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The backwater boats of Kerala: identity, place and the world of Munruthuruthu.
Drawing on ethnographic research in Munruthuruthu, a boat building village in Kerala, south- western India, this paper discusses the study of ‘traditional’ boats as a means to explore the multivalent relations between people and their watery world. The research it draws on addresses boats as a lens...
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| Format: | Printed Book |
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| Accés en línia: | http://10.26.1.76/ks/004980.pdf |
| Sumari: | Drawing on ethnographic research in Munruthuruthu, a boat building village in Kerala, south-
western India, this paper discusses the study of ‘traditional’ boats as a means to explore the
multivalent relations between people and their watery world. The research it draws on addresses
boats as a lens through which the web of meanings and interactions that enmesh them can be
illuminated. Thus, study of the construction methods and social relationships involved in making
boats, the daily journeys they make and the work they are involved in, reveals the production and
negotiation of identities, discloses perceptions of environment and, ultimately, how people, places
and things are constituted through everyday work practices, technical skills and all the other
relational, embodied, habitual activities of life. This paper focuses on one part of a kettuvallam, or
‘tied boat’, to draw out some of these ideas. In doing so, it suggests that by examining the material
construction of boats a ‘traditional boat study’ can also ask what boats reveal about the world in
which they are created. |
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| Descripció de l’ítem: | In J.C. Henderson (ed.) Beyond Boundaries: Proceedings of the 3rd International Congress on Underwater Archaeology, IKUWA 3 published in 2012 (Frankfurt am Main: Römisch-Germanische Kommission, 247-256). |