Seminar Series: Abstract

09:30
May 13 2009
Seminar Room A

Dutch women in Bali: contested notions of citizenship, race and gender in Dutch-Bali Intimacies
Ana Dragojlovic, RSPAS , ANU

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and Bali, this talk situates transnational intimate relationships between Dutch women and Balinese men in contexts of Balinese social relations and post-colonial histories. My focus is Dutch women who came to Bali as tourists but married Balinese men and remained in Bali. These Dutch-Bali relationships complicate a simple notion cultural mixing, particularly for women who trace a part-Indonesian ancestry to colonial times. Their imaginations of Bali thus already informed their identity and motivations for travel. By marrying Balinese men, Dutch women enter into dense webs of kinship relations that include expectations for a ‘proper wife’ and daughter-in-law as well as the acceptance of polygamy. As Dutch women enter a Balinese kinship system, their transnational intimate encounters become contested terrain in which their subjectivities are negotiated in relation to their Balinese husbands, in-laws, gender relations, and their own desires for Bali.