Opinion : How our point of view matters !

I have been pondering  about the meaning of anthropology. I gathered from the discussions that it gives us the skill sets to convert business questions to constructive questions on human. The biggest resource any company can have is ‘humans’ and as an HR manager, I need to have an anthropological mind to study their behavior better.

I have been introduced to Ethnography, which helps in in depth research and analysis of culture. Suppose tomorrow I decide to open my own dental clinic. My old clinic was running successfully. I was offering a variety of services, from root canal treatment to cosmetic treatment. However, somehow my second clinic did not pick up the pace.

I hired an ethnographer to study the cause. The ethnographer analyses the data set I presented to him. The Ethnographer studies the demography and preferences of my patients and suggests to me that my previous clinic was located in Colaba, which is a posh locality, where the major group of patients was aesthetic conscious and thus came to me for getting cosmetic makeover done. However, my new clinic is in Dharavi, where the income level and hygiene consciousness is low. The people are not ‘culturally’ inclined to spend on things which are non essential. Survival is primary and aesthetics is not their prime concern. This was a simple example; however, I understand ethnography has way deeper meaning than this. Using quantitative as well qualitative data, I was able to arrive at the appropriate solution.

An ethnographer explores the cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of study. He or She examines the behavior of a population in a given situation and understands the group member’s own interpretation of such behavior.

If the history was written from a deer’s point of view, will the lion be still considered glorious and the king of the jungle? Pondering over this, I found an image which went viral over the internet- the story of a deer staying still while a mother cheetah was teaching her children on how to hunt.

She was the fastest in her herd and could have easily outrun the baby cheetahs, but the mother deer sacrificed herself to save her cubs. She stood still, seeing her entire flesh being torn alive while from the corner of her eyes, she saw her children run to safety. Now if this story was written by the cheetah- would it be narrated like this?