I wrote a while ago about the rapid transformations post 1990s in young people’s expectations of what a marriage ought to be, what a household should consist of, and what constitutes a good family life. Kerala’s men these days are under pressure to act not only as breadwinners (which has long been the case in this state where women have low workforce participation and where a non-working wife is a component
I’ve been working for many years now between India and the Gulf and am not naive about how remittance and migration economies work, nor about how states operate. I have to begin with this disclaimer, because in a landscape of binary thinking and quick-fire analysis, it is easy to jump into judgement. My close ethnographic work among a range of migrants – many of whom are skilled technical and professional,
I wrote in my last post about the ways in which long-term ethnographic work opens up unanticipated themes which then demand our attention. Border ethnography (see examples here , here and here) has pushed itself into the REALM project. I am currently writing up a traditional academic paper about a complex case history of an Indian migrant worker who was badly treated by his (UK passport holding) ex-pat employer in the Gulf. The
When we do research, we have a project and a plan, but often – especially in long-term ethnographic work – something comes up that we hadn’t expected to be thinking about. This happened to me while conducting my part of REALM. I found myself engaging with ‘border ethnography’ – partly because I experienced delays and some difficulties with my Indian research visa, partly because of events that were happening back
Kerala movies used to be known around India for having a non-commercial artsy stream. But to be honest, when I first visited the state in the late 80s and asked people about these films, nobody in my circles had seen them – or even heard of them. Movies from directors like Adoor Gopalakrishnan were clearly part of an elite movement of intellectuals and artists. The Malayalis I knew enjoyed
