The illegal as mundane

ABSTRACT

Ways of studying illegal behaviour are important in the context of Indonesia, a country well known for its failure to deal adequately with the corruption that permeates every level of society. They are perhaps even more salient at the peripheries of the nation-state where government agencies struggle to contain the illegal practices that necessarily emerge where nation-states meet. This article reflects on our experiences conducting a decade-long study of an Indonesian borderlands that, while not initially focused on illegality, came – as a consequence of its ubiquity – to include it as a key construct. This experience led us to grapple not only with methodological questions about how to research illegality but also with assumptions about what illegality is and does. We argue that the only way to recognise and account for the quotidian nature of many kinds of illegal activity in the borderlands is to eschew an ethnography of exception in favour of an ethnography of the mundane.

KEYWORDS:

• Border studies
• ethnography
• gender
• illegality
• methodology

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project grant DP0557368.

Notes on contributors

Michele Ford is Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre and Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests focus on borderlands and social activism in Southeast Asia. Email: [email protected]

Lenore Lyons is Honorary Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests focus on borderlands, gender and labour migration. Email: [email protected]

ORCID

Michele Ford http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0580-975X

Notes

1 Fieldwork for the project took place in both Singapore and the Riau Islands. We conducted some interviews together in both locations, though primary responsibility for fieldwork was split according to country expertise. Illegality was not a topic of importance or an issue that shaped the Singapore component of our fieldwork: while there are certainly ‘spaces of non-existence’ occupied by undocumented workers in Singapore’s construction, service and sex industries; we did not talk to these workers in Singapore but on their return to Indonesia.

2 In the case of our work on the Riau Islands, such an approach reveals a local ecology of licitness in which practices that break the laws of one or more authority are deemed by some to be warranted on the grounds that the laws themselves are ‘bad’ (Ford and Lyons 2012).

3 This is not always the case, however. See, for example, Wong (2015), who argues that such research is not necessarily dangerous.

4 Jacobs (1998), among others, argues that for this reason the best form of preparation for research in dangerous field sites is lengthy periods of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork. He acknowledges, however, that even then the researcher cannot underestimate the ongoing potential for violence when researching illegality.

5 These phenomena certainly exist, but we think that it is a mistake to see Batam as a place set apart. Life there is for the most part not unlike life in the more established urban communities on the neighbouring islands of Bintan and Karimun, and to some extent in other towns of a similar size elsewhere in Indonesia. Indeed, low-level corruption and many other illegal practices found in the Riau Islands are ubiquitous in the archipelago (see, for example, McCarthy 2002). See Schulte-Nordholt (1991) for a discussion of the role in the state in relation to illegality in the Dutch East Indies. For broader discussions of the role in the state in relation to illegality in contemporary Indonesia, see Aspinall and van Klinken (2011). See Trocki (1998) for a discussion on Southeast Asia more broadly.

6 For a discussion of some of the findings of this work, see Williams et al. (2008).

7 For more information on Chinese living in the Riau Islands, see Lyons and Ford (2013).

8 These observations tally with anecdotal data obtained from a spokesperson of Singapore’s National Trade Union Congress (interview by Michele Ford, March 2010).

9 As we have argued elsewhere, many border-related activities are commonly believed to be illegal not because they are inherently bad but because of misguided policymaking on the part of the central government (Ford and Lyons 2011).

10 Many of our older informants in Tanjung Balai Karimun had stories of incidents of their past involvement in smuggling. The experiences of most were, however, far less exciting than those of Raja Basri. Raja Basri’s stories are plausible since school teachers comprised a significant proportion of the local Karimun elite in the 1940s to 1960s, and because of evidence of very significant business interests developed after resigning from his position as headmaster.

11 See Ford and Lyons (2011) for a discussion of ‘real-but-fake’ passports, and Ford and Lyons (2013) for an account of NGOs’ role in monitoring Indonesian nationals returning illegally by sea.

12 All interviews were conducted in Indonesian or in a combination of Indonesian and the local Riau Malay dialect. The translations here are by the first author.

13 They occasionally described these crossings using the English-derived word ilegal but more commonly referred to as unofficial (tidak resmi) or underground (gelap, lit. dark).

14 Their behaviour is in stark contrast to some of the women we spoke to who had been involved in the commercial sex industry and who were at pains to protect their identities and those of their families – not because commercial sex is illegal, but because it is haram (morally forbidden). Similarly, the smuggling of household goods and foodstuffs is discussed openly because it is considered to be an unremarkable part of life on the border, whereas the smuggling of illegal drugs is not.