Anthropology an Ethnographic Project if

Anthropology An ethnographic project If I were an anthropologist planning to conduct a research project I would select the population of teenagers in India ages 12 to 19 years of age. India is a country that is as old as time. The traditions and ethnic heritage span decades. In the past India was well-known for its cast and class stratification system. Today there are still members of society that are highly affected by the powerful cast system that drove India for decades.

However, with modernization have come many changes to many places of society including India. It would be interesting to study India's culture now, and it's culture during the last three decades, to see how the class stratification system and how patterns of equality have been affected by human rights movements throughout the world.

It would be interesting to see how the teenage population is or has been affected by human rights movements, because their belief or disbelief in the class stratification system, and their support or lack of support for it will help shape the roles people in India play for the next decade or two, as young teenagers grow into young adults and older adults making decisions. I think this research would ad to the growing body of research that already exists concerning technology and modernization.

The spread of human rights movements through information and knowledge sharing is bound to affect the way people in India work and the way they treat their poor and aged. I think this information would impact the understanding of the world in many ways. For one, it may make people living in India today more compassionate toward the suffering.

It may cause some youths to look back on history and make changes to current policies and government procedures to make sure that no one is overtly discriminated against or taken advantage again. However, since the class stratification system has been around for decades in Indian history, undoubtedly changes in technology and modernization have had good and bad effects. The extent to which these changes have affected the young people's views in India is as yet unknown.

To research this information and learn more about the youth culture within India, I would first embark on a review of the literature in India and about India from the 1900s through today. I would look at primary and secondary research that reflects the views and attitudes of people living in India. With interviews, I feel it would be best to interview youth's in two different settings. First, it would be interesting to see how people would respond when interviewed in an educational setting.

This would reveal how youths really feel when in the presence of their peers. Then, if possible, it would be interesting to see if another subset of youths interviewed in the home would have different opinions than those interviewed in the educational system. By reviewing the beliefs in and out of the educational system, the anthropologist would have a better idea of the extent to which education and one's ethnicity, culture and family influenced their ideas and attitudes.

Only a large scale study would reveal trends in beliefs and attitudes that one could generalize to all people of India. Because it would be cost-prohibitive to conduct a study like this personally, all interviews would have to be conducted using the Internet and technology. By using technology, in this case I might limit the sample size to individuals that have access to computers.

It is a given that in most societies today while not all homes have a computer, most countries have available cafes or educational areas where such studies could be conducted. The extent to which the economic status of the region affected the beliefs and attitudes of young people in India regarding class stratification would be interesting.

I would hypothesize that individuals born into an area or a population that is highly positioned from a socio-economic perspective would be more prone to accept social stratification that afforded the upper or upper middle castes some benefits. However, I would also expect that the lower the socio-economic of the region where the children are interviewed, the less likely the focus would be on social stratification, and the more likely people would be to argue for human rights.

Undoubtedly the readings from the syllabus would provide additional information that would coincide with the information gathered from the field research. This semester we have learned that many factors including socio-economic status, gender and ethnicity can all have an impact on one's culture, one's beliefs, one's religion and perhaps one's class stature. Because India is a region where religion is heavily influencing, I would expect to also ask questions about religion, to find out how religion affected the rich and the poor alike.

Given the globalizing effects of modernization, I would expect to see many youth's influenced by the secular beliefs in the West, which go against many of the traditional beliefs held by Indian youths that lack access to technology, which some may consider an interference. I would use qualitative meta-analysis and triangular research meaning more than one research methodology to review how class stratification affects one's beliefs, and how one's beliefs affect class stratification.

It might be interesting to conduct a comparative case study where one group of youth's living in a well-to-do region were compared with a group of youth's living in a poorer region of India lived to see how different the responses were. It might also be interesting to compare the experiences and beliefs of Indian youth's living in America to those of Indian youths living in India.

This type of research is important because in modern society, many humanistic groups are concerned with issues like equality, adequate access to basic necessities including food and shelter. People living in India that are poor may not have their basic human needs fulfilled, which could lead.