these people, and perhaps many of them, will read his research report. If he disguises the name of the district as I have done, many outsiders apparently will not discover where the study was actually located... The people in the district, of course, know it is about them, and even the changed names do not disguise the individuals for them. They remember the researcher and know the people with whom he associated and know enough about the various groups to place the individuals with little chance of error.
In such a situation the researcher carries a heavy responsibility. He would like his book to be of some help to the people of the district; at least, he wants to take steps to minimise the chances of it doing any harm, fully recognising the possibility that certain individuals may suffer through the publication. — William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society , p. American sociologist who worked for several months as a machinist in a Chicago factory and wrote about the experience of work from the perspective of workers.
In Indian sociology, an important way in which fieldwork methods have been used is in village studies. In the 1950s, many anthropologists and sociologists, both Indian and foreign began working on village life and society. The village acted as the equivalent of the tribal community studied by the earlier anthropologists. It was also a ‘bounded community’, and was small enough to be studied by a single person — that is, the sociologist could get to know almost everyone in the village, and observe life there.
Moreover, anthropology was not very popular with nationalists in colonial India because of its excessive concern with the primitive. Many educated Indians felt that disciplines like anthropology carried a colonial bias because they emphasised the non- modern aspects of colonised societies rather than their progressive or positive side. So, studying villages and villagers seemed much more acceptable and worthwhile for a sociologist than studying tribes only. Questions were also being asked about the links between early anthropology and colonialism.
After all, the classic instances of field work