How do folks in each place formulate new ideas about themselves and what are the consequences these new forms of identities are having on their lives and those around them

In the second half of the semester, we read two radically different ethnographies – one about the exploding suicide rates in Kerala, India in the In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India, by Joselyn Lim Chua, the other about voluntourism and environmental conservation in Utila, Honduras in Voluntourism and Multispecies Collaboration: Life, Death and Conservation in the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef by Keri Brondo. Both ethnographies however have a commonality – they both detail ways in which people in these locations are struggling to create and understand themselves in relationship to their surroundings, during rapidly changing times. Your job in this essay is to compare and contrast how Malayali people are responding to and reformulating new ideas about personhood in Kerala, and how voluntourists and ‘local’ Utilians are doing the same. (I’m putting ‘local’ in quotes here to note the fact that the indigenous of Ultila are no longer there, and what counts as ‘local’ has different connotations. e.g. you can be an Old Head white Utilian local or you can be a more newly established Honduran mainlander local). How do folks in each place formulate new ideas about themselves and what are the consequences these new forms of identities are having on their lives and those around them? Your paper should be 5-6 pages in length, double-spaced, Times New Roman. You only need in-text citations. You may not use materials from outside of the two books we read in class. This is not a lot of space to make an argument, so you will need to be concise and specific. As usual, there is evidence throughout each text you’ll need to draw on, so do not rely only on one or two chapters.