The purpose of this course is to introduce you to qualitative methods of enquiry in social sciences.
Starting with the rules of observation and description and ending with the techniques of interpretation of collected information, this course will cover the various steps a scholar canonically follows to ‘do research’: from the formulation of a research question to defining a problematic, from collecting secondary sources to conducting first field observations, from drawing a research design to do fieldwork and conduct interviews, to analyze the material collected to finally writing. The main outcome of this course is the writing of a full-fledged research paper.
This course also aims at introducing you to three broad streams of scholarship:
- One from the past: village studies, or questioning about rural or agrarian change in India.
- Two more contemporary: the anthropology of politics and the anthropology of the state.
The questions of power and social dominance will be transversal to those three streams.
