Wenche Iversen
Research Assistant
Department of Social Anthropology
Homepage: http://55589245
Title: Research Assistant
Phone: +47 55 58 92 45
E-mail: Wenche.Iversen@sosantr.uib.no
Visiting address: Fosswinckelsgt. 6
Room number: 806
My master thesis describes the everyday lives of a group of young women who lives in a paying guest house in Bangalore, South India, where they study and work in the information technology industry – an industry important for the economic growth in India since the early 1990’s.
Women working in the Indian information technology industry are situated in an ambiguous social existence where the possibility of fundamental role conflicts resulting in social stigma are ever present. On the one hand these women are effective national symbols of the country’s adventurous economic development from the 1990s: symbols of progress, wealth and modernity. At the same time, however, the Indian IT-industry embody negative connotations such as greed, the crumbling of moral values, and undesired “Westernization”. New patterns of work does not fit the idea of female respectability and is therefore seemingly at odds with dominant gender ideology in Indian society.
A debate on Friendship as a social relation is central in my thesis. Methodology is also a predominant discussion in the thesis. That is the relationship between anthropologist and informant, relations among the informants, and how friendship as a social relation have been debated in social anthropology.
Regional: South-Asia, India, South-India
Thematic: Friendship, Globalisation, Middleclass, Modernisation, Morality, Social Change, Subjectivity, Women, Work, Work Migration
Master Thesis at the University of Bergen, August 2009:
”IT’s a Woman’s World” En studie av vennskap, valg og inntrykkskontroll blant unge IT-ansatte i Indias nye middelklasse”
Fall/spring 2009 Teaching Assistant and Seminar Lecturer
SANT201 Teori- og Faghistorie i Sosialantropologi
SANT 203 Religion, Ritualer og Politiske Realiteter
SANT 114 Regional Etnografi: Osceania
SANT 118 Regional Ethnografi: Norden
Fall 2009 Teaching Assistant, Seminar Lecturer, and Seminar Coordinator
GLOB 101 Global Utvikling
Spring 2010 Teaching Assistant, Seminar Lecturer, and Seminar Coordinator
SANT 220 Anthropology, intervention and development
Research assistant for prof. Bruce Kapferer
Editorial assistant for Anthropological Theory
Editorial assistant for Social Analysi
Archivist for NAFA (Nordic Anthropological Film Association)
Higher Executive Officer (MPHIL) (Master's Programme in Anthropology of Development)
Factotum