Transformative journeys : temporary Indonesian migrant workers and identity change.

Abstract

Studies of the impact of pilgrimages have relied heavily on one type of identity, the national identity. However, pilgrimages can produce many other forms of identity. In this research, we examine the journeys of temporary migrant workers to different destination countries as the kinds of pilgrimages that follow a ritual process that also reshapes identities. This study examines the pilgrimages' impact on migrant's identities and the broader community around them after completing their pilgrimage. The research was conducted in a village of Indramayu Regency, West Java Province, Indonesia, being one of the most active migrant communities, where temporary migration is crucial for the community.

Migrants started their long-distance journeys to work overseas by leaving from their country of origin to relocate to destination countries. Their journeys are not simply to gain more money, but they also follow the ritual process of a kind of pilgrimage. Migrants are self-selection as being brave and who change their lives for a better future life after migration. Becoming part of a new environment in the urban settings of the destination countries opens an opportunity for migrants to have new experiences as migrants that will transform their identities through the liminality period. They are exposed to status, national, cosmopolitan, and class boundaries that create a migrant identity that fits well with the Indonesian government's expectations of Indonesians.

These migrants' journeys are completed when they return to their community of origin with higher class, increased confidence, and with the more democratic and cosmopolitan elements of their new identities. The thesis shows that the migrants' journeys by working overseas, as similar to pilgrimages, led them to reimagine their identity as plural.

As a kind of learned people, similar to those from educational or religious pilgrimages, they play an essential role in the community of origin because they are confident, skillful and knowledgeable, occupy a higher status and class, and have a new understanding of power relations that demonstrates their new Indonesian identity. Consequently, they have the ability to transfer their new Indonesian identity, through democratization and development arising from their new view of status and hierarchies, to the community around them. It turns out that migrants, as a new class fraction, are generally on the side of the state against the local traditional village leadership. They benefit from utilizing their higher class, status, new skills, and knowledge, which enables them to win awards from the national government for their efforts in changing their home villages. Utilizing their expertise, money, and new status, migrants also develop democratic attitudes which they perpetuate through migrants' organizations, deep involvement in the formulation of village policies, and middle-term village planning. They are the ally of the state insofar as they try to solidify their new class fraction and share the new Indonesian identity by realizing their ideas through modernist and development projects, at the expense of the traditional local order. This indicates a new pattern of power dynamics that is reflected in new power relations within the community of origin.