Cross-border Mobility : Women, Work and Malay Identity in Indonesia

Shaped by social class, gender, and the economic and cultural possibilities of political decentralization, the study identifies three borderscopes that orient women’s work-related mobility and create diverse outcomes for the ethnocultural category 'Sambas Malay'. It offers a fresh perspective on the association between mobility and the ethnocultural category ‘Malay’.

Cross-border Mobility: Women, Work and Malay Identity in Indonesia offers a fresh perspective on the association between mobility and the ethnocultural category ‘Malay’. In so doing, it raises new research questions that are relevant to the study of Indonesian women’s socioeconomic mobility more generally. Based on fieldwork in Sambas, a region of Indonesia bordering Malaysia, this study documents the ethnocultural consequences of the highly mobile working lives of Sambas Malay women. Emphasising the significance of territorial borders in women’s working lives, this study highlights how women’s border location not only facilitates cross-border pathways of international labour migration and trade, but also generates feelings of peripherality that inform women’s imaginative construction of other, nonterritorial borders that need to be crossed. Shaped by social class, gender, and the economic and cultural possibilities of political decentralization, the study identifies three borderscopes that orient women’s work-related mobility and create diverse outcomes for the ethnocultural category 'Sambas Malay'. This book offers a fresh perspective on the association between mobility and the ethnocultural category ‘Malay’. This study documents the broader cultural consequences of Indonesian Malay women's work-related mobility on the practice and understanding of what it means to be Malay. In so doing, the book: Provides a rare investigation into the ethnocultural effects of Indonesian women's mobility (i.e, in term of the way women's mobility reconfigures ethnic identifications). Critically addresses the historically-informed assumption that Malay men, through their mobility, are the carriers of Malayness, Islamic reform, and modernity Deepens our appreciation of the significance of gendered forms of mobility across territorial and non-territorial borders to the construction of identity Provides a borderlands perspective on women's independent labour migration in a part of West Kalimantan where studies of women's labour migration remain scarce.