J Lindquist
Biographic Data
| ID | 13778 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Lindquist |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Lindquist |
| SIGNATURE | LINDQUIST J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stockholm University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8145-2580 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 999 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Faith, Followers, and Factions: Making Social Media Publics in Indonesia
This introductory article lays the groundwork for the special issue on "Social Media and Society in Indonesia." It examines the co-constitutive relationship between social media and Indonesian society, focusing on their mutual shaping within enduring socio-cultural dynamics. The article calls for a nuanced understanding of how technologies are localized and how diverse "social media publics" emerge in the Indonesian context. It begins by tracing …
Afterword: Crisis broker as method
This afterword frames the articles in this special issue on crisis brokers by returning to and discussing the rise of interest in both brokers (and intermediaries) and crisis during the past decade in cultural studies and cognate disciplines.More specifically, it argues that the broker is best approached as a methodological starting point for considering how crisis is negotiated, mediated, and shaped in practice across space and time between diff…
Authenticity Governance and the Market for Social Media Engagements: The Shaping of Disinformation at the Peripheries of Platform Ecosystems
Social media engagements, such as likes and follows, have become crucial for driving algorithmic recommendations and underpinning platform economies. This has given rise to disinformation industries that focus on the production and sale of engagements, including Instagram followers-a phenomenon we term the 'engagement as a service' market. However, this market poses significant challenges for empirical research as its operations remain obscured f…
Debate on Follow the maid: Domestic worker migration in and from Indonesia, by Olivia Killias, Marina de Regt, Johan Lindquist, and Rebecca Elmhirst
Care and Control in Asian Migrations
This special issue takes the relationship between care and control as a starting point for ethnographically approaching the dynamics of Asian migrations. The pairing of care and control offers an entry-point for describing how migration takes shape through the historical development of entangled relationships-ranging from the supportive to the coercive-rather than strictly through dyadic relationships, social networks, structural forces, or as an…
Space of Mediation: Labour Migration, Intermediaries and the State in Indonesia and China since the Nineteenth Century
It is increasingly recognized that a focus on how migration is mediated by non-migrants can provide a critical lens for examining the relationship between migration and broader social change. This article develops this approach further by examining the mediation process historically and comparatively. We compare the evolution of the complex relations among multiple actors that shape mobilities through what we call the “space of mediation”, using …
The infrastructural turn in Asian migration
This chapter engages in the infrastructural turn in migration studies, in general, and in the study of Asian migrations, in particular. The growing interest in infrastructure follows both from transformations in how migration is organised in practice and a lack of conceptual tools in making analytical sense of these transformations. Most succinctly, we argue that transnational migration is increasingly managed through infrastructural developments…
Postscript: Infrastructuralization: Evolving Sociopolitical Dynamics in Labour Migration from Asia
This article explores the trend of “infrastructuralization” in state-sponsored programs of low- and semi-skilled labour migration from Asia. These programs increasingly focus on facilitating migration rather than generating actual opportunities for mobility and substantive development. While providing training to develop skills targeting specific jobs in specific countries, the programs generally leave complaints about actual working conditions a…
Reassembling Indonesian Migration: Biometric Technology and the Licensing of Informal Labour Brokers
This article takes as its starting point the Indonesian government's attempt to license informal brokers - field agents, or petugas lapangan - who recruit migrant workers that are sent to destinations across Asia and the Middle East. The licensing programme utilises biometric fingerprint technology in order to reinforce the boundaries of the Indonesian migration assemblage through the rearticulation of the category of the broker. The article argu…
The Anxieties of Mobility: Migration and Tourism in the Indonesian Borderlands
Since the late 1960s the Indonesian island of Batam has been transformed from a sleepy fishing village to a booming frontier town, where foreign investment, mostly from neighboring Singapore, converges with inexpensive land and labor. Indonesian female migrants dominate the island's economic landscape both as factory workers and as prostitutes servicing working class tourists from Singapore. Indonesians also move across the border in search of wo…
Brokers, channels, infrastructure: Moving migrant labor in the Indonesian-Malaysian oil palm complex
This article problematizes the dichotomy between fluid mobility and fixed infrastructure through a case study of migrant labor recruitment from Indonesia to the Malaysian oil palm industry. Channels of low-skilled transnational migration must be understood in relation to other forms of mobility, most notably that of brokers, who move along adjacent and overlapping routes. Broker mobility is not only shaped by relatively immobile moorings, but als…
Migration infrastructures and the production of migrant mobilities
Since the proclamation of a mobility turn in the 2000s, scholars have populated the field with invaluable insights on what it means to move, and what the politics of movement are. One particularly useful thread revolves around the issue of infrastructures, which have generally been taken to mean the manifest forms of moorings and fixities that help order and give shape to mobilities. Yet, while significant inroads have been made in delineating th…
Brokers and Brokerage, Anthropology of
Of figures and types: Brokering knowledge and migration in Indonesia and beyond
This paper takes the broker as an entry-point for considering the problem of exemplification in anthropology. In particular, it approaches this problem by way of the relationship between figure and type, or between example and theoretical exemplar. While the figure is contingent on a specific socio-historical context, the type consciously accentuates particular characteristics in order to form the basis for comparison. More specifically, the pape…
Migration Infrastructure
Based on the authors’ long-term field research on low-skilled labor migration from China and Indonesia, this article establishes that more than ever labor migration is intensively mediated. Migration infrastructure – the systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility – serves as a concept to unpack the process of mediation. Migration can be more clearly conceptualized through a focus on in…
Historical approaches to the trade in human beings
Nearly two centuries after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and more than a century after slavery was officially ended in its last strongholds, the trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time. (President George W. Bush in a speech to the United Nations on 23 September 2003)History is often invoked when identifying the significance of fighting the trade in human beings. State leaders use history a…
Beyond anti-anti-trafficking
James Siegel
Johan Lindquist (JL): Throughout your career, which began in the early 1960s, you have remained focused on the study of Indonesia. You are also arguably the anthropologist who has been most committed to developing a Derridean deconstructive approach. Before we return to these broad themes, could you say something about your background and how you became interested in anthropology and Indonesia?James Siegel (JS): I was born in Superior, Wisconsin,…
Introduction to Special Issue: Figuring the Transforming City
Opening the Black Box of Migration: Brokers, the Organization of Transnational Mobility and the Changing Political Economy in Asia
This special issue takes the migrant broker as a starting point for investigating contemporary regimes of transnational migration across Asia.The articles, which span large parts of Asia-including China, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, as well as New Zealand-show that marriage migration, student migration and various forms of unskilled labour migration, including predominantly male plantation and construction…
The Elementary School Teacher, the Thug and his Grandmother: Informal Brokers and Transnational Migration from Indonesia
This article considers the emergence of informal brokers in the context of an increasingly formalized regime of transnational labour migration from Indonesia. Following the 1997 Asian economic crisis and the fall of the Suharto regime, there has been a dramatic increase in documented transnational migration to Malaysia at the expense of undocumented migration. In this process, a growing number of private agencies have come to control the increasi…
Putting Ecstasy to Work: Pleasure, Prostitution, and Inequality in the Indonesian Borderlands
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 …
Labour Recruitment, Circuits of Capital and Gendered Mobility: Reconceptualizing the Indonesian Migration Industry
During the last decade there has been a marked shift in the structure of migration from Indonesia with the deregulation of the transnational labour recruitment market after the fall of Suharto and
Images and Evidence: Human Trafficking, Auditing, and the Production of Illicit Markets in Southeast Asia and Beyond
Research Article| May 01 2010 Images and Evidence: Human Trafficking, Auditing, and the Production of Illicit Markets in Southeast Asia and Beyond Johan Lindquist Johan Lindquist Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2010) 22 (2): 223-236. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2009-026 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Lin…
Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism by Rebecca Stein
Migration Infrastructure
Based on the authors’ long-term field research on low-skilled labor migration from China and Indonesia, this article establishes that more than ever labor migration is intensively mediated. Migration infrastructure – the systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility – serves as a concept to unpack the process of mediation. Migration can be more clearly conceptualized through a focus on in…
Opening the Black Box of Migration: Brokers, the Organization of Transnational Mobility and the Changing Political Economy in Asia
This special issue takes the migrant broker as a starting point for investigating contemporary regimes of transnational migration across Asia.The articles, which span large parts of Asia-including China, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, as well as New Zealand-show that marriage migration, student migration and various forms of unskilled labour migration, including predominantly male plantation and construction…
Labour Recruitment, Circuits of Capital and Gendered Mobility: Reconceptualizing the Indonesian Migration Industry
During the last decade there has been a marked shift in the structure of migration from Indonesia with the deregulation of the transnational labour recruitment market after the fall of Suharto and
The Elementary School Teacher, the Thug and his Grandmother: Informal Brokers and Transnational Migration from Indonesia
This article considers the emergence of informal brokers in the context of an increasingly formalized regime of transnational labour migration from Indonesia. Following the 1997 Asian economic crisis and the fall of the Suharto regime, there has been a dramatic increase in documented transnational migration to Malaysia at the expense of undocumented migration. In this process, a growing number of private agencies have come to control the increasi…
Migration infrastructures and the production of migrant mobilities
Since the proclamation of a mobility turn in the 2000s, scholars have populated the field with invaluable insights on what it means to move, and what the politics of movement are. One particularly useful thread revolves around the issue of infrastructures, which have generally been taken to mean the manifest forms of moorings and fixities that help order and give shape to mobilities. Yet, while significant inroads have been made in delineating th…
Of figures and types: Brokering knowledge and migration in Indonesia and beyond
This paper takes the broker as an entry-point for considering the problem of exemplification in anthropology. In particular, it approaches this problem by way of the relationship between figure and type, or between example and theoretical exemplar. While the figure is contingent on a specific socio-historical context, the type consciously accentuates particular characteristics in order to form the basis for comparison. More specifically, the pape…
Veils and ecstasy: Negotiating shame in the Indonesian Borderlands
Malu', meaning approximately shame or embarrassment, is a key emotional trope for contemporary Indonesian migrants. This paper discusses the position of 'malu' in the lives of young female migrants who work as factory workers or prostitutes on the rapidly developing Indonesian island of Batam, located on the border with Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore. It shows how veiling and the drug 'ecstasy' have both become techniques for migrants to negot…
Bodies of emotion: Rethinking culture and emotion through Southeast Asia
Brokers, channels, infrastructure: Moving migrant labor in the Indonesian-Malaysian oil palm complex
This article problematizes the dichotomy between fluid mobility and fixed infrastructure through a case study of migrant labor recruitment from Indonesia to the Malaysian oil palm industry. Channels of low-skilled transnational migration must be understood in relation to other forms of mobility, most notably that of brokers, who move along adjacent and overlapping routes. Broker mobility is not only shaped by relatively immobile moorings, but als…
Images and Evidence: Human Trafficking, Auditing, and the Production of Illicit Markets in Southeast Asia and Beyond
Research Article| May 01 2010 Images and Evidence: Human Trafficking, Auditing, and the Production of Illicit Markets in Southeast Asia and Beyond Johan Lindquist Johan Lindquist Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2010) 22 (2): 223-236. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2009-026 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Lin…
Postscript: Infrastructuralization: Evolving Sociopolitical Dynamics in Labour Migration from Asia
This article explores the trend of “infrastructuralization” in state-sponsored programs of low- and semi-skilled labour migration from Asia. These programs increasingly focus on facilitating migration rather than generating actual opportunities for mobility and substantive development. While providing training to develop skills targeting specific jobs in specific countries, the programs generally leave complaints about actual working conditions a…
Introduction to Special Issue: Figuring the Transforming City
Care and Control in Asian Migrations
This special issue takes the relationship between care and control as a starting point for ethnographically approaching the dynamics of Asian migrations. The pairing of care and control offers an entry-point for describing how migration takes shape through the historical development of entangled relationships-ranging from the supportive to the coercive-rather than strictly through dyadic relationships, social networks, structural forces, or as an…
Reassembling Indonesian Migration: Biometric Technology and the Licensing of Informal Labour Brokers
This article takes as its starting point the Indonesian government's attempt to license informal brokers - field agents, or petugas lapangan - who recruit migrant workers that are sent to destinations across Asia and the Middle East. The licensing programme utilises biometric fingerprint technology in order to reinforce the boundaries of the Indonesian migration assemblage through the rearticulation of the category of the broker. The article argu…
Frontiers, Sovereignty, and Marital Tactics: Comparisons from the Borneo Highlands and the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle
This article considers transnational relationships between men and women from two Southeast Asian border zones, the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysia, and the Indonesian island of Batam, part of the growth triangle that connects Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. It expands on Aihwa Ong's discussion of ‘graduated zones of sovereignty’ by examining how social relations are being reconfigured along these two international frontiers in the con…
Beyond anti-anti-trafficking
Faith, Followers, and Factions: Making Social Media Publics in Indonesia
This introductory article lays the groundwork for the special issue on "Social Media and Society in Indonesia." It examines the co-constitutive relationship between social media and Indonesian society, focusing on their mutual shaping within enduring socio-cultural dynamics. The article calls for a nuanced understanding of how technologies are localized and how diverse "social media publics" emerge in the Indonesian context. It begins by tracing …
Authenticity Governance and the Market for Social Media Engagements: The Shaping of Disinformation at the Peripheries of Platform Ecosystems
Social media engagements, such as likes and follows, have become crucial for driving algorithmic recommendations and underpinning platform economies. This has given rise to disinformation industries that focus on the production and sale of engagements, including Instagram followers-a phenomenon we term the 'engagement as a service' market. However, this market poses significant challenges for empirical research as its operations remain obscured f…
Debate on Follow the maid: Domestic worker migration in and from Indonesia, by Olivia Killias, Marina de Regt, Johan Lindquist, and Rebecca Elmhirst
Organising Aids in the borderless world: A case study from the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle
Tropes of borderlessness are pervasive both in discourses concerning the spread of HIV/AIDS and the Growth Triangle, a transnational economic zone that ideally binds together the Indonesian island of Batam, the Malaysian province of Johor and Singapore. This paper considers how the emergence of HIV as a problem in the Growth Triangle, and on Batam in particular, has been framed as a problem to be addressed in context of the nation-state rather th…
Modern spaces, wild places and international hinterlands: The cultural economy of decoupling and misrecognition
An interview with Arthur Kleinman
Modern spaces, wild places and international hinterlands: The cultural economy of decoupling and misrecognition
Veils and ecstasy: Negotiating shame in the Indonesian Borderlands
Malu', meaning approximately shame or embarrassment, is a key emotional trope for contemporary Indonesian migrants. This paper discusses the position of 'malu' in the lives of young female migrants who work as factory workers or prostitutes on the rapidly developing Indonesian island of Batam, located on the border with Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore. It shows how veiling and the drug 'ecstasy' have both become techniques for migrants to negot…
Bodies of emotion: Rethinking culture and emotion through Southeast Asia
Organising Aids in the borderless world: A case study from the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle
Tropes of borderlessness are pervasive both in discourses concerning the spread of HIV/AIDS and the Growth Triangle, a transnational economic zone that ideally binds together the Indonesian island of Batam, the Malaysian province of Johor and Singapore. This paper considers how the emergence of HIV as a problem in the Growth Triangle, and on Batam in particular, has been framed as a problem to be addressed in context of the nation-state rather th…
Frontiers, Sovereignty, and Marital Tactics: Comparisons from the Borneo Highlands and the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle
This article considers transnational relationships between men and women from two Southeast Asian border zones, the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysia, and the Indonesian island of Batam, part of the growth triangle that connects Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. It expands on Aihwa Ong's discussion of ‘graduated zones of sovereignty’ by examining how social relations are being reconfigured along these two international frontiers in the con…
Navigating landscapes of exception in Southeast Asia: A commentary on Aihwa Ong's ‘Scales of exception: experiments with knowledge and sheer life in tropical Southeast Asia’
Putting Ecstasy to Work: Pleasure, Prostitution, and Inequality in the Indonesian Borderlands
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 …
Labour Recruitment, Circuits of Capital and Gendered Mobility: Reconceptualizing the Indonesian Migration Industry
During the last decade there has been a marked shift in the structure of migration from Indonesia with the deregulation of the transnational labour recruitment market after the fall of Suharto and
Images and Evidence: Human Trafficking, Auditing, and the Production of Illicit Markets in Southeast Asia and Beyond
Research Article| May 01 2010 Images and Evidence: Human Trafficking, Auditing, and the Production of Illicit Markets in Southeast Asia and Beyond Johan Lindquist Johan Lindquist Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2010) 22 (2): 223-236. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2009-026 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Lin…
Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism by Rebecca Stein
Opening the Black Box of Migration: Brokers, the Organization of Transnational Mobility and the Changing Political Economy in Asia
This special issue takes the migrant broker as a starting point for investigating contemporary regimes of transnational migration across Asia.The articles, which span large parts of Asia-including China, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, as well as New Zealand-show that marriage migration, student migration and various forms of unskilled labour migration, including predominantly male plantation and construction…
The Elementary School Teacher, the Thug and his Grandmother: Informal Brokers and Transnational Migration from Indonesia
This article considers the emergence of informal brokers in the context of an increasingly formalized regime of transnational labour migration from Indonesia. Following the 1997 Asian economic crisis and the fall of the Suharto regime, there has been a dramatic increase in documented transnational migration to Malaysia at the expense of undocumented migration. In this process, a growing number of private agencies have come to control the increasi…
Historical approaches to the trade in human beings
Nearly two centuries after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and more than a century after slavery was officially ended in its last strongholds, the trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time. (President George W. Bush in a speech to the United Nations on 23 September 2003)History is often invoked when identifying the significance of fighting the trade in human beings. State leaders use history a…
Beyond anti-anti-trafficking
James Siegel
Johan Lindquist (JL): Throughout your career, which began in the early 1960s, you have remained focused on the study of Indonesia. You are also arguably the anthropologist who has been most committed to developing a Derridean deconstructive approach. Before we return to these broad themes, could you say something about your background and how you became interested in anthropology and Indonesia?James Siegel (JS): I was born in Superior, Wisconsin,…
Introduction to Special Issue: Figuring the Transforming City
Migration Infrastructure
Based on the authors’ long-term field research on low-skilled labor migration from China and Indonesia, this article establishes that more than ever labor migration is intensively mediated. Migration infrastructure – the systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility – serves as a concept to unpack the process of mediation. Migration can be more clearly conceptualized through a focus on in…
Brokers and Brokerage, Anthropology of
Of figures and types: Brokering knowledge and migration in Indonesia and beyond
This paper takes the broker as an entry-point for considering the problem of exemplification in anthropology. In particular, it approaches this problem by way of the relationship between figure and type, or between example and theoretical exemplar. While the figure is contingent on a specific socio-historical context, the type consciously accentuates particular characteristics in order to form the basis for comparison. More specifically, the pape…
The Anxieties of Mobility: Migration and Tourism in the Indonesian Borderlands
Since the late 1960s the Indonesian island of Batam has been transformed from a sleepy fishing village to a booming frontier town, where foreign investment, mostly from neighboring Singapore, converges with inexpensive land and labor. Indonesian female migrants dominate the island's economic landscape both as factory workers and as prostitutes servicing working class tourists from Singapore. Indonesians also move across the border in search of wo…
Brokers, channels, infrastructure: Moving migrant labor in the Indonesian-Malaysian oil palm complex
This article problematizes the dichotomy between fluid mobility and fixed infrastructure through a case study of migrant labor recruitment from Indonesia to the Malaysian oil palm industry. Channels of low-skilled transnational migration must be understood in relation to other forms of mobility, most notably that of brokers, who move along adjacent and overlapping routes. Broker mobility is not only shaped by relatively immobile moorings, but als…
Migration infrastructures and the production of migrant mobilities
Since the proclamation of a mobility turn in the 2000s, scholars have populated the field with invaluable insights on what it means to move, and what the politics of movement are. One particularly useful thread revolves around the issue of infrastructures, which have generally been taken to mean the manifest forms of moorings and fixities that help order and give shape to mobilities. Yet, while significant inroads have been made in delineating th…
The infrastructural turn in Asian migration
This chapter engages in the infrastructural turn in migration studies, in general, and in the study of Asian migrations, in particular. The growing interest in infrastructure follows both from transformations in how migration is organised in practice and a lack of conceptual tools in making analytical sense of these transformations. Most succinctly, we argue that transnational migration is increasingly managed through infrastructural developments…
Postscript: Infrastructuralization: Evolving Sociopolitical Dynamics in Labour Migration from Asia
This article explores the trend of “infrastructuralization” in state-sponsored programs of low- and semi-skilled labour migration from Asia. These programs increasingly focus on facilitating migration rather than generating actual opportunities for mobility and substantive development. While providing training to develop skills targeting specific jobs in specific countries, the programs generally leave complaints about actual working conditions a…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (21 works) · Economics (13 works) · Geography (13 works) · Law (11 works) · History (10 works) · Business (9 works) · Indonesian (9 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (9 works) · Asian Studies and History (8 works)