0608, 2019

Results & Trends IX: Religious Discrimination in India

By Caroline Osella|August 6, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|327 comments

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. In the free-flow of participant observation and 84 unstructured interviews, I heard some frightened voices and many despairing ones, when respondents spoke about India. One of the themes that came up in many

1907, 2019

Results & Trends VIII: gender discrimination in India

By Caroline Osella|July 19, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|4 comments

A project always builds on previous work. One of the intriguing findings that had come up in my research over 2015 (funded by Zayed University) was this: while interviewing Malayali respondents, and chatting with long-time Gulf Malayali friends, I began to discern an unexpected discourse. I kept hearing that ‘The Gulf is good for women’. Finding out more about this, and unpicking what ‘good for women’ might mean, was one

1006, 2019

Results & Trends VII: Infrastructure (as predicted)

By Caroline Osella|June 10, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorised, Uncategorized|16 comments

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

0606, 2019

Results & Trends V: Is It All About the Money?

By Caroline Osella|June 6, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|0 comments

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

2805, 2019

Abu Dhabi – God’s Own Country

By Caroline Osella|May 28, 2019|Media, project results and findings, Uncategorized|7 comments

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

2304, 2019

Results and Trends IV: The difference that Religious Community Can Make?

By Caroline Osella|April 23, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|1 comments

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

1604, 2019

Results and Trends II: the Gulf as continuing aspiration

By Caroline Osella|April 16, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|0 comments

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

2703, 2019

What Happens When Gender Regimes Collide?

By Caroline Osella|March 27, 2019|project outputs|2 comments

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

2603, 2019

When expectations of marriage and family shift, what does it mean for migrants?

By Caroline Osella|March 26, 2019|Media, project outputs, Uncategorized|0 comments

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

1003, 2019

REALM PIs Meetup at NYUAD March 15th/ 16th

By Caroline Osella|March 10, 2019|project results and findings, Uncategorized|0 comments

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

Caroline Osella REALM project blog 2017-2019

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