Agency, Power and Personhood

Abstract

This article examines the prevalence of domestic violence in a fishing community in Kerala, south India. Understanding violence here necessitates understanding something about local ideas of gender, personhood and agency; ideas which are strongly resistant to change. Violence is linked by people to the embodied nature of gender difference, the inevitably greater ‘heat’ of men’s bodies, and also the ways in which men and women are bound to each other in marriage, the actions of each being elicited by the other. Violence here seems inevitable and men are not usually seen as to blame. More recently, activist discourses condemning violence have become common, but the collision between a feminist inspired criticism of male violence and local understandings of person and agency has led to a focus on alcohol as the root of the problem, with men still perceived to be personally not at fault.