London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Building Bigness: Reputation, Prominence, and Social Capital in Rural South India
 
In South India, being a well-regarded person, particularly a "big person," is understood to provide influence and opportunity. Here, we model the social support networks of two Tamil villages to evaluate how prominence, reputation, and social support are entwined. Among the four reputational qualities studied (generosity, good character, advice giving, and influence), we find that all are more strongly associated with providing rather than receiving help, and that a being known as generous has the greatest and being known as influential the smallest effect on the probability that a person helps others. The relative importance of generosity and reciprocity suggests that mutually supportive relationships are the most crucial to one's ability to get by. We therefore turn to social capital and show how it often, but not always, aligns with prominence. We suggest that much of the evidence for the benefits of prominence may actually be capturing the returns to greater social capital. A closer study of social capital should allow for a more complete accounting of people's social resources and strategies, and extend the focus beyond the few who are able to achieve prominence. 
  
Eleanor Power is an anthropologist (more specifically, a human behavioural ecologist) interested in how religious belief, practice, and identity interact with and shape interpersonal relationships. She studies these dynamics through fieldwork conducted in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, primary among which is social network analysis. 

Eleanor is an assistant professor in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before joining the LSE, she was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. She completed her PhD at Stanford University.