Putting Ecstasy to Work: Pleasure, Prostitution, and Inequality in the Indonesian Borderlands

Abstract

This article takes the drug Ecstasy as a commodity located at the center rather than at the margins of social processes, a technology that allows for the temporary engagement with pleasure and displacement of inequality in the context of nightlife and prostitution. It addresses these issues by focusing ethnographic attention on how Indonesian female prostitutes and their Singaporean male clients use Ecstasy in a disco on the Indonesian island of Batam, an export-processing zone located at the border to Singapore. By paying close attention to consumption practices, the article uses Ecstasy as a starting point for illuminating intersections of social mobility and inequality in the context of contemporary forms of transnational capitalism.

Key Words:

• Drugs
• globalization
• prostitution
• Indonesia
• Singapore

Many people have read and commented on various versions of this article. In particular, I thank Natasha Schull and Jennifer Fishman, who invited me to present the first version at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2002. I am also grateful to Matthew Amster, Joshua Barker, Tom Boellstorff, Clara Han, Jennifer Mack, Aihwa Ong, Maple Razsa, and Mattias Viktorin, who all read later versions. Finally, I thank Tom Wilson and Jonathan Hill for their comments and support, as well as the journal's two anonymous reviewers who helped me clarify my argument.

Notes

1. By “technology” I mean “the problem of choosing the most appropriate means for achieving given goals or ends” (Collier and Ong 2005: 8).

2. In this context, comparisons could be made to cocoa leaves, caffeine, or sugar. See, for instance, Mintz's classic study, Sweetness and Power (1985).

3. The region has, however, been characterized by cultural and economic traffic for centuries. Historically, the Straits of Malacca functioned as a transit area for trade between India and China. Singapore was founded by the English for this reason in 1819, quickly becoming the dominant entrepot in the region, and binding the contemporary Riau Archipelago, of which Batam is a part, and Peninsular Malaysia to its hinterlands. It was first after decolonialization, in the 1960s, that a border emerged that regulated the movement of goods and people between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.

4. The standard recipe for Long Island Iced Tea is equal portions vodka, gin, tripple sec, rum, tequila, and some cola.

5. Since the regime of Ecstasy was established on Batam in the mid-1990s, increasing numbers of people have been admitted to hospital emergency rooms. All of the doctors with whom I spoke reported the same pattern: nearly all those admitted are women coming from clubs where Ecstasy is common. Excessively rapid heart beat and breathing problems are common, as well as feelings of fear and depression as they “come down.” Although it is too early to make any definite statements concerning long-term effects, recent clinical studies suggest that the chronic use of Ecstasy impairs visual and verbal memory and that it may affect the ability to reason verbally or sustain attention (Bolla et al. 1998, McCann et al. 1999).