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
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
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
I’m in UAE right now and off to Kerala tomorrow. On the plane, I watched two Malayalam movies. It’s not unusual that both referenced migration. This movie (Marubhumiyile aana (2017)- elephant of the desert) was especially interesting, with its rich roll-out of several Gulf stereotypes, a hybrid protagonist who has an Arab father, and a Malayali mother, and its Arabic catch-phrase – Mafi fulus, mafi mushqil (no money no problem). Something I’ll be
