Results and Trends III: The Gulf has lost its appeal
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