Category: Blog
-
Doing Anthropology During Covid19
It is useful, as an intellectual exercise, to gauge the effectiveness of methods and processes you are employing while you are doing Anthropology. This is something supervisors constantly encourage their students to undertake while they are in the field and while they are writing up. This helps to understand the strengths and weaknesses of one’s…
-
Staying ‘Alive’ with PhD: Thinking Back to Where You Started it all
Have you ever thought how you ended up with your particular thesis topic? Some of you will have your thesis topic handed to you by a supervisor, but many will have chosen a path deliberately. A few of us might have developed a craving during the childhood, prompted by listening to certain stories or reading certain comics or tourist guide books. For some of…
-
Books have memories, and they certainly do!
In 2008, while I was walking with my friends through the alleyways of Calicut town, where sellers of used-books occupied the verandas of Sunday-closed shops, I picked up Katharine Graham’s Personal History for 40 rupees. Such book-hunting, or rather spending time with my friends to converse and learn English was a normal affair during Sundays…
-
How I Decided on iPhone for PhD Fieldwork
Even before heading out for the fieldwork, I feel I have implanted my virtual self there. This happens through my anxious preparations for proposal presentation, drafting ethics application, submitting forms for travel approval and much more. Have you felt the same? Apart from all such anxieties, one of the confusions I have been fiddling with…
-
When I met Dostoyevsky
I have wandered the streets, nooks and corners and alleys of Saint Petersburg with Raskolnikov. I have felt tremors and numbness in my legs when I had to accompany him to the old-lady’s room. I have often got entangled in the arguments of Mitya, Vanya and Alyosha and lost in thoughts. But how I met…
P.C. Saidalavi 