LA 1730 Anthropology and

Media
Instructor- Dr. Haripriya Narasimhan, IIT Hyderabad
Lecture 1
January 4, 2022
Introduction to the course
• What is anthropology?
• What is media?
• What do we mean by ‘media’s influence’?
• Is media influenced by society?
• Or is society influenced by media?
• Or is it both ways?
• Can ‘Anthropology and Media’ help us understand what is going on
around us?
The discipline of anthropology

What is anthropology?
- A subject of social science
- Similar to sociology
- Objective- to study ‘society’ (British Anthropology) or ‘culture’ (American Anthropology)
- It’s also called ‘ethnology’ (ethnos means ‘nations’)
- Started with studying indigenous peoples, called ‘tribes’ across the world
- Even today, anthropologists are seen as experts on indigenous peoples
- But they have slowly started studying people in urban areas, both rich and poor and middle class
- Today anthropologists study infrastructures like electricity, water etc
- -In India, those who do research in urban areas are called sociologists and those who study
indigenous peoples are called anthropologists
Famous anthropologists-?
Margaret Mead (1901-1978)
Kathy Reichs)
Jane Goodall
Yo Yo Ma
David Graeber
Paul Farmer (1959-)
• Professor at Harvard

• Founded ‘Partners in Health’, a

well known NGO that works on
health issues

• Read more at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pa
ul_Farmer

With Melinda Gates of the Gates Foundation

Influential Anthropologists in India

VERRIER ELWIN (1902-1964)

M.N.Srinivas (1916-1999)
Famous anthropologists from India

Arjun Appadurai

Akhil Gupta
What do anthropologists study?
• Social hierarchies and inequalities- caste, race, class, gender
• Religion
• Politics
• Gender
• Family- “Kinship”
• Economy
• Language, Folklore
• Health
• Media
• Technology
How do anthropologists do research?
• Living in and with the community/group we study
• ‘Participant observation’* (will be explained in the next slide)
• Fluency in local language
• Knowledge of local customs, power structures
• Sensitivity to people’s likes and dislikes
• Collecting Data- by interview, survey, random sampling, snowball
sampling, observation
• Analysis- nuanced, in-depth knowledge of the topic across cultures
• Final ‘product’- Ethnography
Anthropologists who have worked on media