Johan Lindquist

Opening the Black Box of Migration : Brokers, the Organization of Transnational Mobility and the Changing Political Economy in Asia

This special issue takes the migrant broker as a starting point for investigating contemporary regimes of transnational migration across Asia. The articles, which span large parts of Asia—including China, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, as well as New Zealand—show that marriage migration, student migration, and various forms of unskilled labour migration, including predominantly male plantation and construction work and female domestic, entertainment, and sex work, are all mediated by brokers. Although much is known about why migrants leave home and what happens to them upon arrival, considerably less is known about the forms of infrastructure that condition their mobility. A focus on brokers is one productive way of opening this “black box” of migration research. The articles in this issue are thus not primarily concerned with the experiences of migrants or in mapping migrant networks per se, but rather in considering how mobility is made possible and organized by brokers, most notably in the process of recruitment and documentation. Drawing from this evidence, we argue that in contrast to the social network approach, a focus on the migrant broker offers a critical methodological vantage point from which to consider the shifting logic of contemporary migration across Asia. In particular, paying ethnographic attention to brokers illuminates the broader infrastructure that makes mobility possible while revealing that distinctions between state and market, between formal and informal, and between altruistic and profit-oriented networks are impossible to sustain in practice.

Labour Recruitment, Circuits of Capital and Gendered Mobility : Reconceptualizing the Indonesian Migration Industry

During the last decade there has been a marked shift in the structure of migration from Indonesia with the deregulation of the transnational labour recruitment market after the fall of Suharto and ...

Veils and ecstasy: negotiating shame in the Indonesian Borderlands

‘Malu’, meaning approximately shame or embarrassment, is a key emotional trope for contemporary Indonesian migrants. This paper discusses the position of ‘malu’ in the lives of young female migrants who work as factory workers or prostitutes on the rapidly developing Indonesian island of Batam, located on the border with Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore. It shows how veiling and the drug ‘ecstasy’ have both become techniques for migrants to negotiate ‘malu’ in the context of the demands of migration and the contradictions of everyday life on Batam.

The Elementary School Teacher, the Thug and his Grandmother: Informal Brokers and Transnational Migration from Indonesia

This article considers the emergence of informal brokers in the context of an increasingly formalized regime of transnational labour migration from Indonesia. Following the 1997 Asian economic crisis and the fall of the Suharto regime, there has been a dramatic increase in documented transnational migration to Malaysia at the expense of undocumented migration. In this process, a growing number of private agencies have come to control the increasingly deregulated market for migrant recruitment. These agencies, in turn, depend on informal brokers who recruit migrants in villages across Indonesia to work on palm oil plantations and as domestic servants in countries such as Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. This article takes these informal brokers as a starting point for considering the current Indonesian migration regime, using ethnographic data from the island of Lombok. Along with offering a description of brokering practices, the article argues that the dual process of centralization of migration control and fragmentation of labour recruitment has created a space of mediation for individuals who can navigate bureaucratic process while embodying the ethical qualities that convince Indonesian villagers to become migrants.

Images and Evidence: Human Trafficking, Auditing, and the Production of Illicit Markets in Southeast Asia and Beyond

Images and Evidence : Human Trafficking, Auditing, and the Production of Illicit Markets in Southeast Asia and Beyond

Frontiers, Sovereignty, and Marital Tactics: Comparisons from the Borneo Highlands and the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle

This article considers transnational relationships between men and women from two Southeast Asian border zones, the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysia, and the Indonesian island of Batam, part of the growth triangle that connects Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. It expands on Aihwa Ongs discussion of ‘graduated zones of sovereignty’ by examining how social relations are being reconfigured along these two international frontiers in the context of changing economic processes and state practices. The case studies, and the comparison between them, illustrate how men in Malaysia and Singapore, who are increasingly marginalised in the globalising economy, become involved with Indonesian women from the other side of the border in order to reproduce patriarchal structures that are connected to ‘traditional’ family forms.

Brokers and Brokerage, Anthropology of

This article deals with the ebb and flow of interest in the broker in anthropology since the 1950s. It attempts to situate this interest in relation to the changing world that anthropology has been concerned with, and in the context of shifting theoretical perspectives within the discipline. Beginning with the era of decolonization and the rise of the new nation-states, it tracks the position of the broker in relation to trends within political and economic anthropology, before pointing toward current concerns in anthropology.

Migration infrastructures and the production of migrant mobilities

Abstract Since the proclamation of a mobility turn in the 2000s, scholars have populated the field with invaluable insights on what it means to move, and what the politics of movement are. One particularly useful thread revolves around the issue of infrastructures, which have generally been taken to mean the manifest forms of moorings and fixities that help order and give shape to mobilities. Yet, while significant inroads have been made in delineating the morphologies of transport infrastructures, mobilities research has been relatively reticent about the organisational structures, orders and arrangements that give rise to another key mobile phenomenon of our time — international migration. In this editorial introduction, we lay down some groundwork on the productive and political nature of infrastructures that likewise affect and inform the way (im)mobilities are contingently created and parsed in migration. Looking through the prism of East and Southeast Asia and its migration infrastructures, we take advantage of the ‘new’ infrastructural configurations in an emerging empirical context to point to some directions by which mobilities researchers can more rigorously interrogate ‘migration’ as another socially meaningful and specific form of mobility that exceeds a mere displacement of people or change in national domicile.

Putting Ecstasy to Work : Pleasure, Prostitution, and Inequality in the Indonesian Borderlands

This article takes the drug Ecstasy as a commodity located at the center rather than at the margins of social processes, a technology that allows for the temporary engagement with pleasure and displacement of inequality in the context of nightlife and prostitution. It addresses these issues by focusing ethnographic attention on how Indonesian female prostitutes and their Singaporean male clients use Ecstasy in a disco on the Indonesian island of Batam, an export-processing zone located at the border to Singapore. By paying close attention to consumption practices, the article uses Ecstasy as a starting point for illuminating intersections of social mobility and inequality in the context of contemporary forms of transnational capitalism.

Brokers, channels, infrastructure: moving migrant labor in the Indonesian-Malaysian oil palm complex

Abstract This article problematizes the dichotomy between fluid mobility and fixed infrastructure through a case study of migrant labor recruitment from Indonesia to the Malaysian oil palm industry. Channels of low-skilled transnational migration must be understood in relation to other forms of mobility, most notably that of brokers, who move along adjacent and overlapping routes. Broker mobility is not only shaped by relatively immobile moorings, but also by more fluid ‘moorings’, notably mobile communication, low-cost airlines, and emergent social relationships. In order to understand how the migration process is arranged it is critical to pay attention to the logistical practices that make mobility possible. The article argues that broker mobility, diverse forms of moorings, and logistics come to shape a socio-technical system that can be understood in terms migration infrastructure.