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Research Article | Open Access
Volume 12 2020 | None
Understanding the Construction of Community Identity - The Case Study of the Namboodiri Community of Colonial Kerala
Dr.Girish Vishnu Namboodiri
Pages: 956-960
Abstract
The present paper addresses the question concerning the constitution of community identity. Antithetical to the dominant historical and ethnographic thinking that community is an essential category that continues through time, the present paperintends to hypothesize that any attempt to essentialize community identity would produce only an ahistorical argument. Identity is not essential, aspatial and atemporal, but it is historical. Therefore, it changes the changing socio-political and economic situations. When arguing so, we do not fall into the limitations of social determinism. Instead, we would say that the constitution of community identity is effectuated as a consequence of the corresponding relation between the socio-economic situation and the mentality of the subjects living in it. To establish this argument, the present study will analyze the strategies adopted by the Namboodiri community in three different historical conjunctures to structure and restructure their community identity in modern Kerala. The first is the colonial phase (or more precisely, the period of social reform), wherein how the Namboodiri who had internalized the values of colonial modernity appropriated new strategies to structure a „modern and civilized‟ Namboodiri will form the central concern. The second situation is the period of Land Reform in post-independent Kerala, wherein we will examine how Namboodiri rebuilt their community identity differently when their existence was challenged economically. The third moment is the recent neoliberal phase, wherein we could see the Namboodiris reinventing their once-rejected past, which is embodied by ritual authority to address the risks and uncertainties created by contemporary Kerala.
Keywords
Community,Yogakshema Sabha, identity, neoliberal
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