Abstract
Large-scale, capital-intensive and globalized mining project sites represent an international order—little enclaves of the global located in the midst, but not really an intrinsic part, of the local context within which the mining operations take place.1 They represent the global and developmental aspirations of the national governments, who often earn huge amounts of revenues from these mining operations, but have significant impacts on the social and cultural fabric of the local communities that host such projects. As shown by Limin Teh in this volume, the upheavals that take place fundamentally change the preexisting social order, giving rise to urban settlements or company towns where the company is present in every aspect of life and where the community life mirrors the company hierarchies. However, it is not only class boundaries that are manifested on the space in such towns. Race and gender complicate the picture and create new spatial boundaries. This chapter locates itself at the intersection of larger theoretical and disciplinary fields from which it borrows for explanation of social and gender phenomena: the geographical insights on gated communities and their elaborations on the social class and race within company towns, and the anthropological analyses of boundary maintenance.2 Within the company town, it focuses on the mining camp, a gated residential community meant for upper-class managers from overseas and from other parts of the country that bars the entry of the general population of the company town.
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Notes
Such remote locations have been described as “resource peripheries” that are “remote, elsewhere, foreign, uncomfortable, expensive to reach and sometimes dangerous.” Roger Hayter, Trevor Barnes, and Michael Bradshow, “Relocating Resource Peripheries to the Core of Economic Geography’s Theorizing: Rationale and Agenda,” Area 35, 1 (2003): 17.
The first geographical works were Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994),
and Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997). The interest spread to the urban centers of less developed countries where gating is a practical solutions to consumer need for “defended collective housing.” The gated communities are rooted in the idea of a “fragmented city”—the private and guarded housing being a consequence not only of a deregulated and flexible economy but also of a growing pluralization of lifestyles and “cultural” orientations at large.
Transnational research on gender in such a context has raised important questions related not only to ethics but also to my own identity as a “footloose researcher.” Throughout the research and during each of the field visits, I was most acutely aware of myself, of my own multiple identities and my subjective position—as a woman, an Indian woman, and a researcher with a certain standpoint on the social impacts of mining. I was an outsider, a woman from Australia, yet I was an Asian, not the usual and accustomed “white” foreigner. Although being an Asian woman often made me more acceptable in certain circumstances, at other levels I remained an outsider as I could only speak basic Bahasa Indonesia. My own identity as a researcher is also located within the transnational flow of labor and capital, and the “betweenness” of myself often caught me in the double bind of being both a local and an ethnographer. The series of research projects in collaboration with KPC since 2004 threw up a number of methodological questions for me. The research represented a crossing of the border for me not only in the absolute physical sense of looking for and locating the Equator, which is only some kilometers away yet which almost never seems to arouse any interest among either the expats or the local Indonesian immigrants. But this was also my first research outside of my “home region,” South Asia, and my first “commercial” research (initially in 2004, I undertook a research-based consultancy project for KPC to make a gender audit of the Company’s human resources). For me, such research entailed critical ethical questions that tormented my activist self. The ethical complexities of action-research in collaboration with a mining company was new not only for me, it was new also for the university that had been aggressively pursuing such industry linkages in order to generate research grants. Lastly, the fantasy and desire for Asian women, of warm and humid nights, and the palpable yearning for the Asian femininity by Western men were brought home to me as real experiences right from airport bookstores as I traveled to Southeast Asia. Researching in KPC, therefore, was both a “first contact” and a “boundary crossing” at the same time. See the commentary about transnational feminist researchers in Richa Nagar, “Footloose Researcher, ‘Traveling’ Theories, and the Politics of Transnational Feminist Praxis,” Gender, Place and Culture 9, 2 (2002): 179–86;
and Miraftab Faranak, “Can You Belly Dance?: Methodological Questions in the Era of Transnational Feminism,” Gender, Place, and Culture 11, 4 (December 2004): 595–604.
Chris Ballard and Glenn Banks, “Resource Wars: Mining and Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 32 (October 2003): 287–313.
Lesley Potter has described how such far away locations such as those in Kalimantan continue to be seen as distant and different resource peripheries from the heartland in Indonesia. Lesley Potter, “Resource Periphery, Corridor, Heartland: Contesting Land Use in the Kalimantan/Malaysia Borderlands,” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 50, 1 (April 2009): 88–106.
For a review, see Stanley D. Brunn, “Gated Minds and Gated Lives as Worlds of Exclusion and Fear,” GeoJournal 66, 1–2 (November 2006): 5–13.
Georg Glasze, “Segregation and Seclusion: The Case of Compounds for Western Expatriats in Saudi Arabia,” Geojournal 66, 1–2 (November 2006): 83–8.
Indonesian gated communities depart from the private sector-driven “globalized” form of spatial segregation found elsewhere. They were a response to the demonstrations, riots, and chaotic collective violence directed at wealthy ethnic Chinese Indonesian minorities during the crisis of 1997–98. See Kim Jee Hun, “Research Notes on the Making of a ‘Gated Community’: A Study of an Inner City Neighbourhood, Jakarta, Indonesia,” Asian Journal of Social Science 30, 1 (2002): 97–108.
See examples in Judy Bates, “Gendered Spaces of Industrial Restructuring in Resource Peripheries: The Case of the Corner Brook Region, Newfoundland,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geographie, Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG 97, 2 (2005): 126–37;
and Anne Goldberg, “Company Town, Border Town, Small Town: Transforming Place and Identities on the US-Mexico Border,” Journal of the Southwest 48, 3 (Autumn 2006): 275–306.
According to Prasetyawan, this regulation was formulated with the intention of offering the Indonesian businesspeople a chance to operate a large coal mining project through a partnership with large multinationals as a means of gaining access to the international market, capital, and technology. Wahyu Prasetyawan, “Government and Multinationals: Conflict over Economic Resources in East Kalimantan, 1998–2003,” Southeast Asian Studies 43, 2 (September 2005): 173–4.
G. D. Klinger, “Labour in Mining: The Kaltim Prima Coal Experience,” in Indonesia Assessment 1993: Labour: Sharing in the Benefits of Growth? ed. Chris Manning and Joan Hardjono (Canberra: Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, 1993), 173–85.
From this perspective, Owen’s New Lanark (1816) or Lever’s Port Sunlight (1886) were the first company towns. However, as Porteous has noted, they also furthered social, political, or religious aims, whereas the latter-day mining or extractive industry-based company towns characteristically exhibit ethnic and socioeconomic segregation in housing location in which house-quality styles are allocated to employees not according to need (such as family size) but according to class, leading to the creation of separate institutions for each class. See J. Douglas Porteous, “Social Class in Atacama Company Towns,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 64, 3 (September 1974): 409–17. See also the discussion of company towns concepts in Chapter 1 of this volume.
For example of such work, see James Allen, The Company Town in the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966),
and J. Douglas Porteous, “The Nature of the Company Town,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 51 (November 1970): 127–42.
Jonathan Crush, “Scripting the Compound: Power and Space in the South African Mining Industry,” Environment and Planning, D, Society and Space 12, 3 (1994): 301–2.
Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production (London: Macmillan, 1983);
Linda McDowell, “Life Without Father and Ford: The New Gender Order of Post-Fordism,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 16 (1991): 400–19.
Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, “Rethinking Class in Industrial Geography: Creating a Space for an Alternative Politics of Class,” Economic Geography 68, 2 (April 1992): 113.
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© 2012 Marcelo J. Borges and Susana B. Torres
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Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2012). Race and Gender in Peripheral Resource Towns: Boundaries and Boundary-Crossings in Tanjung Bara Mining Camp in Kalimantan, Indonesia. In: Borges, M.J., Torres, S.B. (eds) Company Towns. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137024671_8
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