PROJECT STATEMENT for ‘CHHOTA SA JOD’ – Explorations in Reflexive

Anthropology

What is to be communicated to the students and why?

The project hopes to explore new ways of class room teaching by designing a communication

system that integrates emerging ethnographic methods with readily available information

technologies.

Inside the classroom, a variety of challenges are faced on a day-to-day basis by students and

teachers alike. Often, as the teacher is trying to convey ideas and concepts which are alien to

the class environment, where ideally the students would have needed to move to these

contexts to engage, the teacher is forced to make do with charts and other static visual

references. Our motivation is to bring these interactions to the classrooms themselves through

multimedia presentations and live footages.

For the same purpose, we as a team have come to an agreement that the students could be

introduced to an environment which is in vivid contrast to their own. Through this, they will be

encouraged to ‘explore’ a new place and subjectively come to various conclusions which will

add on to whatever they have learnt from their text books.

How will a multimedia presentation and film footage (live) from the field help in this?

The project aims to help school children and teachers to make the classroom experience more

interactive and add on to the knowledge gained from the text books by answering their

curiosity about various issues.

The knowledge from the text books, in this case, about environmental awareness and

cleanliness, falls short of its purpose if it is not practically implemented. The project will make

an effort to show the students actual places and communities which follow such principles

which they read about through multimedia presentations. Based on the assumption that the

visual impact of information makes learning not only more interesting but also more immersive,

this gives the students a chance to ‘see’ the subject matter of study for themselves; in other

words the power of place of the ethnographer.

Why Mawlynnong and Living Bridges?

The travel magazine Discover India declared Mawlynnong in Meghalaya as the cleanest village

in Asia in 2003 and the cleanest village in India in 2005. But that is not it’s only claim to fame.

Mawlynnong is also the site of the extraordinary Living Root Bridges. And lastly, but by no

means the least, Meghalaya and especially the provinces of Mawsynram and Cherrapunji are

best known for being (perhaps) the wettest place on Earth. Incessant rainfall and turbulent river

streams make it a difficult place to live indeed. And it is this violent and unforgiving face of

Nature that the Living Root Bridges help to tame. These bridges are constructed out of the

inter-tangling of roots from trees planted adjacently on opposite banks of a stream; taking

several generations, sometimes up to 500 years to build.

Ever since the article was released, the village has achieved a unique position in the map of

Meghalaya tourism or more appropriately, eco-tourism. Various terms like ‘eco friendly’,

‘sustainable architecture’, and so on, have been associated with the people and the village. It is

basically the USP of the village and something they have started to go by themselves. Through

this project, we will try to decipher the local people's idea of sustainable design. We are

assuming that sustainability is an imposed idea. For the locals, it is just the way things have

been for a long time. Now in the face of modernity, when we see some part of the country still

following traditional methods which do not harm the environment, we tag the practices as

'sustainable'. Thus, the brief we come down to is:

How and why the people of Meghalaya use different types of sustainable design and traditional

knowledge in spite of modernity and how does it define their cultural identity.

Process

The entire project is following 3 phases:

Phase 1 – It had 3 processes going on simultaneously.

Field work at school: To find out the focus groups’ notion of environment, ‘going green’

and their queries about it. Also, their approach towards new cultures and understanding

of the importance of the same.

Background research on Meghalaya: the people, their history, their beliefs, their lifestyle

and so on, with relevance to the project.

Maintaining an online forum: The forum will host all the information that we gather as a

team through the course of the project. It will have all the links, discussions, documents

and so on.

Phase 2 –

On the basis of the information gathered, in Phase 1, an initial content for the final

communication product is to be designed. This phase will require a number of activities going

on simultaneously with utmost stress in coordination and working within time frames.

However, there must be some space left to allow flexibility if ideas.

A part of the team will go to Meghalaya, to the site of interest with the assumptions

made on the basis of background research and the questions posed by the focus group.

Documentation of all the information collected from Meghalaya will be received by the

group staying back and will be sorted and collated.

Coordination with the school so that the entire point of multimedia presentation for

educational purposes be tried and tested.

Phase 3 – Collating data from phase 1 and phase 2 and editing footage of overall phases to

create the final communication product.

Rough plan of multimedia presentation

What we have done till now –

Google Hangout meetings : It is a forum where a circle of people can video conference

at the same time as is done in face to face meetings.

Test recording of meetings through third software

Studied the focus group and their understanding of environmental issues and how they

usually approach a new culture

Create a presentation on Meghalaya which would try to draw questions from the

students for creating the content of this project

What we are planning to do –

The multimedia presentation which will include live streaming from the field of interest will be

held on the 7th of March (tentative). This entire presentation will be done in lieu with part of

the team which remains back in Gandhinagar to interact with the school students at the

appointed time. They will be setting up an internet connection and projector in the school to

give the students an opportunity to ‘see’ the location of interest and we expect a spontaneous

give and take of information.

Possible setbacks – Mainly technical

When the laptops run out of power, there might not be ports to charge them in location

The internet connection might be faulty and hinder the live streaming

Carrying around a laptop around the site while on Google Hangout can be arduous task

Photos of school trip

Rough plan of film footage

What we have done till now –

Video recording of all the meetings that the team has done

School field trip to study the focus group for whom the resulting form of communication

is being designed; Video recording of the same

Pre planning schedule which includes equipments to carry, places to visit, people to

interview and so on.

Rough plan of Meghalaya trip

Date Agenda Interviewee Location

4/3/12 Reach destination - Shillong

5/3/12 Collection of data

from NEHU

regarding projects

done by students

on ‘environment

issues’ to

understand what

the state’s

educational system

is imparting about

the same

Director of

education and

training and

professor of

environmental

education

department

Shillong

6/3/12 Interviewing locals

to verify

assumptions taken

to the field & video

documentation of

the same

Locals, guides,

restaurant owners,

tourists etc.

Mawlynnong

7/3/12 Live streaming Mawlynnong

8/3/12 Explore

surrounding

villages which are

now following

similar cleanliness

principles like

Mawlynnong

Locals Shnongpdeng,

villages in East

Khasi hills district

9/3/12 Collate all the data

collected and

document the trip

- Shillong

10/3/12 Rest of the

documentation

- Shillong

11/3/12 Return to

Gandhinagar

Team Members:

Manu Kamath Anindita Dutta

Avik Ganguli Jenil Malavia

Samuel Pushpak Ashna Liza Sunny

Jinisha Gajjar Padmini S. Hegde

Manan Oza Mohit Goel

Co-ordinating Faculty: Prof. Vishvajit Pandya