The remittance forest: Turning mobile labor into agrarian capital

Abstract

How does labor migration affect Indonesian forests? In the mountains of Java, where political forests and plantations date back to colonial state land acquisitions in the nineteenth century, forests are being reconstituted and reconfigured by unusual subjects: the wives and daughters of contracted forest workers and other forest farmers. Working as maids and other domestic laborers in Hong Kong and other prosperous Asian cities, these landless women are sending home remittances to invest in rural resources and changing the understory of the political forest where their husbands and fathers are required to remain available for formal forest labor. Slowly, without really intending to, these women have regendered the forest, not completely ousting the men or the masculine associations with logging and resin collection, but making inroads into the control of the forest lands via the under‐used understory. This article tells how poor, landless women, marginalized as forest residents and as free household labor, reforestation farmers, and poor agricultural laborers, signed up to work as maids in Hong Kong and ended up remaking the forest.