Starting from Audio

This project emerged out of an encounter between my prior academic interests and the rites of passage into the Indian corporate world. I found it striking that much of business intelligence - those unquantifiable parts of user behavior, preferences, and engagement - has traditionally been the province of psychology or behavioral economics. 

 

Yet, anthropology, the discipline I was trained in, offered a deep and rich tradition of attending to precisely those social phenomena that elude simple measurement and enumeration - phenomena that the father of Ethnography, Bronislaw Malinowski, has termed the imponderabilia of social life. 

 

The provocation was thus: can we deploy the archive of anthropology to illuminate something about the imponderabilia of business operations? This risk I took constitutes the driving force of this project.