Sociocultural Change and the Life Cycle: A Study of Javanese Village Women's Decisions on Transnational Labour Migration and Their Impact

Abstract

Using a modified form of Giddens’ structuration theory, this thesis seeks to understand how transnational labour migration reflects and influences personal development and social change in the East Javanese village of Pranggang. In doing so, it fills a gap in a literature focused primarily on the narrow window of time immediately before, during and immediately after migration. At its heart are the biographies of six village women, which are analysed to reveal the strategies they employ to attain a village-centric good life. This, in turn, makes it possible to understand the reasons why some women, but not others, choose to undertake transnational labour migration, and how their migration experience influences their life trajectories and their social world. Empirically, this study demonstrates that these women’s lives are products of the structural forces that shape their society, but also of their agency and particular life experiences. Equally, however, the transnational labour migration undertaken by these women and others like them has altered both Pranggang’s economic and physical characteristics and its social and gender relations. Theoretically, the study confirms and extends two key arguments of structuration theory. First, that individual lives and the social world are constantly produced, reproduced and transformed by people’s actions in time-space, in dialogue with their positions in society’s hierarchies, its rules and resources, and the actions of other social actors. Second, far from merely functioning as a constraining physical environment where social interaction occurs, space provides people with resources to (attempt to) achieve their aspirations. This study extends these two insights by showing that it is through life-long learning that female transnational labour migrants develop and modify their capacity for creating, preserving and transforming their lives and their social world.