The Anxieties of Mobility: Migration and Tourism in the Indonesian Borderlands (Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory (Hardcover)) - Hardcover

Johan A. Lindquist is assistant professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University.

A fine-grained picture of working class Indonesians and Singaporeans who travel in opposite directions in pursuit of jobs, money, sex, drugs, legitimacy, and bright lights. They cross multiple barriers―national, urban, moral, gender, and religious―in order to attain some measure of individual success in the globalizing economies that link Singapore’s development with Indonesia’s supply of cheap migrant workers. The ethnography is rich and fascinating, and it captures a complex shifting world with delicacy, grace, and clarity. (Aihwa Ong, University of California, Berkeley)

A landmark achievement. It builds a compelling theoretical argument from a close engagement with on-the-ground ethnography, providing a unique―but uniquely telling―window into everyday dynamics of movement, place-making, intimacy, and alienation, dynamics too often glossed over as a unitary globalization. By studying a place of hyper-capitalism far removed from the images of peaceful tradition typically associated with Indonesia, Lindquist has crafted a major contribution to a range of fields, from Asian Studies to studies of migration, transnationalism, and emotion. (Tom Boellstorff, University of California, Irvine)