Title: “The Remittance House on Forest Land: Migrant Labor’s Fixities in Mountain Java”

Speaker: Professor Nancy Lee Peluso (Departments of Geography and Anthropology, UC Berkeley)
https://ourenvironment.berkeley.edu/people/nancy-lee-peluso

Abstract:
Remittance houses are global phenomena that have transformed rural and agrarian landscapes as transnational labor migration (TLM) has increased. In East Java, Indonesia, montane forest workers’ wives, daughters, and mothers are remitting their savings from TLM in East and Southeast Asian cities, reducing long-term household debts and eliminating forest worker households’ dependence on the plantation for social reproduction. Despite the long-term status of the forest worker settlement area as “borrowed” forest land, women’s transnational work is also replacing men’s forest plantation work as the primary source of income in their households. Based on oral histories, analyses of maps, and archival/documentary research carried out since 2015, this paper documents and illustrates one way the remittance houses built on forest land symbolize and represent contemporary local and global politics of production and social reproduction: through their connections to an unusual site for a remittance house built of more permanent materials than forest workers’ housing ever was in the past. The houses also represent a specific plantation-migration nexus in the current conjuncture, one financed by women’s congealed mobile labor and men’s access to the worker settlement land by working for the foresters. Though funds for remittance houses on forest land are deployed only after more pressing debts and expenses are paid out, they refract past (in situ) and present (multilocal) land-labor relations. In addition, they embody and emplace the changing politics of social reproduction and work on a village-plantation complex of private and state forest plantations in the mountains of Java. 

For those who would like to join on Zoom:
Time: Tuesday, 25 February. 15:00-17:00 (GMT +9)
https://kyoto-u-edu.zoom.us/j/96450076673?pwd=LanS4bI7gfgVjo4cUOmT2nA2YEHKOF.1
ID: 964 5007 6673
PASS: 843295