Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how a transnational approach to migration informs fieldwork experiences. It suggests that potentialities of multi-sited fieldwork rely upon an understanding of located contexts as well as upon the intent to ‘open’ the analysis of these contexts to a transnational perspective.

Paper long abstract:

The southern Indian State of Kerala has experienced migration in different periods of its history, with the Gulf attracting a considerable number of Malayalis since the end of the 1970's. Gulf countries represent today one - though probably still the most important - among a constellation of places in Malayali transnational lives (Malaysia, Europe, UK, US). In Kerala not only migration is inscribed in personal, household and community biographies of a relatively large portion of Malayali society, but has also produced a culture of migration that deeply informs the everyday life of the people who have never physically left their place. Indeed, the understanding of processes of social transformation and cultural change taking place in Kerala increasingly relies upon the analysis of the relation between this State and its NRI population. Similarly, people's relations with different places in transnational migration is deeply informed by the reconfiguration of hierarchies and processes of social mobility taking place in the native country. How to approach more 'traditional' issues such as caste and religious identity taking into consideration processes of social mobility enacted through migration? How caste, class, gender and age inform people relation with different places in transnational migration? And how, in turn, peculiar destinations and their cultural representations enhance or hinder people's expectations of mobility? Finally, how these questions lead to a reformulation of fieldwork methodology in contemporary India? The trope of physical and cultural separation that the idea of fieldwork have traditionally entailed for the ethnographer seems at odds with the fact that the life of the people we meet are often partly build upon travel, connections and displacement.

The first part of my paper will address some theoretical and methodological problems that have emerged during different prolonged periods of fieldwork in Italy and Kerala about Malayali migration to this Southern European country. If multi-sited research represents theoretically and methodologically a suitable resource to cope with the relation between India and NRI population, it nevertheless raises crucial questions, not only in term of research timing and 'depth' but also on the processes of construction of fieldwork as a relational practice. The second part of my paper will focus on the relation between 'hierarchies of places' and the politics of identity in contemporary urban Kerala. The intent is twofold. First it will be suggested that the potentialities of multi-sited fieldwork rely upon an understanding the meanings of transnational experiences through the analysis of located contexts and, on the other hand, upon the intent to 'open' the understanding of these contexts to a transnational perspective. In my fieldwork experience these levels were conceived not only in continuity between each other but possibly as integral parts of the same approach. Finally, it will be pointed out how this perspective allows us to understand how different experiences and cultural representation of places orient men's and women's transnational movements, enhancing processes of social mobility as well as producing hierarchies and inequalities in contemporary Kerala.