Urbanism, Photography, and Dhows: The Swahili Coast and Western Indian Ocean

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Prita Meier, Associate Professor Art History, NYU

Title: The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast.

Abstract: This paper presents an alternate genealogy of the beginnings of photography in the Global South. Instead of foregrounding photography’s representational nature, I emphasize its qualities as an object, showing how photographs worked as relational things colliding with other things–such as bodies, commodities, and heirlooms in the mercantile world of the Swahili coast. From this perspective it becomes apparent that photographic portraits, although seemingly about the sitter’s desire to express some essential aspect of his or her being, was often about quite the opposite. Namely, it was about textural effects and the desire to hold onto bodies as things.

Nidhi Mahajan, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz.

Title: On Dhows and Dangers of the Sea: Navigating Risk and Protection in the Western Indian Ocean

Abstract: Sailing vessels or dhows have long connected different parts of the western Indian Ocean, transporting goods, people and ideas across South Asia, the Middle East and East Africa. While dhows once relied on the sail for movement across Indian Ocean port cities, these days, dhows are mechanized and run on diesel engines. Many of these vessels are built in Kutch in western India. These dhows now function as an economy of arbitrage, transporting foodstuffs, electronics, diesel, livestock and cars across India, the UAE, Yemen, and Somalia. They have especially found an economic niche servicing minor ports in times of conflict. Kutchi dhow sailors therefore face danger not only at sea, but also in the ports that they service. Based on ethnographic research in India, the UAE, and Kenya, this paper focuses on sailors from towns on the Gulf of Kutch in India who traverse the Indian Ocean on wooden dhows. How do these sailors contend with danger and death at sea? While maritime insurance has a long history in western India, these financial instruments do not account for laboring lives lost at sea. Thus rather than thinking of risk and protection in financial terms, I argue that dhow sailors negotiate risk, and danger at sea through a complex web of kinship relations, historical memory of Sufi saints and travelers who act as protection and comfort for these seafarers as they move across choppy waters.

Please click here for the readings.

February 15, 2019

Presenter: Prita Meier, Nidhi Mahajan