C Allerton
Biographic Data
| ID | 4509 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Allerton |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Allerton |
| SIGNATURE | ALLERTON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1463-4157 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 105 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Coming of age in‐ and out‐of‐place
Through a comparison of adolescent experience in Manggarai, eastern Indonesia, and amongst children of migrants in Sabah, Malaysia, this article argues for the value of attending to the spatiality of adolescence as a period of transition. Biocultural development expands both adolescents’ concrete experiences of mobility and their sense of the possibility of movement. However, the ability to move is influenced by various frictions, most notably th…
Being and Not Being Filipino
I was braver when I was younger
This article explores the ambiguous zone between legality and illegality experienced by children of migrants in Sabah, Malaysia. It argues that, despite their systematic exclusion from Malaysian schools, and despite their largely undocumented status, such children experience forms of legality contingent on age, gender, ethnic appearance and the use of borrowed or informal documents. Such children’s acts of citizenship are very different to those …
Discordant temporalities of migration and childhood★
Childhood, though it is understood cross-culturally in very different ways, always has a distinctive temporal framework, since children's growth and development cannot be undone. Yet, in many contexts, the times of childhood have become discordant with the rhythms, timescales, and temporal controls of migration. Focusing on the children of Indonesian and Filipino migrants in Sabah, Malaysia, this article explores the contemporary clash between th…
Childhood
Children, as the youngest members of our species, exist in all human societies across space and time. But societies differ widely in their understandings of childhood as a distinctive stage of the human life cycle. This entry describes anthropological work on childhood as a varying cultural construction, from early comparative studies of childcare and development, through work on the socialization of young children, to more recent ‘child-focused’…
Invisible children? Non-recognition, humanitarian blindness and other forms of ignorance in Sabah, Malaysia
In the Malaysian state of Sabah, public antipathy towards the presence of large numbers of migrant workers influences a widespread ignorance of the educational and other exclusions of their children. Children of migrants are rendered invisible in Sabahan cultural discourse because they are not recognized as proper subjects, or even as 'normal' children. Cultural denial of such children's circumstances can be seen in local newspaper reports that c…
Stuck in the Short Term
In Sabah, East Malaysia, decades of informal migration, combined with increasingly strict immigration regulations, have led to a paradoxical situation of immobility. Impoverished eastern Indonesian migrants find themselves 'stuck', unable either to return home and build a house in their home village or to plan for a future in Malaysia. Their Sabah-born children are born migrants, excluded from Malaysian schools, but mostly lacking knowledge of th…
Wildenauer, Nora. Fighting for nothing to happen. DVD/PAL, 48 minutes, colour. London
Najwa Latif—'Sahabat
This article describes the emotional power that 'Sahabat', by the Malaysian singer Najwa Latif, came to have for me during fieldwork with the children of refugees and migrants in the city of Kota Kinabalu. The sweet, youthful and optimistic energy of this song helped me to immerse myself in daily fieldwork trips, easing my transition from English-speaking parent to Malay-speaking fieldworker. The song also allowed me to relax and ignore the frust…
Potent Landscapes
The Manggarai people of eastern Indonesia believe their land can talk, that its appetite demands sacrificial ritual, and that its energy can kill as well as nurture. They tell their children to avoid certain streams and fields and view unusual environmental events as omens of misfortune. Yet, far from being preoccupied with the dangers of this animate landscape, Manggarai people strive to make places and pathways "lively," re-traveling routes bet…
Contested Statelessness in Sabah, Malaysia
UNHCR's current #IBelong campaign presents stateless people as uniquely excluded, emphasizing the need for legal solutions to their situation. Such approaches to statelessness sidestep both the complexities of lived experience and the wider politics of state recognition. In response, this article utilizes ethnographic data from Sabah, Malaysia, and theorizations of the gray areas between citizenship and statelessness to argue for the fundamental …
Children
Conducting ethnographic fieldwork with children presents anthropologists with particular challenges and limitations, as well as rewards and insights
Questioning the scope and audience of anthropology
Potent Landscapes
The Manggarai people of eastern Indonesia believe their land can talk, that its appetite demands sacrificial ritual, and that its energy can kill as well as nurture. They tell their children to avoid certain streams and fields and view unusual environmental events as omens of misfortune. Yet, far from being preoccupied with the dangers of this animate landscape, Manggarai people strive to make places and pathways "lively," re-traveling routes bet…
Making guests, making 'liveliness
This paper analyses two key aspects of Manggarai hospitality: the making of 'liveliness' and the making of guests. Liveliness is an affect produced at crowded and noisy events where stimulants and food are consumed. However, being lively is also an interpersonal quality demonstrated in everyday visiting. Having outlined the significance of liveliness, I examine the transformative role of hospitality substances and sounds in three key event-types:…
Static Crosses and Working Spirits
In southern Manggarai, in the west of the Indonesian island of Flores, Catholicism has a long history and people assert the importance of their identity as Catholics. Nevertheless, they also continue to engage, both pragmatically and in ritual contexts, with a landscape that they experience and describe as full of spirits and energies. As an example of this, I consider a ritual to renew the fertility of a river feeding into wet-rice fields. Despi…
Introduction
This Introduction foreshadows the main themes of this special issue on spiritual landscapes of Southeast Asia. Throughout Southeast Asia, links exist between spirit beings or potent energies and particular sites in the landscape, including trees, mountains and rivers. These are highlighted in this collection of papers via the notion of 'spiritual landscapes'. This concept also broadens anthropological approaches to the religious significance of t…
Centering the margin
The Secret Life of Sarongs
Studies of Indonesian textiles have predominantly focused on their symbolic and religious aspects, ignoring their everyday use as clothing. This article reveals the sensual, intimate life of Manggarai sarongs as everyday garments, a life that has remained a 'secret' in the academic literature. Sarongs, with their capacities to wrap, protect and hide, accentuate the properties of skin and can therefore be considered 'super-skins'. As artefactual e…
Children's places
The path of marriage; Journeys and transformations in Manggarai, eastern Indonesia
This article outlines the signficance of marriage in Manggarai, west Flores, as a series of journeys along paths. The notion of marriage as a 'path', widespread in eastern Indonesia, blurs the boundaries between real and symbolic trails. The complex intertwining of these paths and 'rooted' places, such as houses, dynamically constitutes Manggarai kinship and marriage
Authentic housing, authentic culture? Transforming a village into a 'tourist site' in Manggarai, Eastern Indonesia
Since the publication of MacCannell’s The tourist (1976), the issue of ‘authenticity’ has been at the centre of tourism studies. Whilst early analysts broadly agreed with MacCannell’s thesis that tourism, by turning culture into a commodity, replaced real with ‘staged’ authenticity (ibid, 91-107), more recent work has shown ‘an increased awareness of the social construction and invention of both tradition and authenticity’ (Wood, 1992: 57). That …
Introduction
This Introduction foreshadows the main themes of this special issue on spiritual landscapes of Southeast Asia. Throughout Southeast Asia, links exist between spirit beings or potent energies and particular sites in the landscape, including trees, mountains and rivers. These are highlighted in this collection of papers via the notion of 'spiritual landscapes'. This concept also broadens anthropological approaches to the religious significance of t…
Making guests, making 'liveliness
This paper analyses two key aspects of Manggarai hospitality: the making of 'liveliness' and the making of guests. Liveliness is an affect produced at crowded and noisy events where stimulants and food are consumed. However, being lively is also an interpersonal quality demonstrated in everyday visiting. Having outlined the significance of liveliness, I examine the transformative role of hospitality substances and sounds in three key event-types:…
Stuck in the Short Term
In Sabah, East Malaysia, decades of informal migration, combined with increasingly strict immigration regulations, have led to a paradoxical situation of immobility. Impoverished eastern Indonesian migrants find themselves 'stuck', unable either to return home and build a house in their home village or to plan for a future in Malaysia. Their Sabah-born children are born migrants, excluded from Malaysian schools, but mostly lacking knowledge of th…
The Secret Life of Sarongs
Studies of Indonesian textiles have predominantly focused on their symbolic and religious aspects, ignoring their everyday use as clothing. This article reveals the sensual, intimate life of Manggarai sarongs as everyday garments, a life that has remained a 'secret' in the academic literature. Sarongs, with their capacities to wrap, protect and hide, accentuate the properties of skin and can therefore be considered 'super-skins'. As artefactual e…
Invisible children? Non-recognition, humanitarian blindness and other forms of ignorance in Sabah, Malaysia
In the Malaysian state of Sabah, public antipathy towards the presence of large numbers of migrant workers influences a widespread ignorance of the educational and other exclusions of their children. Children of migrants are rendered invisible in Sabahan cultural discourse because they are not recognized as proper subjects, or even as 'normal' children. Cultural denial of such children's circumstances can be seen in local newspaper reports that c…
Static Crosses and Working Spirits
In southern Manggarai, in the west of the Indonesian island of Flores, Catholicism has a long history and people assert the importance of their identity as Catholics. Nevertheless, they also continue to engage, both pragmatically and in ritual contexts, with a landscape that they experience and describe as full of spirits and energies. As an example of this, I consider a ritual to renew the fertility of a river feeding into wet-rice fields. Despi…
The path of marriage; Journeys and transformations in Manggarai, eastern Indonesia
This article outlines the signficance of marriage in Manggarai, west Flores, as a series of journeys along paths. The notion of marriage as a 'path', widespread in eastern Indonesia, blurs the boundaries between real and symbolic trails. The complex intertwining of these paths and 'rooted' places, such as houses, dynamically constitutes Manggarai kinship and marriage
Contested Statelessness in Sabah, Malaysia
UNHCR's current #IBelong campaign presents stateless people as uniquely excluded, emphasizing the need for legal solutions to their situation. Such approaches to statelessness sidestep both the complexities of lived experience and the wider politics of state recognition. In response, this article utilizes ethnographic data from Sabah, Malaysia, and theorizations of the gray areas between citizenship and statelessness to argue for the fundamental …
Discordant temporalities of migration and childhood★
Childhood, though it is understood cross-culturally in very different ways, always has a distinctive temporal framework, since children's growth and development cannot be undone. Yet, in many contexts, the times of childhood have become discordant with the rhythms, timescales, and temporal controls of migration. Focusing on the children of Indonesian and Filipino migrants in Sabah, Malaysia, this article explores the contemporary clash between th…
Authentic housing, authentic culture? Transforming a village into a 'tourist site' in Manggarai, Eastern Indonesia
Since the publication of MacCannell’s The tourist (1976), the issue of ‘authenticity’ has been at the centre of tourism studies. Whilst early analysts broadly agreed with MacCannell’s thesis that tourism, by turning culture into a commodity, replaced real with ‘staged’ authenticity (ibid, 91-107), more recent work has shown ‘an increased awareness of the social construction and invention of both tradition and authenticity’ (Wood, 1992: 57). That …
The path of marriage; Journeys and transformations in Manggarai, eastern Indonesia
This article outlines the signficance of marriage in Manggarai, west Flores, as a series of journeys along paths. The notion of marriage as a 'path', widespread in eastern Indonesia, blurs the boundaries between real and symbolic trails. The complex intertwining of these paths and 'rooted' places, such as houses, dynamically constitutes Manggarai kinship and marriage
Children's places
The Secret Life of Sarongs
Studies of Indonesian textiles have predominantly focused on their symbolic and religious aspects, ignoring their everyday use as clothing. This article reveals the sensual, intimate life of Manggarai sarongs as everyday garments, a life that has remained a 'secret' in the academic literature. Sarongs, with their capacities to wrap, protect and hide, accentuate the properties of skin and can therefore be considered 'super-skins'. As artefactual e…
Centering the margin
Static Crosses and Working Spirits
In southern Manggarai, in the west of the Indonesian island of Flores, Catholicism has a long history and people assert the importance of their identity as Catholics. Nevertheless, they also continue to engage, both pragmatically and in ritual contexts, with a landscape that they experience and describe as full of spirits and energies. As an example of this, I consider a ritual to renew the fertility of a river feeding into wet-rice fields. Despi…
Introduction
This Introduction foreshadows the main themes of this special issue on spiritual landscapes of Southeast Asia. Throughout Southeast Asia, links exist between spirit beings or potent energies and particular sites in the landscape, including trees, mountains and rivers. These are highlighted in this collection of papers via the notion of 'spiritual landscapes'. This concept also broadens anthropological approaches to the religious significance of t…
Making guests, making 'liveliness
This paper analyses two key aspects of Manggarai hospitality: the making of 'liveliness' and the making of guests. Liveliness is an affect produced at crowded and noisy events where stimulants and food are consumed. However, being lively is also an interpersonal quality demonstrated in everyday visiting. Having outlined the significance of liveliness, I examine the transformative role of hospitality substances and sounds in three key event-types:…
Potent Landscapes
The Manggarai people of eastern Indonesia believe their land can talk, that its appetite demands sacrificial ritual, and that its energy can kill as well as nurture. They tell their children to avoid certain streams and fields and view unusual environmental events as omens of misfortune. Yet, far from being preoccupied with the dangers of this animate landscape, Manggarai people strive to make places and pathways "lively," re-traveling routes bet…
Questioning the scope and audience of anthropology
Children
Conducting ethnographic fieldwork with children presents anthropologists with particular challenges and limitations, as well as rewards and insights
Potent Landscapes
The Manggarai people of eastern Indonesia believe their land can talk, that its appetite demands sacrificial ritual, and that its energy can kill as well as nurture. They tell their children to avoid certain streams and fields and view unusual environmental events as omens of misfortune. Yet, far from being preoccupied with the dangers of this animate landscape, Manggarai people strive to make places and pathways "lively," re-traveling routes bet…
Contested Statelessness in Sabah, Malaysia
UNHCR's current #IBelong campaign presents stateless people as uniquely excluded, emphasizing the need for legal solutions to their situation. Such approaches to statelessness sidestep both the complexities of lived experience and the wider politics of state recognition. In response, this article utilizes ethnographic data from Sabah, Malaysia, and theorizations of the gray areas between citizenship and statelessness to argue for the fundamental …
Wildenauer, Nora. Fighting for nothing to happen. DVD/PAL, 48 minutes, colour. London
Najwa Latif—'Sahabat
This article describes the emotional power that 'Sahabat', by the Malaysian singer Najwa Latif, came to have for me during fieldwork with the children of refugees and migrants in the city of Kota Kinabalu. The sweet, youthful and optimistic energy of this song helped me to immerse myself in daily fieldwork trips, easing my transition from English-speaking parent to Malay-speaking fieldworker. The song also allowed me to relax and ignore the frust…
Childhood
Children, as the youngest members of our species, exist in all human societies across space and time. But societies differ widely in their understandings of childhood as a distinctive stage of the human life cycle. This entry describes anthropological work on childhood as a varying cultural construction, from early comparative studies of childcare and development, through work on the socialization of young children, to more recent ‘child-focused’…
Invisible children? Non-recognition, humanitarian blindness and other forms of ignorance in Sabah, Malaysia
In the Malaysian state of Sabah, public antipathy towards the presence of large numbers of migrant workers influences a widespread ignorance of the educational and other exclusions of their children. Children of migrants are rendered invisible in Sabahan cultural discourse because they are not recognized as proper subjects, or even as 'normal' children. Cultural denial of such children's circumstances can be seen in local newspaper reports that c…
Stuck in the Short Term
In Sabah, East Malaysia, decades of informal migration, combined with increasingly strict immigration regulations, have led to a paradoxical situation of immobility. Impoverished eastern Indonesian migrants find themselves 'stuck', unable either to return home and build a house in their home village or to plan for a future in Malaysia. Their Sabah-born children are born migrants, excluded from Malaysian schools, but mostly lacking knowledge of th…
Discordant temporalities of migration and childhood★
Childhood, though it is understood cross-culturally in very different ways, always has a distinctive temporal framework, since children's growth and development cannot be undone. Yet, in many contexts, the times of childhood have become discordant with the rhythms, timescales, and temporal controls of migration. Focusing on the children of Indonesian and Filipino migrants in Sabah, Malaysia, this article explores the contemporary clash between th…
Being and Not Being Filipino
I was braver when I was younger
This article explores the ambiguous zone between legality and illegality experienced by children of migrants in Sabah, Malaysia. It argues that, despite their systematic exclusion from Malaysian schools, and despite their largely undocumented status, such children experience forms of legality contingent on age, gender, ethnic appearance and the use of borrowed or informal documents. Such children’s acts of citizenship are very different to those …
Coming of age in‐ and out‐of‐place
Through a comparison of adolescent experience in Manggarai, eastern Indonesia, and amongst children of migrants in Sabah, Malaysia, this article argues for the value of attending to the spatiality of adolescence as a period of transition. Biocultural development expands both adolescents’ concrete experiences of mobility and their sense of the possibility of movement. However, the ability to move is influenced by various frictions, most notably th…
Sociology (17 works) · Anthropology (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Asian Studies and History (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Geography (6 works) · History (6 works) · Gender Studies (5 works)