Many readers, particularly those looking for ethnographies accessible to undergraduates, will welcome Johan M. Lindquist's timely topic and his engaging writing style. His book is an anthropological exploration of Batam Island, the Indonesian entrepôt lying across the Malacca Straits from Singapore that was essentially invented and aggressively developed as a peripheral “export-processing zone” in the 1980s and 1990s (p. 33), and that is apparently floundering at present (p. 147). While Lindquist gives a concise history of the Straits area, providing just enough factual data for readers to make sense of the political and economic context of his field site, his focus is not on development per se, but rather on how individual lives are lived in this socially diffuse and financially unstable borderland.
Lindquist's focus on Indonesian migrants seeking their fortunes (whether they work at multinational corporate factories on Batam or use the island to transit to Singapore or Malaysia as their preferred destination) reveals that the research site and its inhabitants seem to be in continual flux. Because of this emergent and shifting context, Lindquist frames his research as “post-ethnographic” (pp. 316–17) in that it refuses “the bounds of conveniently sized localities … venturing to speak about regional relations and histories” (p. 10). To address the complexity of his field site and the people who live there, the author devises what turns out to be an interesting and effective conceptual framework, selecting three Indonesian “concepts” to guide his analysis. These common terms, merantau (circular migration), liar (wild, uncontrolled), and malu (shame)—along with an auxiliary fourth term, belum, “not yet”—help him to make sense of the varied situations he observes.
With a fluid writing style that brings alive the subjects of his research, Lindquist examines Batam as a “node in a system of human mobility that is territorially and culturally unbounded” (p. 8), giving chapter-length excursions into the lives of Indonesian factory workers, prostitutes, Singaporean tourists, and Indonesian migrants working in Malaysia and Singapore. Because he is interested in how individual migrant workers engage with changes in employment opportunities, the transnational corporate economy is of less interest than the “emotional economy,” that is, how the impersonal global development system impacts a worker's sense of self. His title is apt: the subjects’ varying states of mobility, whether represented by excursions to and from their illegal (another definition of liar) shantytowns or by attempts to sneak into Singapore, are overwhelmingly fraught with anxiety.
The ethnographic details in the book (based on thirteen months of research in the late 1990s and two return trips) are rich and memorable, and the author brings up intriguing contradictions of experience, addressing the inescapable changing dynamics of gendered behavior (in a system that, contra tradition, values women's work over men's), notions of time (referencing short-term versus long-term stays on the island), and the fluctuating nature of common theoretical rubrics such as “place” (discussing Singaporean tourists' perception of Batam as “fantasy island” where drugs and sex are essentially unregulated). The reader will come away with a solid foundation of basic issues surrounding global development, with a clear sense of strategies that migrant workers use to engage with varying government and corporate systems, and a collection of clear narrative images of the individuals who are the focus of the book. It should be noted here, even though scant reference is made to it in the text, that Lindquist's research is also the topic of B.A.T.A.M. (2006), a thirty-minute film by Liam Dalzell, Per Erik Eriksson, and Johan Lindquist that is available from Documentary Educational Resources. Researchers and instructors should be aware of this useful supplementary information, as several of the book's issues and research subjects are also effectively discussed and depicted there.
That said, there are a few hesitations readers might have with this book. Some might feel that anchoring an investigation of the complexity of mobile workers in a global economy to three Indonesian conceptual tropes is too essentializing, and that such limiting terms are unable to take account of the experiences of individuals as varied a pious young Muslim woman from Aceh (Wati) and a retired ex-pat male from Singapore (Pak Haji). Others might feel that the author has neglected appropriate references in his discussions of the out-migration of maids, of prostitution, and of Indonesian perceptions of emotion. I felt that his framing of “tourism” mentioned in the title was unclear, having very little to do with the common understanding of the term; readers may want to find supplementary research about his examples, in which Singaporean males travel to Batam exclusively to engage in sex and drug experiences. A point of frustration was never learning the author's perceptions of why the Indonesian economy is so much less successful than its two regional neighbors, the issue that would explain why workers migrate, and, indeed the issue that underpins the very essence of his research.
Nevertheless, Lindquist's work strikes me as a valuable, interesting, and in many ways innovative addition to the field. The book is ideal for use in undergraduate courses in globalization and development, or area studies (Southeast Asia or Indonesia), and as long as certain aspects, such as those mentioned earlier, are supported with pertinent articles or in lectures, I can easily imagine this book to be required reading in such courses, particularly as it is supported by an affiliated ethnographic film. The author has structured his book in such a way that the chapters are linked by regular reference to the terms malu, liar, and rantau, as well as by the continuing stories of particular individuals, all of them engaging characters. The chapters also successfully stand alone. This feature of his writing makes the book particularly useful in the classroom, allowing an instructor the freedom to assign the sections separately and in conjunction with supplementary readings on theory or concept. The Anxieties of Mobility will no doubt find a secure place in the anthropological literature on development, borderlands, gender, prostitution, and migration.
