Coming of Age In- and Out-of-Place: Frictions of Adolescent Mobility in Island Southeast Asia
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Russell Square: College Buildings
- Room
- RB01
About this event
This talk concerns adolescent mobility and immobility in island Southeast Asia. It argues for the value of attending to the spatiality of adolescence as a period of biocultural development.
During the transitions of adolescence, young people’s experiences of mobility often expand, as does their sense of the possibility of movement. However, the ability to move is influenced by various frictions, most notably those of border infrastructures, as well as understandings of gender and kinship. I compare adolescent experience in two contexts: in rural Manggarai, eastern Indonesia and amongst children of migrants in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia. I show how, in rural Manggarai, adolescence was entangled with different scales of mobility. By contrast, in urban Sabah, adolescence was a time of growing immobility. In both contexts, tensions between adolescent and parental expectations also shaped the emotionality, experience and expectations of movement and in urban KK, adolescents explicitly compared their situation with the imagined ‘freedom’ of adolescence in rural Indonesia. Ultimately, the spatiality of ‘coming of age’ is very different in a context like , where young people are understood as ‘in-place’, as compared with one like Sabah, where they considered ‘out-of-place’.
Registration
This event is free, open to the public, and held in-person only.
South East Asian Studies Seminar Series
This semester’s theme foregrounds how communities across Southeast Asia have sought to live, believe, and flourish through the practices of everyday life. From ritual and governance to kinship and sport, the seminars explore how ordinary practices are imagined and enacted across different times and places. The series brings historical and ethnographic perspectives into conversation to illuminate the ethical, political, and creative dimensions of daily life in the region.
Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk
Header image credit: Yoyo Hins Itta via Unsplash
About the speaker
Catherine Allerton is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and is a socio-cultural anthropologist interested in the materialities and mobilities of everyday life. Her research has focused on place and landscape, kinship and marriage, childhood and migration. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Flores, Indonesia and in the capital city of Sabah, Malaysia. She is the author of Potent Landscapes: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia (2013, Hawai’i) and of the edited volume Children: Ethnographic Encounters (2016, Bloomsbury) and is currently working on a manuscript on migration and belonging in Sabah.
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