Ethnology as Science and as Art

Ethnology as Science and as Art FEW accounts of village life give one the sense of coming to know, of vicariously sharing in, the lives of real villagers that this book' conveys. The village is called Rampura, a medium- sized community in the Mysore district of Kamataka. It is -The Remembered Village-' of the title because of the circumstances in which it was written. In 1970 M N Srinivas was a Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in California and had just begun writing the results of the field research in Rampura that he had started in 1948. His sources were the fieldwork notes that he had been developing for the past 18 years. Then one night an arsonist set a fire at the Centre and all these notes were burned to ashes. The original field notes and diaries were in Delhi but the long effort of arranging and collecting them had disappeared in the flames.