In Sickness and In Wealth: Migration, Gendered Morality, and Central Java by Carol Chan (review)

There are approximately six million Indonesians working overseas as both documented and undocumented labor migrants. This is known, in Indonesian, as the Tenaga Kerja Indonesia or Tenaga Kerja Wanita (TKI, Indonesian labor force, or TKW, the women’s labor force). In the late 1980s, a demand for cheap labor in foreign export-processing-zone factories and in neighboring countries’ domestic households pulled in many poor and rural people from Indonesia. After the Asian Economic Crisis (1997–98), the movement of people in search of better economic opportunities expanded further. Migration became increasingly gendered, with hundreds of thousands of women from rural Java taking up jobs as domestic workers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Scholars from the disciplines of geography, anthropology, sociology, political science, labor, and migration studies, as well as human rights activists and advocates, have kept track of the sociological, institutional, infrastructural, and personal developments of this migration system by studying and documenting various aspects of peoples’ mobilities at different scales (e.g., national and village studies, personal narratives, oral life histories). As a result, there is now a large academic literature about Indonesian overseas labor migration and, particularly, concerning the range of women’s experiences during their overseas work and upon their return.

Carol Chan’s book, In Sickness and In Wealth: Migration, Gendered Morality, and Central Java, starts by providing one of the best and most thorough reviews of the literature about Indonesian women’s overseas migration. Chan argues that women’s migration from Java is governed by “gendered moral economies” that are constituted and reconstituted at multiple levels of society, but most potently circulated through “mundane everyday village talk about and responses to migrant success and failure” (12). Throughout the six chapters of her book—which explain the politics of morality and identity in Indonesia, evaluations of migrant success and failure, and the ways that shame and faith mobilize moral discourses governing women’s migration choices—we are reminded often of the fact that “discourses in Indonesia linking gender, migration, and morality produce a double-edged view of women as, on the one hand, highly individualistic and conscious agents of their own fate; and, on the other hand, highly vulnerable to worldly temptations and thus requiring protection and discipline” (57). Chan demonstrates this using several key examples, such as the high-profile media coverage of Erwiana Sulistyaningshi’s abuse and neglect, and the ways that women and men differentially alter their post-migration behavior in relation to gender-specific expectations of morality embodied in feelings of shame (malu) and faith in God. These gendered post-migration behaviors emerge through discourses about fate (nasib) and embodied understandings of labor, destiny (takdir), and human agency.

The perspective provided in this book could have far-reaching effects not only for research and academic analyses, but also for activists and advocates who seek to improve the lives of Javanese women who transnationally migrate. Chan argues that “through the public cultural valorizing of migrant workers, Indonesian state authorities depict and justify multidimensional socioeconomic inequalities as a natural state of affairs” (45). Chan’s scholarship shows that these inequalities are not natural or inevitable. They are, in fact, the product of decisions made at different levels of society, ranging from governmental policy decisions to people’s behavioral choices within the realm of possibilities in Javanese villages. While government discourses and the mundane everyday talk of villagers normalize transnational, gendered structures of inequality, Chan’s work and that of other scholars reveal the precise mechanisms through which these structures are sustained and through which cultural logics circulate. In particular, understanding the ways that transnational workers deploy ideas about individual fate and destiny in relation to multiple social and structural inequalities and barriers to success could help design more meaningful interventions, empowerment programs, and advocacy initiatives that consider how risky decisions are justified and made sensible locally.

This book is essential reading for students wishing to learn...