Assuming modernity : migrant industrial workers in Tangerang, Indonesia

Abstract

The financial cns1s in 1997 that severely hit Indonesian manufacturing made thousands of factory workers redundant. As the impact of the crisis eases several years later, the sector has started to recover and urban manufacturing is now attracting young migrants from rural Indonesia. The recent flow of migrants to the city marks the rise of a new generation of urban factory workers who arrive in the metropolis with distinctive aspirations compared to their pre-crisis predecessors who were associated with labour activism in the early and mid-1990s. This thesis is an ethnographic account of migrant industrial workers in Tangerang, west Java and their relation to the processes of globalisation and modernisation. It focuses on the increasing integration of rural subjects into modem discourses through the embrace of practices regarded as conferring on them a modem identity. The formation of identity amongst these subjects is inseparable from their efforts to be modem subjects, represented by their aspirations for progress and advancement. The personalities introduced in this thesis demonstrate a variety of expression of what it means to be modem beings; to be urban people; to be differentiated from the 'un­ modem' rural existence; and to be in conformity with the imagined state of modernity. The shift to the city is not experienced by these new arrivals as a disjuncture because their childhood experience in the countryside has already been shaped by diverse cultural flows, making modernisation and global discourse familiar in rural society. Indeed, these childhood encounters with the modem have created a phantasmagoric image of modernity which they seek to embrace through migration to the city. Nonetheless, in their new metropolitan setting, the contemporary migrants remain subject to the harsh regime of capitalist production as well as urban marginalisation that menace their attempt to realise their 'imagined community' of modernity. Therefore, their urban practices are affected by their efforts to produce a new meaning to and realigning of their pre-existing perceived 'modernity' with the actuality of the industrial town. This thesis, based on nearly one year's fieldwork between 2000-2001 in an urban neighbourhood in Tangerang, focuses on how the rural youth-turned urban migrant workers understand their place in the process of modernisation and material development, which has become the holy grail of the contemporary Indonesian state.