Gendering Asia No. 13. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2018. 246 pp. (Graphs, maps, B&W photos.) £25.00, paper. ISBN 978-87-7694-227-4.
I want to begin this review by stating that this book is a truly remarkable contribution to studies of migrant work and migration regimes in the global south. The focus of Killias’s study is domestic workers migrating from Indonesia and her approach centres on “following” domestic workers from their home villages, to so-called “training centres” through to their places of employment in Malaysia. As researchers we are often forced to limit our projects: pressures of time and money, logistical and linguistic challenges, and negotiating research visas, amongst other factors, can mean that we design projects that are limited in scope and will tell us lots of small things that, hopefully, link us to bigger questions and issues. In studies of domestic worker migration, for example, it is common practice for researchers to focus on either the experiences of workers in host countries or on their households in sender locations, stressing the impact of migration on those “left behind.” Increasingly, attention has also been placed on the roles that recruiters and brokers play in facilitating migratory flows and creating migrant subjects. This migration infrastructures literature has led to studies of the “in-between” sites of the global care chain, such as the recruitment training centre (see, for example, Liberty Chee, “‘Supermaids’: Hyper-resilient Subjects in Neoliberal Migration Governance” International Political Sociology 2020). However, this literature often suffers from the absence of a truly multi-sited approach, one which examines every step of the migratory journey. That Killias has managed to offer this in itself makes her book an important contribution.
Killias wants to move beyond understandings of domestic worker migration that simply focus on the migrant and her employer (maids and madams), and seeks to look at how domestic workers are mobilized, move, and are made. She does this by bringing “into view a whole range of intermediaries who make the transnational care chain work” (204). This book seeks to explore the entire infrastructure of the domestic worker return migration system. Of course, this is not to suggest that Killias observes a smoothly functioning process of migration management. This is a work that hones in on the points of friction as well as the temporal stops and starts experienced by those moving through the migration chain. Potential migrants fail health checks and return back to the village, recruiters try to limit reputational damage and seek to distinguish themselves from unscrupulous illegal brokers, migrants become indebted to placement agencies and are confined in training camps, the return home is met with feelings of ambivalence and regret, and is even delayed.
In undertaking this meticulous study, one that involved over a hundred fieldwork interviews, Killias centres the agency of those within low-wage return migration systems, recognizing their hopes, and their aspirations. Political elites in Jakarta may well see the widespread migration of women to take up domestic work overseas as a source of national shame, but for the women themselves, migration as a domestic worker is viewed as a socially acceptable, even virtuous, form of employment. Killias is clear in her view that the domestic work return migration system serves to legalize servitude (162), but she also challenges the idea that migrant women are naïve about the conditions of work and the risks involved. This is an agency that is, invariably, deeply ambiguous. Thus, the introductory chapter shares the story of “Mega,” a Javanese migrant domestic worker employed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Mega’s state of isolation as a domestic worker contrasted with what her family back home believed was a life full of shopping trips in a global city. Despite a difficult relationship with her daughter, who had refused to talk to her on a recent visit back home, Mega saw her situation as one that was “good enough” and planned to extend her contract of employment by another two years. In such passages of the text we capture the everyday agency of domestic workers making the best out of difficult situations and, in doing so, Killias brings to the fore the people and personalities who constitute the global market for migrant domestic work.
Having set out, in chapter 1, the mechanisms through which the Indonesian state brokers labour to the world and how this is rooted in longstanding colonial histories, each subsequent chapter of the book moves us through the circular migratory journey. Each chapter takes us to a particular node in the chain, with the aim of revealing what goes on within each of these relatively opaque (7) nodes and how they interconnect with one another. Chapter 2 takes us to the tea fields of upland Central Java, where married women leave their villages to take up employment overseas. Chapter 3 takes us on the road to the major cities in which recruitment agencies are located. In chapter 4, the location is the training camp, and in chapter 5 the story moves to examine the lives of migrant domestic workers behind the doors of their middle-class employers. Finally, chapter 6 reflects on what it means to return home.
Looking inside each of these nodes is important, because it reveals how migration infrastructures operate. For example, gendered structures of debt that indenture women to their recruitment agents and then their employers play a crucial role in enabling village women to migrate in the first place. Whereas male migrants need to raise funds to migrate via localized debt relations, female migration is facilitated by recruitment agencies that will upfront funds, which they will then seek to recoup from employers. Such gendered debt regimes facilitate the feminization of migration. Furthermore, migration infrastructures don’t only operate to reproduce conditions of labour unfreedom, they are also crucial to understanding how the very identity of the “deferential maid” is produced. This includes the role of training programs that teach deference, as well as the role that agencies play in projecting an image of the quality maid through things like biodata photographs, which potential employers can consult when selecting a domestic worker.
This comprehensive account of the infrastructures of return migration between Indonesia and Malaysia is beyond impressive. The level of ethnographic detail brings out the agency of workers who experience the management of migration in their everyday lives. It is a study that is attentive to the complex relationships between migration, gender, race, the legacies of colonialism, and forms of regulatory state rule, and is a must-read for anyone seeking to better understand contemporary processes of domestic worker migration.
Juanita Elias
University of Warwick, Coventry