Living in a Makeshift World? Mobility, Temporariness, and Everyday Life in Indonesia

Kloos, David

doi:10.1111/var.12078

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Bimo also sees the popularity of street photography as tied to a shift in Indonesia's economy toward more precarious and makeshift (Kloos 2015) forms of labor. Bimo himself is an architect, though without a permanent position.…”

Section: Shadow Worlding Through Precarious Timesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shadow worlding: Chasing light in Yogyakarta

Luvaas

2022

American Anthropologist

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In the era of social media and digital cameras, street photography, or the candid documentation of everyday life in public space, has seen a resurgence of interest worldwide.What draws people to the genre is its ability to transform the way they see and experience the spaces around them. Street photography, I argue here, is a mode of shadow worlding, a dynamic and collaborative place-making practice in which the places being built are left deliberately inchoate and incomplete. Based on several weeks of participant observation among street photographers in two Indonesian cities, this article considers what happens when we begin to see and experience the way a street photographer does. I tell the story of several Indonesian street photographers, as well as describe my own experiences with street photography, to demonstrate the potential of the genre for reimagining and reworking our relationships with the cities we live in and the fieldsites we pass through.

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Section: Shadow Worlding Through Precarious Timesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shadow worlding: Chasing light in Yogyakarta

Luvaas

2022

American Anthropologist

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“…While youth has conventionally been considered as a process of transition, as something temporary anyway, this process is prolonged for many in anticipation of gainful employment, marriage and family or a sense of stability, an anticipation that may never end (Côté, 2018; Honwana, 2012,). Much has been made for a long time about the seemingly intensifying temporariness of everyday life and the way this word has been affixed as temporary contracts and labour, temporary friendships with or without benefits, even temporary autonomous zones (Boersma, 2019; Kloos, 2015; Rao, 2007). In an extensively urbanised era replete with the valorisation of mobility and circulation and the ways in which any apparent stability seems tenuous because of the ways in which social and geographic positions are networked across an ever-expanding range of relations, what could not be temporary?…”

Section: The Time Of the Temporarymentioning

confidence: 99%

To extend: Temporariness in a world of itineraries

Simone

2020

Urban Studies

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Recent urban analysis has emphasised the ‘big moves’ – planetary scales, extensive processes, major actors, mega-developments and substantial financial flows – important in accounting for a seemingly all-encompassing urbanisation. Still, significant volumes of the urban environment have historically been shaped by the collaborative efforts of residents and their associative institutions. These were collaborations largely operating without formal contracts or consensus, piecing together concrete places capable of holding different practices and sentiments and, as such, rarely became sedentary, even if conditions and power relations might have appeared fixed. These forms included and exceeded clear demarcations of entities (individual, household, social), with, for example, the operations of the digital media increasingly beyond the apprehension of human cognition, making it increasingly unclear ‘who is the what that does something to whom.’ As a result, the terms and economies of such collaborations amongst residents – their acts of autoconstruction – have become more complex and precarious, particularly as residents emphasise the importance of mobility, flexible commitments and individual aspirations. Hence, urban environments are elaborated in ways not captivated by plans, measures or even advanced computational analyses, and there are many ways that residents continue to operate in concert but without discernible mobilisation or organisation. Focusing on temporariness – not as a specific sector or set of practices but as a constellation of efforts to generate something of value – and drawing upon fieldwork across different sites in Indonesia, this lecture explores the new terrain of urban invention by poor, working and lower middle-class residents in the wake of its purported demise.

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“…McKay, this volume, on forms of ambient surveillance that characterise some transnational and diasporic relations). Indeed, the 'makeshift' (Kloos 2015) nature of life in KK is often stressed by migrants themselves. I once went with Leo and Rida to pay respects at another quarry-house where a man had just received news of the death of his mother in Adonara.…”

Section: Conclusion: the Difficulty Of Living In The Momentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stuck in the Short Term: Immobility and Temporalities of Care among Florenese Migrants in Sabah, Malaysia

Allerton

2019

Ethnos

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In Sabah, East Malaysia, decades of informal migration, combined with increasingly strict immigration regulations, have led to a paradoxical situation of immobility. Impoverished eastern Indonesian migrants find themselves 'stuck', unable either to return home and build a house in their home village or to plan for a future in Malaysia. Their Sabah-born children are born migrants, excluded from Malaysian schools, but mostly lacking knowledge of their parents' Indonesian homes. The paper discusses the narratives of three migrant families from east Flores, exploring how practices of care are intertwined with control exerted by the state, employers, and non-migrant kin in places of origin. It argues that many families have been led, by necessity, to emphasise short-term care and physical proximity with children over long-term care such as investment in education. However, the continued significance of Florenese commitments to land and houses can make living in the short-term morally problematic.

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Living in a Makeshift World? Mobility, Temporariness, and Everyday Life in Indonesia

Cited by 7 publications

References 31 publications

Shadow worlding: Chasing light in Yogyakarta

Shadow worlding: Chasing light in Yogyakarta

To extend: Temporariness in a world of itineraries

Stuck in the Short Term: Immobility and Temporalities of Care among Florenese Migrants in Sabah, Malaysia

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