Andrew Pieper and Dr. Charles Nuckolls, Department of Anthropology

Vasuvanipalem, a once isolated fishing village on the South Eastern coast of India has in recent years been absorbed in to the rapidly growing city of Visakhapatnam. The accompanying changes of urbanization and modernization within this community have changed dramatically the lives of fishermen within the community and their families.

This ethnographic project set out to examine the socioeconomic change that has been experienced in this community and understand how people feel about and perceive these changes. As such, the methods were oriented towards obtaining this sort of knowledge through the primary methods of interviewing and participant observation. This research was conducted from May 2012 to August 2012. The study indeed proved useful in understanding the changes encountered in the lives of these people.

The interviews were conducted primarily with 15-20 members of the fishing community and naturally centered on areas that had been associated with change i.e. the industrialization of the fishing industry, education, housing, etc. These interviews were aimed at obtaining an insider’s point of view towards this socioeconomic change. Over time, I was able to obtain a lot of relevant data that has helped me to better answer my initial research question.

The language barrier presented particular difficulty given the methods of this project. To overcome the researcher’s minimal grasp of Telugu, the native language of the informants, a translator was employed to provide translation throughout most of the duration of the project. To additionally ensure the accuracy of the data received, a second translator was hired to retranslate the recorded interviews.

It was both a great and demanding experience, being the first ethnographic research project I had ever performed. I found that soon upon beginning my project that interviewing is a difficult skill to master. Questions that seemed to make sense to me, sometimes didn’t translate very well. I had to work with my translator to find questions that were easy to understand, and did not lead the informants.

It also didn’t take long for me to realize that ethnographic research is hard to predict. A lot of things went much different than I thought they would. That is the nature of human research and I found it to be exciting and challenging. There are many things that I learned that will prove vital in future projects along these lines in graduate school or in my career.

My research has been concluded but I still have a lot of work to do on this project. Having just received the second translation of the interviews, I will spend substantial time in upcoming weeks performing further data analysis. I will be using qualitative data analysis software to assist in coding and categorizing responses I received, which will allow me to better see overall trends in the responses. I absolutely loved the experience of the research, and thanks to this project could see a future in academia. I will be finishing my final report this semester, and hopefully, if all goes well I will be able to publish the piece.

Much of what I received from the interviews is descriptive in nature, I now better know what has changed (housing, education, technology, etc.), how it has changed (government development programs, loans, urbanization, etc.) and the effects of this change- (debt, the future direction of fishing, shift to other occupations, etc.).

I have done some preliminary data analysis, and what I can observe thus far seems to point at a number of interesting conclusions.

An example of one of these conclusions is that the modernization of Vasuvanipalem- through modern houses, advanced fishing technologies, etc. has brought with it a great increase in debt among fishermen. Anytime a large expense was need to be made, fishermen spoke of government and bank loans that were necessary given their lack of initial capital as a long marginalized community. I learned from fishermen how debt was obtained, and the manner in which payments of collected.

Another example of a conclusion that my data seems to make is that the future of fishing as an occupation on the scale employed in Vasuvanipalem is becoming more and more threatened by a number of factors identified by fishermen- over fishing, pollution, foreign and domestic competition, more steady employment in other areas, etc.

Overall, my findings in Vasuvanipalem help to weave a tale of socioeconomic change that is complex. The fishermen of Vasuvanipalem are in a unique position- having traditionally been a lower class in the former caste system and still finding difficult to elevate their position in the newer capitalist economy of India. Through the research I conducted, I feel confident in my ability to at least describe this change through the experiences and words of the fishermen themselves. This project has allowed me to understand these people better and their experiences, and put me in a position to help others do the same. I am so grateful for the ORCA grant that helped make this research possible.