82

In the context of the new labor migrations that first emerged in Asia in the 1970s, Indonesia has established itself as one of the leading exporters of labor to the countries of the region, the Near East and the Middle East. These transnationalisms disrupt ways of life across the archipelago. In the rural spaces of central Java’s Yogyakarta Special Region, where populations until recently tended to be sedentary, tensions have emerged between established forms of collective life and attitudes and practices developed in migration, often to the region’s major metropolises: Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Hong Kong and Seoul. An ethnographic study of one of the region’s villages reveals that, by calling into question processes of social and cultural reproduction, these upheavals expose power relations formerly obscured by the self-evidence of traditional forms of interaction. This has opened up an unprecedented political space in which it is possible to renegotiate forms of “making community” on the basis of the plurality of transnational “ordeals”. ?