Interrogating Communalism (Religion and Citizenship) by Punathil Salah

Author:Punathil, Salah [Punathil, Salah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Structural violence and marginality in coastal Kerala

This section illustrates some of the socio-spatial manifestations of structural violence permeating coastal villages for last several decades. Das and Poole (2004) in the introduction of their book Anthropology in the Margin of State try to locate the question of marginality in the context of the ‘state-margin’ relationship where isolated and often excluded geographies and social groups are important ethnographic sites. They cite the examples of Latin American countries where peasant communities exist as a cultural and social group ‘removed’ from the national culture and polity. This sort of territoriality, according to Das and Poole, assumes a central mode of spatial and social relations in which a ‘margin’ is imagined as something that can be located at the outer edge of a given social unit. This notion of territorial margin forms a part of a well-known anthropological account of the peasant families as isolated and marginal to the state (Roitman 2004). The coastal villages in Kerala resemble many of the features of such anthropological sites.

The structural violence and marginality of the fisher people is interwoven with the geographical space where they live. It is explicit that coastal villages lie at the outer sphere of the inland society. The geographical location places the fishers between the deep sea and the outlier of inland (Visvanathan 1996, Aerthayil 2000). Their tiny geographical space in coastal localities often generates risks, isolation, tension and suffering. Across the state, the coastal strips are densely populated. The landlessness of coastal people, a condition ignored by land reform policy, forced them to continue to inhabit the coast. Kalpana Ram, in her study on the Mukkuvars of Kanyakumari coast, which is closer to the coastal belts of Thiruvananthapuram, says the tremendous population pressure in the area, along with a precarious economy, leads to volatility and violence (Ram 1992). She says that the closely packed dwellings and widespread poverty give the coastal strips more of an appearance of a slum than a series of rural villages (ibid). The very habitatand nature of work in thier geographical space itself creates insecurity for them, which is clear from Table 4.1 .

One can note that, on average, Kerala’s fishers are settled within 1 metre to 1 km of the coast. In the Thiruvananthapuram and Malappuram districts, the houses are closer to the sea compared to other districts. In these districts, the average distance is under 100 metres and maximum is 300 metres from the seashore. The more interesting information is that about 87 percent of the total houses are under 200 metres from the shore. The proportion of houses under 200 metres off the coast constitutes 99 percent in the Thiruvananthapuram district. The number of hutments lost to storms or tides is too high, according to available data. And Thiruvananthapuram coastal area, the field of this research, is not any different. During 2005–06, the number of houses damaged at coastal localities of this district is 3,414. In 2006–07 it was 2,458, in 2007–08 it was 2,825, and in 2008–09 it was 868.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.