Posts Tagged ‘Anthropology’
Desi Girls – MA thesis available
Posted by Johanna in Anthropology, Gender, India on november 10th, 2009
My MA dissertation on Delhi girls “Desi Girls – a stydy of young urban middle class girls’ expressions and negotiations of gender” is now to be found online, feel free to download and spread! Thank you.
Just click on this link, and you need to search for the title Desi girls in the first field.
Abstract:
This thesis attempts to understand how gender is expressed and negotiated in the everyday lives of young urban girls in South Delhi. To approach the topic of gender I engaged in participant observation including semi-structured interviews and spending time with young middle-class girls during two months in Delhi at the end of 2008. The girls I encountered in the field are all college students in a phase of transition; being young, educated and of marriageable age.
In constructing a body of knowledge with a foundation in the theoretical framework of discourse analysis, I illustrate how institutions like marriage, family, societal norms, space, and relations between the sexes are juxtaposed in the area of gender. This thesis reveals how gender identity is constructed not as individual accounts, but as juxtapositions of perspectives of individual agency and manifestations of discourses.
Marriage in Delhi is commonly arranged by the parents and is considered a union in which gender needs to be re-negotiated. Aware of the patriarchal ethos imbuing their society, the informants are preparing for the after-marriage talk. After marriage their individual freedom lies in the hands of their husbands, therefore they intend to negotiate with their husbands-to-be to have a marriage based on equality.
Being a Desi girl is a paradox: on one hand they want to be good girls – subservient, humble and obedient – but on the other hand they are negotiating and challenging the normative behaviour when it comes to issues like marriage, go out pubing, or to talking back to their parents. In this thesis, I investigate the societal femininity discourse and the possible discrepancy between the discourse and the actual behaviour. I have concluded that the concept of negotiation plays a key role in the Delhi girls’ constructions of gender.
Key words: Delhi, Gender, Girls, Middle class, Discourse analysis
Your virtual you
Posted by Johanna in Anthropology, Global on september 15th, 2009
There is a debate in Swedish news media regarding diseased peoples facebook profiles, do we honour them by letting the profile remain as a virtual bversion of the deas person, or is it simply disrespectful? In the infomation age – death is no longer definite. I have previously ecountered virtual cities in the anthropological article by Khosravi and Graham (in Reordering Public and Private in Iranian Cyberspace, 2002) .The example in the article is a city destroyed by war is virtually existing online. This online virtual sphere is becoming more and more emergent to research, I stress the concept Anthropology 2.0 because I believe that there is so much to be investigated in what we call ‘cyberspace’. Further reading on cyberspace research I recommend is of course one of ,my favourite books ‘Coming of age in Second Life’ by Tom Boellstorff, 2008 and ‘The Internet – an ethnographical approach’ by Miller and Slater, 2000. Please let me know if you have any more tips for further reading.
Anthropology 2.0
Posted by Johanna in Anthropology, Global, India, Popular culture on september 10th, 2009
Conducting my research in Delhi in November and December 2008 I did a classical anthropological fieldwork in an upper class market in South Delhi. I choose a popular cafe as my field and all my initial meetings with informants took place there. On the initial meetings, hanin out with girls at the cafe I began too see a pattern. They kept asking me if I was to be found on the social networking site Facebook. My group of informants where to a large extent engaged in this social network site, actually I did not encounter any South Delhi girl who where not found on Facebook…
I created a Facebook profile. I concluded my research days logging in to the Facebook chat where I always found someone of my informants. The social network profile became a tool of great utility for me, facilitating me in keeping contact with informants on a regular basis. Time of the day when we did not find actual time to meet me in real life we could spend time online chatting on Facebook. I thought about call these meetings to have taken place in virtual time, since the take place virtually not phisically, but I see the philosophical contradiction in time being virtual since time is actual…
The distinction virtual life and real life is problematic since virtual life is real life, but I choose to separate these two types of meetings based on the different of these events. Tom Boellstorff is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, who recently conducted researched online for the book Coming Of Age in Second Life. Bearing Boellstorff in mind I was not afraid to use modern world tools in my traditional anthropological research.
Facebook as a tool helped me to gain the data necessary needed to be able to describe and contextualize, and the best part is, my research is passively active even though we are not meeting in real life since we live on different continents. We are constantly connected thought ICT. This is the main advantage of conducting research in the information age.
This is Anthropology 2.0 – The modern day researcher using Social network sites as research tools. Anthropology 2.0
The ‘good Indian girl’ – defining a normative concept
Posted by Johanna in Anthropology, Gender, India on augusti 24th, 2009
Johanna: Is there a norm to be a good Indian girl and in that case, which are her
qualities?
Yasmin: In India girls are expected to be silent, demure and sacrificial. It’s not ok to
challenge norms, or argue back with people. You are expected to be subservient and
humble, and excessively helpful.
*
One day at Lady Shri Ram College, in South Delhi, the students were gathered in the
assembly room for a screening of a documentary on women’s issues. Yasmin and Preity
were present in the hall to see the Jagori documentary, they described the documentary
content to me. The documentary makers were filming with a hidden camera at an upper class market in south Delhi at 9 PM.
Various men were asked about their views on women who were outside after 9 PM and the voices in the documentary were unequivocal: “the women who are out at night are not good women – they are obviously not from respected families”, “women who were out at night were not respectable”. And the underlying attitude in a sense justified that the women outside after 9 PM could be blamed if they were caught up in dangerous situations at night. This is one of the many stories on gender and space that my Delhi informants shared with me during research in India. I also found out that the girls are highly aware of the normative behaviour that is ascribed to females and on which ways they negotiate and challenge these norms.
I think the normative gendered public behaviour that is expected out of women is a really interesting topic for research. Hopefully this is what I am researching in the future.
The “we can do it” approach
Posted by Johanna in Anthropology, Gender, India on juni 23rd, 2009
India is interesting on so many levels. And I am fascinated by the strong “we can do it” approach that is present among the young women. “It” in this sense refers to meeting equality, meeting the men half-way on many levels of society. I have a deep interest in India and gender, therefore, for my master thesis in Anthropology I choose to conduct research in the vibrant globalized sphere of South Delhi - where gender roles are constantly being negotiated in the capital city which is moving with a high speed towards the future.
I am especially interested in the gender perspective in India today. Marriage has been and still is an important social institution in India. “A good marriage” is essential and to be a good wife is a desirable goal for many women in India. The young women I met in Delhi are well aware of what is considered desired female behaviour and they in many ways try to live up to this norm and to follow the social unwritten rules of what is considered desirable female behaviour. But even though they do have room for negotiating their role within the marriage institution.
I am fascinated by the strong “we can do it” approach – meaning match up to the men, become their equals within the society as such and specifically within the marriage institution. According to my informants, many Indian marriages are based on inequality, the man is often considered to be in charge of decisions. When the family units are becoming nuclear, breaking free from the extended family setting then new rules are negotiated between the spouses with no external power involved. With every generation comes change, and with every generation small changes are being made, my Delhi informants can see these changes in their parents and grandparents attitudes that differs on many levels from their own. Delhi women are moving at a high speed.
Even if the young women are restricted on many areas of the society – especially when it comes to moving freely in their own city after night falls. I admire their spirit! I wish them all the best in their struggle fuelled by their ‘we can do it’ approach. I am grateful that I had the privilege to meet some of these young women during my stay in Delhi at the end of year 2008.
Female space in Delhi
Posted by Johanna in Anthropology, Gender, India on juni 22nd, 2009
This is as extract from my fieldswork in Delhi; One day at Lady Shri Ram College, in South Delhi, the students were gathered in the assembly room for a screening of a documentary on women’s issues. Two of my informants, Yasmin and Preity, were present in the hall to see the Jagori1 documentary. The documentary makers were filming with a hidden camera at upper class market Saket in south Delhi at 9 PM. Various men were asked about their views on women who were outside after 9 PM and the voices in the documentary were unequivocal: “the women who are out at night are not good women – they are obviously not from respected families”, “women who were out at night were not respectable”. And the underlying attitude in a sense justified that the women outside after 9 PM could be blamed if they were caught up in dangerous situations at night.
This is one of the many stories on gender and space that my informants shared with me. In my thesis I show how my informants are aware of the normative behaviour that is ascribed to females and how they negotiate and challenge these norms on several levels. The data I have gathered during participant observation in Delhi is about being an upper middle-class girl. Based on what my informants told me, I would say that the Delhi society they describe in their experience is, to a large extent, gender segregated. Among my informants there is a cultural code of normative femininity; the good Indian girl. According to this cultural code women are among other things expected to stay indoors after night falls; an exception being if they are accompanied by a man. The street is to be considered safe in male company; the man defines the safe space for my informants.
