Gauravonomics Blog

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As the Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University, I’ll spend the next year studying how social media in BRIC countries will be used differently from the first world countries and the implications this will have on how individuals and institutions in these countries engage with social media.

Inspired by Grant McCracken’s post on how trend-hunting is meaningless unless it is rooted in a deeper understanding of the underlying culture –

it is precisely when “culture above” resonates with the “culture below” that things “take,” that innovation has a chance to transform us in substantial ways.

– I realized that to understand how social media in BRIC countries will be used differently from the first world countries, I first need to understand how social dynamics in these countries differ.

So, as a starting point, I asked myself — and my friends on Twitter — if there are any subcultures in India, like this list of subcultures in the West.

I’m searching for someone who has studied Indian urban culture in detail, maybe done a PhD in it (tweet).

I’m also looking for books on Indian culture like Pavan Varma’s ‘The Great Indian Middle Class’ and Rama Bijapurkar’s ‘We Are Like That Only’ (tweet).

Grant McCracken on how to become a self-taught anthropologist –

If you choose to be a free standing anthropologist, there are two objectives: the culture below and the culture above. The culture below is the long standing ideas and assumptions with which we make the world make sense, the infrastructure, if you will, of thought and feeling. The culture above is the trends and innovations that pour through our world. We want culture above and below because too often anthropology is reduced to a kind of cool hunting, a search for the latest thing and an investigation of culture above. Certainly, we need to know what social networking is, but if that’s all we know, all we can report to the client, we have removed ourselves from usefulness.

More to the point, we have sacrificed our disciplinary advantage. Any undergraduate can pursue cool. Only an anthropologist can observe the larger, richer cultural context from which cool springs and with which it must correspond if cool is to cool into something lasting. Indeed I would argue that it is precisely when culture above resonates with the culture below that things “take,” that innovation has a chance to transform us in substantial ways. (And by this reckoning you could say that social networking is now finding its feet precisely because users have found a way to make it responsive to the logic of their social worlds. This is not to say it will not change these social worlds, but first it must find a way to resonate with them.)