explores her experience of uncovering the group’s—and its members’—affiliations with Hindutva and patterns of political exclusion. Drawing on scholarship on right-wing movements, it then analyzes how anthropologists and ethnographers navigate alienation, ideological discord, and strategic engagement while considering the broader implications of these challenges for fieldwork in India today.