Petty Traders, Gender, and Development in a South Indian Fishery

* I would like to thank the following individuals for their comments on earlier versions of this work: Priti Ramamurthy, Janet Momsen, Yamuna Sangarasivam, Rod Francis, Susan Wadley, Dilip Menon, John Agnew, Jeff Popke, Katherine Jones, members of Sari Bicklin’s Advanced Ethnographic Writing class, and two anonymous reviewers for Economic Geography. Special thanks to Devan Ayyankeril for his contribution to the collection and interpretation of the data. I would also like to thank Nalini Nayak and Aleyamma Vijayan for discussing their work with women fisherfolk and sharing their ideas about the impact of mechanization on women fish traders with me; any errors in analysis are mine.

Abstract

In this paper I examine the impact of mechanization and commercialization on small-scale fish traders in Kerala, India, with special emphasis on gender and the impact of economic transformation on women fish traders. I explore the relationship of women’s work in distribution to production and how this has changed with capitalist development. I argue that because women’s roles in the fish economy have been overlooked, they have experienced economic marginalization at the same time that their labor has become increasingly important for household survival. Such marginalization stems from a qualitative change that has taken place in their relationship to production and marketing as a result of capitalist development and the ecological crisis it has engendered.

Keywords:

• fish markets
• petty traders
• gender
• India
• Kerala

Notes

* I would like to thank the following individuals for their comments on earlier versions of this work: Priti Ramamurthy, Janet Momsen, Yamuna Sangarasivam, Rod Francis, Susan Wadley, Dilip Menon, John Agnew, Jeff Popke, Katherine Jones, members of Sari Bicklin’s Advanced Ethnographic Writing class, and two anonymous reviewers for Economic Geography. Special thanks to Devan Ayyankeril for his contribution to the collection and interpretation of the data. I would also like to thank Nalini Nayak and Aleyamma Vijayan for discussing their work with women fisherfolk and sharing their ideas about the impact of mechanization on women fish traders with me; any errors in analysis are mine.