Anthropologists of India: Adrian C. Mayer, M.N. Srinivas, André Béteille and Jonathan Parry is the first time a collection of interviews is being published as a book. These interviews have been conducted by one of England’s leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane.
Filmed over a period of 40 years, the four conversations in this volume are part of the series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions also form a part a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences, the sciences and to the performing and visual arts. The current volume is on four of the world’s foremost social anthropologists and sociologists who have been closely associated with the British anthropological tradition.
These conversations focus primarily on fieldwork experience in India and how new dimensions and interpretations were added to the discipline of sociology and social anthropology as more and more primitive cultures and ancient civilizations were studied.
This book brings out the diversity of the Indian subcontinent and its people through its engaging conversations and occasional anecdotes. Immensely riveting as conversations, this collection gives one a flavour of the many different cultures that coexist in a vast country like India, often with no knowledge of each other’s existence while de-jargonizing complex sociological concepts.
The book will be of enormous value not just to those interested in the subject of Sociology, Social Anthropology and Ethnography, but also those with an avid interest in History, Culture Studies as well as those with an interest in learning about other societies.