Leslie Butt

Rebel girls? Unplanned pregnancy and colonialism in highlands Papua Indonesia.

In highlands Papua, Indonesia, rapid social change under a colonial system of governance has created novel sexual opportunities for young indigenous women. Recent scholarship has viewed similar youthful sexual practices that challenge the status quo as expressions of personal agency. By looking at how young women and their families cope with unplanned pregnancies, we suggest that a more viable analytic approach would be to view sexuality, pregnancy and childbirth as a single unit of analysis. From this perspective, young womens experiences are primarily ones of constraint. Case studies offer insights into the ways a political context of colonial domination limits options and choices for young women who have children born out of wedlock. In particular, this paper describes how the ‘settler gaze’ — omnipresent colonial norms and judgments — creates regulatory effects in the realm of reproduction.

Can You Keep a Secret? Pretences of Confidentiality in HIV/AIDS Counseling and Treatment in Eastern Indonesia

A critical feature of contemporary interventions of HIV is the provision of voluntary counseling and testing. Protecting the confidentiality of the client is a lynchpin of successful counseling. This article explores the teaching and implementation of the concept of confidentiality in highlands Papua, Eastern Indonesia. Results of participant observation and in-depth interviews with clinic staff in 2009 and 2010 show that confidentiality is an ideal poorly taught and systematically violated in practice. Identifying, labeling, and regulating HIV-positive persons appears more important than enacting the humanitarian and moral imperative of protecting client rights. Confidentiality becomes the means to enact dividing practices and to create categories of persons—those who choose to adhere to therapies and those who do not. The implications of this pattern are discussed with reference to wider humanitarian initiatives.

Local Biologies and HIV/AIDS in Highlands Papua, Indonesia

The province of Papua, Indonesia has one of the fastest growing rates of HIV infection in Asia. Within volatile political conditions, HIV has reached generalized epidemic status for indigenous Papuans. This article explores the merits of using the concept of local biologies as an analytic tool to assess the range of factors which affect a local pattern of untreated HIV and rapid onset of AIDS. A research team conducted 32 in-depth interviews with HIV-positive indigenous persons and 15 interviews with health care workers in urban and peri-urban sites in the central highlands region. The results show fear of gossip and stigmatization, regional political conditions and gaps in care interweave to create local biological conditions of evasion of care and rapid onset of AIDS. The normative emphasis in contemporary scholarship on stigma as shaping subjective responses to HIV needs to be complemented by a full assessment of the physiological impact of health services, and the ways political conditions trickle down and mediate local biological patterns. The concept of local biologies is highly effective for explaining the full scope of possible factors affecting the intersection of social and physical realms for HIV-positive persons.

False papers and family fictions: household responses to ‘gift children’ born to Indonesian women during transnational migration

Abstract When parents pursue transnational labour migration, challenges arise around ensuring the social belonging of children, especially ‘gift children’ who are conceived or born abroad as a result of out-of-wedlock relationships or sexual assault. Families we interviewed in Lombok, Indonesia, displayed complex social ingenuity to ensure the gift child’s social belonging. Caregivers described how they address discrimination by manipulating and falsifying family histories in identity documents, including census forms and birth registration. These family strategies drive home the local role of identity documents as a tool to enhance belonging rather than as proof of legal identity. We spotlight the time lag between birth and obtaining an official birth record as a crucial space in creating ‘citizenship from below’ in communities with high out-migration and low birth registration rates.

Compelling Evidence: Research Methods, HIV/AIDS, and Politics in Papua, Indonesia

Increasing calls for an evidence-based public health (EBPH) rely on forms of quantitative evidence to decide HIV/AIDS interventions. A major criticism of this method is it downplays the significance of experiential, cultural or political facets of HIV/AIDS. We apply the concept of ‘rendering technical’ to explore the relationship between methods used in HIV/AIDS research in Papua, Indonesia and current socioeconomic conditions. We analysed research methods used in sixty-two HIV/AIDS studies, assessed presentations at an international AIDS conference, and conducted ethnographic research in Papua. Nation-wide EBPH initiatives are implemented in Papua, yet there remains a critical mass of qualitative ethnographic studies carried out by indigenous scholars emphasising experiences of persons and culture, often within a colonial or post-colonial framework. We argue these studies partially counter approaches which render technical complex realities. In political conditions where indigenous minorities suffer inequities, qualitative ethnographic research may yield critical kinds of evidence, potentially contributing to more nuanced decision-making around HIV.

‘Like it, don’t like it, you have to like it’: children’s emotional responses to the absence of transnational migrant parents in Lombok, Indonesia

ABSTRACT This article explores the experiences and emotions of children in rural East Lombok, Indonesia, who stay behind with relatives or neighbours while their parents leave the country for work. The article contributes to recent scholarship of children’s experiences of transnational migration in Southeast Asia by drawing out the complex emotions of children who stay behind. Based on research conducted in four ‘sending’ villages, the article describes children’s lived experiences of their parent’s transnational migration, and their intense feelings that whether they ‘like it or don’t like it’, they have no choice but to acquiesce to their parents’ long, often indeterminate absences. The research suggests that stay-behind children are entangled in community anxieties pervading the emotional economy of transnational migration, including the embodied emotion of shame (malu) which shapes children’s responses to parental absence. By focusing on children’s own views and experiences, we contribute to growing debates about the implications of migration for children’s rights and well-being in Southeast Asia.

Migrant Mothers and the Sedentary Child Bias: Constraints on Child Circulation in Indonesia

Across the Asia-Pacific region, increasing numbers of women are migrating transnationally for low-skill work while their children remain in home communities, fostered by family or neighbours. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2014–15 in Lombok, Indonesia, this paper describes a sedentary child bias within Indonesian policies, and how this bias constrains migrant mothers’ choices regarding the care and well-being of their children. Vignettes describing the challenges of caregivers in Lombok families illustrate how the absence of social services, local forms of child fostering and limits on transnational adoption and child mobility together significantly curtail migrant mothers’ opportunities to arrange optimal support for their children while working abroad. The sedentary child bias in Indonesia raises issues around limits on the circulation of children that are relevant to the wider Asia and Pacific region, where temporary female labour migration and concomitant mother–child separation is on the rise.

‘Living in HIV-land’: Mobility and Seropositivity among Highlands Papuan Men

The lure of Papua as a discrete, politically distinct space has curtailed the study of Papuan mobility, or the impacts of the mobile technologies, peoples, objects and ideas that flow in and out of the province on the indigenous men and women who live there. The tendency has been to privilege the fixity of culture in place, and the site of the production of cultural knowledge itself, over the fluidity and porosity of cultural boundaries and cultural transformations brought about through mobility. The tried-and-true approach, as I have taken in many of my own academic papers, is to assert that particular indigenous tribes of the central highlands region culturally value personal mobility across space, social flexibility across kin lines, and are affected by migrants who have moved into the region, but to then go on to focus analytic attention only on what takes place within the fixed space of their ancestral lands.

Birth registration in Southeast Asia: a child’s foundation right?

Birth registration is understood as a child’s ‘foundation right’ (UNICEF, 2015, p. 3). Ideally, birth registration provides a legal identity linked to country of origin and rights to state services including education, protection, health care and special programmes for vulnerable populations, aiming to leave no one behind. Universal birth registration by the year 2030 has been adopted as a target within United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 16 (United Nations and the Rule of Law, 2015). Across Southeast Asia, however, birth registration is entangled with national ideologies and local moralities, and the idealised link between birth registration and entitlements cannot be assumed. Moreover, patterns of birth registration indicate inequitable access to the registration process itself. As shown in Table 1, there are uneven rates of birth registration within the region, ranging from a high of 99.4 per cent in Thailand to a low of 55.2 per cent in Timor-Leste. While UNICEF (2015) gives an average rate of 79 per cent across Southeast Asia, estimates vary depending upon reporting agency and methods. In addition, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam do not provide national statistics to global agencies. Income disparities are one driver of widely varying registration rates across the region. Countries with high-income disparities such as Indonesia and Myanmar have lower registration rates than countries with lower-income disparities, such as Thailand and Viet Nam (UNICEF, 2015). We suggest that regional birth registration follows two general trends. The first characterises countries with overall high registration and low-income disparities, but with enduring pockets of low registration. This includes Thailand, Viet Nam, and the Philippines. The second trend is found in countries with overall low registration and high-income disparity. This includes Indonesia, Myanmar, Lao PDR, and Cambodia. Exemplifying the first trend, Thailand has used innovative methods to register over 99 per cent of in-country births. Registration is free for every newborn within 15 days of birth and is tightly tied to the health sector. An online registration system in hospitals is complemented by a rural midwife programme to verify out-of-hospital births. Nonetheless, pockets of unregistered children remain: only 79 per cent of children living in homes with non-Thai speakers have their births registered, and most unregistered children are born to families who migrated from Lao PDR, Myanmar and Cambodia (National Statistical Office, 2013). Lack of knowledge of the Thai language and lack of required documents are