In response to global attention to the young child, early childhood programs have become a national and provincial focus in Indonesia since 2000. The roll out of public programs for low income communities has made use of a longstanding mode of delivery: the volunteered, community-based labour of women. Although susceptible to analysis as a mode of governmentality, an older scholarship on the domestic community, its role in social reproduction, and its shaping by global accumulation offers significant insights as to why this method for delivering social welfare persists, even as it dovetails with more recent work on care and networks of global care labour. Based on ethnographic work in Yogyakarta, this examination of changes in international development regimes considers the contradictory effects for the empowerment of women as against children. Ultimately, the care labour required for early childhood programming, which has been taken to follow from the naturalised link between women's socially appropriate care work and childrearing, provokes instead questions about the awkward relationship between children and women. That is to say, recent developmental regimes seem to promote the empowerment of children as against women. By foregrounding social reproduction, this awkward relationship becomes a productive way to consider the limits of governmentality and to reconsider the domestic community as critical to understand globalisation, neoliberalisation, and the reorganisation of development and social welfare in the early twenty-first century.
Walking down the alley to the corner in the kampung where I used to lived, I feel the weight of twenty-four years of visits and the tenderness borne of managing that burden for these many years. This feeling begins the moment I pass the market near the entrance that remains remarkably unchanged. The broken-down remains of the PKK warung next to it are a reminder of a spat between neighbors. 1 Turning north, the open space used for badminton and other afternoon sports is still there, although the ruined house of minor kraton (royalty) is now an asrama (dormitory), and the nextdoor mosque has been much improved. From here, the alleyway extends through two neighborhood sections to reach my old house and the house next door that belongs to the family that now feels like my own kin. 2 Any walk through what I call Kampung Rumah Putri is an opportunity for me to inventory what remains and what has changed. I have experienced Java through
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