3 periods of Kerala fieldwork over 2 years. 84 respondents. Mixed ages, provenance, community and class, different migration destinations. A straight 50/50 split between those who felt that Gulf migration was “only for the money” and those who felt that lifestyle and other factors were also important in their decision to go and to stay. The next few posts will pull out the major factors which emerged from the 84 free-form
3 periods of Kerala fieldwork over 2 years. 84 respondents. Mixed ages, provenance, community and class, different migration destinations. Here’s some quotes from interviews in which respondents explained or justified their evaluation of Gulf life as positive, negative or ambivalent and often compared it to life in Kerala. ‘There’s no communal problem in the Gulf. I’m the only Hindu in my team, but we all get on and we never
3 periods of Kerala fieldwork over 2 years. 84 respondents. Mixed ages, provenance, community and class, different migration destinations. Special focus on Mavelikkara, Calicut & Mattancherry Respondents split by gender A mix of retired, returned, current migrants Their response to my key question: is Gulf migration only about the money? You’ll be thinking I’ve made this up – such a neat result. Split straight down
I’ve been closing my part of the REALM project over the past month. Now I will be posting highlights from the results. Anyone who works in migration can approach me if they need more details, and you can see the bigger REALM website for details of other projects on this collaborative initiative. My project – ‘The Paradox of the Gulf as a Space of Freedom and Aspiration’, grew out of
An important question for my part of the REALM research has been about following up on my earlier work, which strongly suggested that Gulf migration, for Malayalis, is not “just about the money”. I’ve been asking people to identify what other aspects are important to them. Now, UK project assistant Helen Underhill and I have been sifting over 100 free-form qualitative interviews and putting some of our findings into a
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
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,
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
