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Asien, Nr. 72 (1999): ASIEN (Juli)

This PhD thesis is about Vohras, an Indian Muslim community that identifies the ‘Charotar’ region of central Gujarat as its homeland. Their cultivation of regional identity takes place within the context of a recent history of violence against Muslims in the state, and more widely in relation to the marginalisation of Muslims in Indian politics and society. The thesis describes the various ways in which Vohras shape their community and their sense of local belonging: through narratives, marriage practices, land investments, charitable associations, and travel. The thesis is based on multi-sited fieldwork involving ten months in Gujarat, two months in the UK, and brief fieldwork trips to other locations. The community is analysed from a ‘multi-scalar’ perspective, at three levels: as a local community in Anand town, as a regional community in ‘Charotar’, and as a transnational family network with ties to the region. By applying the notion of ‘place-making’ within a multi-scalar framework, the research contributes to theorising the region and to the ‘placial turn’ in discussions of transnationalism and migration, and, more specifically, to current debates on the position of Muslims in India.

After the fall of Soeharto in 1998, and an increased connection to the global world, politics at the local level in Indonesia have changed significantly. This has contributed to a change in how business is conducted in provincial towns. This thesis explores the changing relationship between the state and business after decentralization policy in 2001 followed by various technocratic approach in public sector. The study focuses on two business sectors: the batik and construction in Pekalongan, a provincial town in Central Java. ‘Informality’ is the approach used in this thesis to understand how state relates to business. There four main findings of this research. First, the intertwining of business and politics has intensified at the local level in post-Soeharto Indonesia. Businesspeople have resorted to a greater variety of strategies to access business opportunities in the state arena. Second, the increased quality of liberal democracy does not diminish personal relations, clientelism, collaboration between businesspeople and state actors. Third, there are similarities and differences of practices of informality in the two business sectors. Both sectors are liberalized and informality becomes a strategy to protect their business from the negative consequences of neoliberal reforms. Practices of informality are different between the two sectors, which depend on the scale of business and type of business. The forth is on theoretical reflections: the difficulty to disentangle formal from informal practices in the state-business relations.

This study explores the experiences of youth in the provincial town of Pontianak, West Kalimantan, done in Pontianak, the provincial capital of West Kalimantan during the years 2008-2009. It tries to understand the various patterns of relations between growing up and being young, how social relations of interdependence are embedded within this process, and how it is experienced by different segments of youth population in Pontianak. By trying to understand how young people navigate between being young and growing up as two co-existing dimensions of their lives, this study offers an alternative approach to deal with the limitations of both perspectives of ‘growing up’ and perspectives of ‘being young’ which are often discussed, and deployed in research, separately. Mainly using a qualitative approach focusing on subjective experiences of an educated youth population coming from the lower middle class, it explores how tensions and continuities between growing up and being young are experienced in life domains influential in young people's lives: education, work, and romantic relationships. It shows the interweaving of life domains that young people have to negotiate in their lives, which are also often dealt with separately in studies on youth. The continuities and tensions between growing up and being young are captured through identifying two main patterns of relations: ‘being young while growing up’ and ‘growing up while being young’, with the difference between them being a matter of different emphasis along what is basically a continuum.

How do people protect their physical and mental well-being when their assets and health are continually threatened by river flooding? How can we understand their practices in anticipation of, during, or right after floods? These are the main questions that have led to my anthropological PhD-research on the ways in which residents of a severely flood-prone neighbourhood in Jakarta (Indonesia) live with - and protect themselves against- frequent floods. Between 2009 and 2011 I have conducted fieldwork and lived in a neighbourhood that I call ‘Bantaran Kali’ in this dissertation: a slum that is built on the banks of a river and that is flooded several times a year. During my fieldwork in Bantaran Kali, I participated in the daily lives of my informants and experienced some of the risks that are inherent to it. For example, their houses and in-house shops flooded three times during the period in which my fieldwork took place. Many residents fell ill due to the polluted floodwater, and most of them experienced huge economic losses as a result of these floods. Some lost all their savings, while others saw their furniture and work assets damaged. Through the methods of participant observation, focus group discussions, risk mapping and in-depth interviewing; and by recording life-histories and conducting psychological and socio-economical surveys, I tried to gain insights in the many different ways in which the inhabitants of Bantaran Kali act and deal with the flood-risks described above.

This thesis argues that we can no longer understand the regulation of international mobility by focusing exclusively on state borders. In our contemporary mobile world, movement is regulated by spatiotemporally extended mobilities regimes in which both state and non-state actors play a role. In addition, in these mobilities regimes, the enabling and restricting of movement work in tandem through the use of particular technologies of classifying, examining, and controlling mobilities. The tracing and mapping of contemporary mobilities regimes as is done in this thesis not only allows us to understand their workings and constellation of actors, but also their effects. I show that mobilities regimes create differences in actual movement, in access to movement, and in control over movement, and how these regimes, by blurring the tasks and responsibilities of public and private actors and crossing geographical borders and legal boundaries, challenge borders and boundaries in several ways. In that light, I hope this thesis will encourage the critical analysis of contemporary efforts to regulate international mobility.