ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how can anthropology with its history of intensive qualitative research in small-scale societies and expertise on traditional' aspects of the rural social structure best contribute to this urban research. The author's earliest experience of fieldwork in India was during the second half of the 1960s when he did doctoral research in the rural district of Kangra in a mountainous region in the northwest. Graduate students of his generation in British anthropology departments were largely expected to find their own way and were not required to set out their research questions and the ways they would tackle them in a formal research proposal. Death in Banaras is very big business, and that business is characterized by an elaborate division of labour and by a good deal of violent competition. The author was concerned with the social organization of death, its practical aspects and ideological construction.
