Introduction

Exploring the mobility experiences and subjectivities of women travellers in the context of a developing country, this book aims to contribute to the theorization of women's travel. Routes of travel are significant in tracing contemporary social and cultural processes (Clifford 1997; Tsing 2000). The routes of travel by Eastern Indonesian women are varied and so are the outcomes. This book focuses on groups of young women travellers from Eastern Indonesia. It analyses the ways these women through their travel have created a subjective space enabling re-imagining identity and subject positions in a larger scale of social relations.

Travel, traveller, and travel stories have formed the heart of geography as a scientific discipline for centuries (Domosh 1991). In the context of Indonesia, travel is a visible part of the recent economic and political changes that have taken place in the country. Women's travel is a component of these national and regional transformations or the macropolitics of location, and is interconnected to multi-layered social relations. Travel also reflects a range of specific local, social and cultural changes. A question that motivates my research concerns these forces of change in relation to women and space; why and how has travel preoccupied women of Eastern Indonesia? More specifically, I address three inseparable concerns: the distinctive characteristics of women's voyages; how women's travel not only reflects and reproduces but also resists gendered space; and how the space of travel allows women to shift subject positions and subjectivities.

Indonesia is the setting of my research. The country's recent political and economic changes provide a window through which we can gain a perspective on the flow of people, and of women in particular. My choice of Eastern Indonesia as the regional focus of the study follows one of the classic interests of human geography in its concern for the region, the area or the locality (Massey 1984, p. 2). My own familiarity with the people, language and culture is, of course, an advantage. Eastern Indonesia, in particular the province of East Nusa Tenggara, attracts my interest for a number of reasons. It is known as a place at the margin. The region has been described as the Outer Islands, with a relatively low transport penetration indicating that it is a “peripheral region” (Rutz 1976, p. 161), and “the least integrated and most underdeveloped of Indonesia's provinces” (Drake 1989, p. 221).

In Eastern Indonesia gender is an important category that stratifies social groups. Women's access to mobility is influenced by their position in social relations. I begin by situating myself in the research project and then locating the Eastern Indonesian women in the geographical, economic and political situations of East Nusa Tenggara. Women's travel represents efforts to negotiate their position in spatial and social relations. Such representation does not change the dominant discourse of social categories or boundaries, however it does open a new space for women's shifting roles.

This part takes the dynamics of Eastern Indonesian women's travels full circle. Within the framework of local social relations discussed previously, this final chapter engages in conceptual discussion of the range of travellers' tales told. Women's mobility reveals not only physical change but also a metaphorical journey creating a critical space that enables mobile subjectivities.

Performing multiple femininities

In the local gendered space of Flores, our bodily appearance—the material space — and social relations are formed and negotiated as a strategy to achieve a specified aim, as the previous vignette illustrates. Travel to the city in the local context, as suggested by the women's stories in this chapter, involves aligning their body, gender, and sexual behaviours. Why? In the local context, similar to the early twentieth century cities in Europe, women's presence in the cities might be seen as a problem because it symbolized the promise of sexual adventure, “a problem of order” (Wilson 1991, pp. 5–6). In Indonesia, sexual adventure, excessive ambition, and assertiveness for women is seen as a deviation (Hatley 1997, p. 94). Cities represent disorder and ambiguity as far as women's sexuality is concerned, but at the same time they also offer wealth and opportunity, promising liberation (Wilson 1991, p. 6).

Through unpacking travel stories and being myself a fellow traveller on voyages, I trace the complexities and diversity of travelling identities of Eastern Indonesian women. Paying attention to the local context of social relations opens a space for articulating the physical as well the metaphorical journeys of crossing the ocean. Individuals inhabited different subject positions in various nodes of relations. Travellers move in and out of a wider range of subject positions allowing new subjectivities to emerge. I ground the empirical evidence of travel on three basic sea routes, namely travel inter-islands, travel to urban centres, and travel to overseas destinations. Travellers' tales provide clues to the creation of contested and liminal spaces where new identities are imagined.

Women and travel within the literature

This chapter provides a context for discussion of women's travel by firstly identifying several strands of literature where issues of women and travel are discussed. The link between space, women's travel, and subjectivity is then explored. Secondly, I draw on social analysis and ethnographic work on localities in East Nusa Tenggara and also on collective thought in folk narratives to situate women and their travel within the local socio-cultural context. I am interested in the ways that culture, as a web of socially negotiated meanings, is embedded in a process of women's mobility. Mobility is a way in which women participate in the dynamic processes of reworking both the meanings of place and their own identities (Marcus and Fisher 1986; Silvey and Lawson 1999, pp. 124–125).

Current studies on travel and travellers extend to a wide range of spatial practices. Movements of people in diaspora, exile, transnational and inter- and intra-regional migrations, global tourism, and other flows have been classical research projects in geography. The spatial pattern associated with the social and cultural condition of post-modernity in which people depart from (a notion of) a place of origin, has become increasingly complex, thus harder to describe and analyse (Appadurai 1991; Siikala 2001, p. 1).

The vast amount of research on people's mobility reflects the significance of movements for existence. The rich migration literature encompasses a range of theoretical perspectives and scales of analysis. A systematic review of migration research produced by Silvey and Lawson (1999) shows a diversity of approaches within the migration field. Migration has been shown as a powerful force affecting identities in the context of societies such as Irish, Italian, Mexican, and Caribbean (Walter 1997; Grimes 1998; Webster 1998; Fortier 2000). This literature, located at the intersections of cross-cultural studies, diaspora studies, and gender studies, provides theoretical debates on identity in relation to space. A smaller but increasing number of more recent works on gender and contemporary migration, in which my work is positioned, pay attention to women's identities and subject positions (see, for example, Romero 1992; Constable 1997; Kofman and England 1997; Barbič and Miklavčič-Brezigar 1999; Cox 1999; Gamburd 2000; Parrenas 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Silvey 2000, 2001).

Migration research employing political and economic frames nevertheless dominates the work on people's mobility.

At the end of July 1999 on one of my visits to Flores Timur, I travelled to Kedang on the island of Lembata. Like many women from the region, I took the ferry between islands because this was the most economical and practical way to circulate in the region. That day there was hardly any drama competing with other passengers to get seats on the ferry. When we were halfway into the journey, I climbed the upper deck of the ferry and thought I would take a few photographs of the view.

Even in that short four-hour inter-island trip there was a sense of surprise waiting around the corner. In an effort to extend my network I approached a group of women travelling together to attend a traditional village celebration. They were quite amicable. Apparently, my camera had signified me as a tourist — separating me as a different kind of traveller. Eventually, the four women cheerfully posed on the deck for a photograph. However, as I was about to take that shot with the beautiful background view, a man who had watched us from a distance, approached us and bluntly stopped me: “do not take their photograph!” There was confusion and tension among us women. The man was protective of the local women travellers. These women's association with me while on the voyage aroused this man's anxiety. Why?

Circulating: going with and against propriety

Inter-island movements of East Nusa Tenggaran women are characterized by temporary, short distance and sometimes repetitive trips. Women in the region have travelled as part of the family for a long time, yet this vignette indicates independent women circulating between islands can still create a sense of social unease. An implied cultural assumption that women are stationary at home underlies the problematic empirical evidence of women circulating in travel.

Historically, men's domain of mobility, for instance in pre-colonial trade and other localized interactions including migration, were conducted through the inter-island routes, as Graham (1999, p. 72) illustrates:

Mapping women's travel

In this study — mapping Eastern Indonesian women's travel — the journey has arrived at the destination. This final chapter engages with both a conceptual discussion of the previous chapters’ themes and a strategic analysis of the specificity of the politics of space and its relation to subjectivity. Here, I show how my engagement with the local specificity of women's mobility in Part Two leads to a discussion of the power geometry of place. This links micropolitics of women's travel with the macropolitics of the region. I have explored the notion of women crossing and negotiating boundaries through the travel stories of teachers and nurses (Chapter 5) and also of domestic workers (Chapter 6), such as Susana, leaving home. Susana's emphasis on the importance of her deportment, her bodily attributes of fair skin and her spatial movement are indications of a subject being aware of multiplicities within herself in terms of her race/region, class and gender identity, moving through trajectories of the geometry of power. She strategically placed herself through langgar laut, playing her politics of place. Through travel, Susana and others crossed and negotiated boundaries, creating a space of different scales of relations and power.

My contribution to the research on women's mobility focuses on the relationship between the creation of a transient, liminal space of travel and women's shifting subjectivities. This relationship can then be used to explore the link between space, gender, and subjectivity. I have taken into account the travelling subject, explored women's agency in their mobility, and examined their mobility as more than the product of women's class positions and forces of globalization. I have done so by paying attention to the women's voice, identity and personal meanings of mobility, as suggested by Silvey and Lawson (1999).

As Part Two indicates, Eastern Indonesian women's travels in the context of local/ethnic and class relations contain gender dimensions in which a complex mix of identities shapes their mobility. The specificity of the local space produces and reproduces an association of gender with particular spaces, social categories/hierarchies, activities, landscapes and symbols, in which inter-subjective and collective experiences of the community are negotiated (Bhabha 1994). I have analysed women's travel as a space of shifting gender relations in a range of spatial domains and scales which vary between places and over historical time (Callaway 1993; McDowell 1999; Silvey 2006).

The large inflow of immigrants from China and South Asia during the British colonial period has led to the emergence of a multiracial population that has persisted until today. Since the immigrants brought with them their religious practices different from the Bumiputera's, the population also became multi-religious in character. The close identification of ethnicity with religion reinforced the sharp divide between the different ethnic communities in the country. Some difficulties and challenges have always been encountered in the collection and presentation of statistics on ethnicity and religion, and they will be discussed in their respective sections.

The collection of information on ethnicity has assumed greater significance in recent years since it provides a major impact on the formulation and monitoring of government policies and programmes designed to eliminate the identification of race with economic activities. Undoubtedly, ethnic data compiled from the census would be essential for a fuller understanding of the country's demographics in view of the influence of ethnicity on the various population characteristics. The item pertaining to race has always been included in the population censuses conducted in Malaysia, though some changes in the definition and presentation of the statistics have been introduced over the years.

A better appreciation of the ethnic information requires an explanation of the definition of the different ethnic terminologies used in the population censuses. The definition of Chinese has always been quite clear-cut, referring to people of Chinese descent regardless of their country of birth or citizenship. The term Indians has not been consistently defined in past censuses, but it is now employed to refer to persons from the Indian subcontinent such as Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Sri Lankans. The definition, also disregarding citizenship or birthplace, makes sense because these people display fairly common social and cultural traits, and hence similar demographic characteristics.

The term Bumiputeras was introduced in the pan-Malaysia Censuses to accommodate the emergence of a large variety of indigenous communities after the creation of Malaysia in 1963. The Bumiputera group is now divided into Malays and Other Bumiputeras in most of the tables presented in the census reports. The latter refers mainly to the Orang Asli in West Malaysia and the numerous small indigenous tribes in Sabah and Sarawak.