Here is an extraordinarily rich and well-curated account of Gulf – South Asia connections from Ayesha, who has been working for some time now on this. What’s especially exciting about this project is that it is coming from people who themselves have been part of this history; that it takes us back to some of the earliest photographically-recorded moments and memories; and that it acknowledges the two-way nature of these
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,
The Gulf is arguably the most extreme example of superdiversity. In public space, we make snap judgements about each other and work to understand how we need to present ourselves to others. This process becomes very complex when public space norms are not singular or agreed upon. (And if, as anthropologists recognise, ‘culture‘ has always been plural, then the places where this is evidently the case are multiplying, while the
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
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
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
