The fieldworker and the field

by M.N. Srinivas

This is a paperback of a 1979 hardback which broke new ground in social investigation. There have, since, been other books on the experience of fieldwork, but this remains a much cited work. The eighteen essays in the volume describe the experiences of field research mainly in rural and urban India, and in complex organizations such as a hospital, a factory and a trade union. There are also accounts of work in Japan, Sri Lanka and New Mexico. This is an informative and helpful guide to those about to embark on their own field research.

Genres: Anthropology

308 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 1980

About the author

Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas was born on November 16, 1916 in Mysore, although his parents were from Arakere, a village 20 miles (32 km) away. Srinivas, the youngest of four sons, studied in Mysore. He took an honours degree in social philosophy from My sore University, "an ambitious programme, covering an immense variety of subjects, which would have daunted any undergraduate anywhere" he recalled in his interview to Fuller. Srinivas has written about how, as an "overprotected Brahmin boy", he experien ced his first "culture shocks not more than fifty yards from the back wall of our house... The entire culture of Bandikere was visibly and olfactorily different from that of College Road. Bandikere was my Trobriand Islands, my Nuerland, my Navaho country and what have you. In retrospect, it is not surprising that I became an anthropologist, an anthropologist all of whose fieldwork was in his own country."

From Mysore, Srinivas moved to Bombay and later to Oxford University. He did his Masters under G.S. Ghurye, during which he did a dissertation he later published as Marriage and Family in Mysore (1942). Srinivas would later recall that the seeds f or his ideas on sanskritisation were sown during his fieldwork for his M.A. dissertation. At Oxford, Srinivas worked under the two leading anthropologists of the day, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and E.E Evans-Pritchard. In his interview to Fuller, Srinivas spea ks of this period as one of both intellectual excitement and growth.

Srinivas returned to India in 1951, and joined the Department of Sociology of M.S. University, Baroda. He formulated a new syllabus for the department and built it into a reputed centre of socio-anthropological teaching and research. In February 1959, h e was invited to Delhi University to establish and head the Department of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, which was recognised as a centre for advanced study in 1968. Srinivas attracted the best talent to the department and built it into one of the leading departments in the country in the field, combining sociology with social anthropological approaches. Its competitor at the Delhi School was the Economics Department which had an array of distinguished economists such as K.N. Raj, Amartya S en, Pranab Bardhan, Mrinal Dutta Chaudhuri and others on its faculty. In his interview to Fuller, Srinivas hints at the competition and tension between these two strong departments. "Marxism was the dominant ideology of the economists - Marxism and macro -economics. They laughed at the kind of things we were doing. We were studying kinship, caste, villages, religion, and they looked upon us as backward people," Srinivas told Fuller.

In 1972, Srinivas returned to his home State and joined the Institute for Social and Economic Change set up by V.K.R.V. Rao in Bangalore as Joint Director, a position he gave up in 1979. He joined the National Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS) as the J. R.D. Tata Visiting Professor in 1992 and started a unit of sociology and social anthropology in 1997. He and R.L. Kapur set up the Women's Policy, Research and Advocacy Unit at the NIAS. His interest in issues relating to gender began with his participat ion in the Status of Women in India Report, 1975.

After shifting to Bangalore, Srinivas continued to write on those themes that flowed from his early anthropological work - caste, modernisation, sanskritisation, social change, gender, the practice of social anthropology, and so on. His most recent publi cation, Indian Society through Personal Writings (1998), dedicated to his old friend, novelist R.K. Narayan, is a collection of essays - some biographical, some on caste disputes in Rampura, an account ("idiosyncratic, if not capricious") of Banga lore, and so on. Interestingly, in the book Village, Caste, Gender and Method (1998), he also included two short stories.

Reviews

[Chandni · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book does NOT read well in 2021. Almost exclusively written by Brahmin sociologists, 'discovering' fieldwork. The ideas around women being discouraged from fieldwork in rural India felt particularly jarring.