Wooden sailing vessels or dhows have long traversed The Indian Ocean, making it what some scholars have called “the cradle of globalization.” Today, dhows or vahans from Kachchh in western India continue along old Indian Ocean routes as crucial intermediaries in global shipping. This talk traces how this mobile trade network is anchored or moored in specific places and economic concepts in some moments, and unmoored in others. Focusing on arbitrage, long a strategy used by Indian Ocean merchants, I argue that value in the contemporary dhow trade is created through a fractured moral economy. Tracing the movement of one dhow across the Indian Ocean during the COVID-19 pandemic, I argue that sanctions regimes, and questions of jurisdiction at sea in the Persian Gulf have created a geopolitical climate in which value is produced at multiple scales through the intersection of these logics, the body of the sailor becoming the site for capturing value and crafting sovereignty at sea.
Nidhi Mahajan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCSC. Her research focuses on the intersection between political economy, sovereignty, and mobility in the Indian Ocean. A practicing artist, she has also developed multi-media exhibitions in Kenya, India, and the UAE. Her work has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; Island Studies Journal, and the edited volumes Reimaging Indian Ocean Worlds and World on the Horizon.
Date | Time
October 5, 2022 | 12:30 – 1:45 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public
Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz
Please note that this talk will start at 12:30 rather than 12:15 to accommodate the History of Consciousness job talk by Dimitris Papadopoulos, “The Chemical Milieu. Chemistry, Ecology and Social Change,” from 11:00-12: