Global Childhood and the Politics of Contempt

When in 1978 I first came to the coastal village of Poomkara in Kerala, India, to carry out an anthropological inquiry into the work of children as part of a research project on poverty and survival strategies of poor households,1 I witnessed, not surprisingly, a fair degree of indigence and heavy involvement of children in their families' daily hardships. About half of the village children did not get three meals a day, were scantily dressed, and suffered from a range of poverty-related ailments. Most of the three hundred or so households lived in thatched huts, without piped water or bathrooms; only a handful had electricity or radios, and telephones and TV sets were unknown. Lifestyles were very much imbued by an orthodox interpretation of Islam that justified resistance against both Marxist-inspired mili tan tism and Western ideas and values. Revisiting the village several times, I was able to observe gradual changes in the lives of children under the impact of a massive migration of young men to the Gulf countries that had begun in the early 1980s. About 150 of these young men have regularly been transmitting money to their relatives, introducing them not only to an array of consumer items but also to the symbols and rituals of the type of modernity that has developed in the Gulf. Some have built multistory houses, fitted them with piped water, telephones, TVs and VCRs, and bathrooms and modern kitchens; they have bought lorries, cars, and motorcycles, and opened shops that sell a choice of processed food and consumer goods unknown in the locality until then. The migrants have also introduced the local Muslim population to a modernized version of Islam that seems better equipped to reconcile orthodoxy with the search for individual advancement and economic gain.