PUKAR
presents a talk
by
Filippo Osella
'I am Gulf': The Production of Cosmopolitanism in
Calicut, Kerala
Date:
Tuesday, 13 December 2005
Time
6.30 pm
Venue: PUKAR Office
Address: 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Opposite
Strand Book Stall, Sir. P M Road, Fort, Mumbai 400001. Tel: 5574-8152
Abstract
This paper explores the production of cosmopolitan identities in
Calicut,
Kerala. We find that the diverse experiences of the past - when commerce
brought to Calicut traders from far and wide - and the present - when
Calicut migrants travel to the Gulf to work and live alongside people from
all over the world - are brought together in popular discourse to highlight
the 'cosmopolitanism' of the city and its inhabitants. But for Calicut
Koyas - the Muslim community with whom I conducted fieldwork from 2002 to
2004 - cosmopolitanism goes beyond a celebration of cultural
sophistication. It is a discourse through which a specific and exclusive
local identity is objectified and valorised, at the same time assimilating
and distinguishing Koyas from other Muslim and non-Muslim communities in
Calicut and beyond. The Koya residential area of Calicut
- Thekkepuram,
with its highly specific matrilineal joint households - and the Gulf -
connected historically to Calicut
through trade and migration - become
inseparable, braided reference points of Koya identity and claims for
superior status. In turn, however, the experience of contemporary Gulf
migration re-aligns historical notions and practices of urban
cosmopolitanism through which Koyas define their own and their city's
identity.
Filippo Osella studied at the
London
School of Economics (PhD in
Anthropology 1993), and is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the
University
of Sussex
. He has carried out several periods of extended
fieldwork in Kerala and the Persian Gulf
since 1989, and has published on
social mobility, migration, agrarian relations, masculinities and
sexuality, popular religion and the body. His most important publications
to date are: Osella, F & Osella, C. 2000 Social Mobility in Kerala:
Modernity and Identity in Conflict, (Pluto); Chopra R, C Osella & F Osella
(eds.) 2003 Masculinities in South Asia, (Kali for Women); F Osella & K
Gardner 2003 Migration, Modernity and Social Transformation in South Asia
(SAGE). He is currently working on contemporary consumption practices and
ways in which they impact upon identities in the contexts of economic
liberalisation, high migration and Islamic reformism, with fieldwork in
Kerala and the Persian Gulf
.
