Gendering the ports: mapping hospitality and care in the Indian Ocean World

Marina Kaneti’s talk interrogates the nature of interactions at maritime ports as well as the broader system of circulation and exchange. She explains how such interactions were contingent on practices and traditions of hospitality and care; and shows how decisions on the inclusion, exclusion and care of strangers depended on the consideration, consent and labor of women.  The talk also maps out the gradual restructuring of gender dynamics in maritime ports and at sea, showing how the careful restructuring of social relations by various European colonial administrations transformed the system of interactions that had propelled pre-colonial maritime connections and exchanges. With the arrival and spread of European control over multiple maritime ports, the multifaceted practices of hospitality and care were (re)conceptualized and (mis)construed as signs of licentious and wanton sexual intercourse, therefore unraveling the social standing, economic prospects, and autonomous decision-making of women. The European colonial monopoly over the maritime trade in the Indian Ocean was therefore not just a function of war and imposition of colonial control over the land, but was also a direct product of the transformation of a networked system of hospitality, care, and social reproduction where women had played a primary role.