Labour in Paradise: Gender, Class and Social Mobility in the Informal Tourism Economy of Urban Bali, Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Bali’s recent socio-economic transformation is mainly a result of rapid growth in mass-tourism, which, as a capitalist labour-intensive industry, represents a new regime of labour that reorganises, dislocates, and multiplies wage labour opportunities. ‘Localising globalisation’ through labour in tourism alters conditions for gaining a living wage; yet, it also produces new contestations of gender, caste and class. This article argues that the labour regime shift has produced a large informal economy that provides new paths for social mobility for low caste Bali-Hindus, whilst at the same time class, gender and caste inequalities interlock in the shaping of different labour trajectories.

Acknowledgements

This article is a result of my work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway. I wish to thank Cecilie Ødegaard, Ragnhild Overå, Gracia Clark, Berit Angelskår, Espen Villanger and Leif Manger, who were all participants in the comparative research project ‘Localising Globalisation: Gendered transformations of Work in developing economies’, for their valuable comments on presentations of drafts for this article. I also wish to thank Mary Beth Mills for her inspiring thoughts and comments. I wish to express my gratitude to my current employer, Bergen University College, for providing me with the time and space needed for working with, and finalising, this article. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions for improvement of this article, and Penny Bayer for copy editing. Finally, I thank Ni Made Sriati and the people of Bali for including me, for welcoming my many questions, and for providing me with the knowledge on which I base my analyses. The data upon which this article is based can be acquired upon request to the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.