ABSTRACT
More than fifty years ago, the anthropologist Kusum Nair trekked the length and breadth of India, stopping and chatting with villagers regarding the impact of development on their lives.1 Her treatment was narrative and descriptive rather than rigorously analytical. Why did she choose this methodology over the other equally well suited to her objective? She stated that she believed it better suited the situation, bringing out the attitudes and opinions of the people she was interviewing.2 In so doing, she drew upon a long tradition of many of the social sciences, one of observation, conceptual analysis, and synthesis; a tradition based more on a form of literature than on a system of painstaking experimentation or report methodologies found in other social sciences or the physical sciences.
