Welcome to my Cultural Anthropology MA Thesis

This website is the culmination of my research as an MA Cultural Anthropology student. It is an ethnographic research project presented as a multimedia, creative website for anyone interested in larger questions about how eating becomes a central part of our identity. My focus is to understand how vegetarian-identifying South Indian immigrants in California negotiate their cultural identity. How do we understand our food culture and express it through eating practices? In 2023, this project came into place via my personal connection to the Indian immigrant community in California. I am the daughter of Tamilian parents who immigrated to California as vegetarians, negotiated a new cultural and culinary landscape, and passed on that vegetarian culture to me. In its nascent stages, I saw this project as an academic exercise to understand the identity construction process within my own community, spurred by the idea that I am best suited to investigate my own people as opposed to the “other.” Reading more about ethnographic practices and being encouraged by scholars to question if any anthropologist is truly “native” (Narayan 1993) helped me rethink my approach to this project. Rather than position myself as an insider who already knows about the South Indian immigrant vegetarian community, I shifted my goal to familiarize myself with the unfamiliar and make the familiar unfamiliar. In other words, this project is the result of exploration rather than going into the field with assumptions as a “native” anthropologist (Narayan 1993). 

Haritha Govind. I am an MA Anthropology student with previous degrees in Archaeology and History. My research interests include food studies, South Asian culture, diasporic studies, and transnationalism.

Learn more about me here: E-Portfolio

This website is a collage of ethnographic information presented to you, the viewer, in various visually creative ways (a card game, TV show script, eating log, newspaper clipping) and expository written sections. The website is organized into four themes, each with its own tab in the menu bar. You are welcome to read the tabs in any order. The final tab, “behind the scenes,” offers a peek behind the curtain of this project and anthropological research practices. Continue browsing this page to learn about my research participants and some of their experiences.