Event Date
Nidhi Mahajan, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz
Register here for this online talk: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwoc-qqrTgoGNFfUjGT5MELA6SWGw60R_l8
Title: Of Moorings and Voyages: Arbitrage and a Fractured Moral Economy in the Persian Gulf
Abstract: 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 to traverse old Indian Ocean routes, functioning as an economy of arbitrage, becoming 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, I argue that sanctions regimes, and questions of jurisdiction at sea 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.
For more information please contact: pacordova@ucdavis.edu
Event sponsored by: Department of Anthropology