Mavelikkara is a Hindu and Christian area; I met almost none of Alappuzha district’s 10% population who are Muslims during my 1990s fieldworks. (To round this out, I am beginning to make connections in the nearby market town of Kayamkulam, as I continue my return visits to Travancore). Calicut is a town with a strong Muslim community (40%) and it borders onto the district of Malappuram, where Muslims make up
My last post spoke about the continuities in Kerala-Gulf relationships. But there is another story, too. Statistical evidence and ethnographic narrative alike are showing that, for Malayalis, the turndown in the Gulf economies is impacting people’s plans for migration and for return. I’ve been finding that it’s also true that ‘cultures of migration’ which made a period in the Gulf practically a normalised part of masculine life-cycles in many parts
In Calicut, many people describe Gulf migration as continuing to be a normalised part of life, expecting it to continue, although the benefits are not as strong as they once were. Gulf wages have dipped relative to Kerala; costs of living have soared in the Gulf. The older generation recount spectacular gains and startling differences between Kerala and the Gulf which the post 1990s generation have not seen. But because
Throughout the 1990s, I worked in a rural paddy-growing area near Mavelikkara town, and wrote about some of the ways in which Gulf migration was shifting the social landscape. Some families from Hindu lower castes were achieving significant social mobility through remittances; their success was having a wider effect upon longstanding caste hierarchies. In the old agrarian economy, caste status and wealth had been tightly connected, with landowning Syrian Christian,
Helen Underhill (the UK project assistant) and I are excited to be travelling to NYUAD in Abu Dhabi this week to a meetup of REALM project PIs. We will all be presenting our material (which for some folk, such as the economists, is ‘data’, but for ethnographers like myself is more loosely ‘outcome’). I’ve got 76 interviews with Kerala migrants and a lot of fieldnotes from ongoing conversations that I’ve been
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
REALM project workers gathered in Abu Dhabi Nov 14th and 15th to share progress and work towards next steps. We have demographers, economists, geographers, ethnographers, speaking to each other about Gulf migration issues. What is exciting for me about being in this portfolio of projects are two highly unusual aspects: firstly, that we have a genuinely respectful cross-disciplinary conversation going on, without any of the ‘quantitatives versus qualitatives’ or ‘demographers
