Community Building Among Indonesian Transmigrants
1998 | Dumoga Valley, North Sulawesi, Indonesia
Fulbright Scholar Research
[See maps of Indonesia and Study Area]
Overview
This research investigates how state-sponsored migrants in Indonesia construct community, forge identity, and create culturally meaningful space under conditions of political uncertainty and ecological stress. Conducted in the village of Werdhi Agung and surrounding settlements in the Dumoga Valley, the project focuses on the transmigration program—a long-standing effort by the Indonesian government to resettle urban and landless poor in frontier regions to foster economic development and national unity.
What I encountered in the field was not merely a top-down model of engineered community, but a dynamic, contested process in which settlers actively negotiated belonging, survival, and meaning amid a rapidly shifting landscape of national politics, economic crisis, and environmental precarity.
Ethnographic Methods
My fieldwork employed a mixed-methods approach:
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In-depth interviews with two generations of transmigrants, village leaders, and local residents
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Participant-observation across daily life, ceremonies, and public gatherings
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A closed-ended social survey with approximately 150 households in Werdhi Agung and 50 additional respondents across three neighboring villages
This combined methodology allowed me to assess both individual narratives and collective patterns—documenting how migrants established households, developed support networks, assumed social roles, and reimagined community life in a setting marked by difference and uncertainty.
Key Questions
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How do migrants from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds build community across cultural divides?
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In what ways do local and national forces intersect in the everyday experience of transmigrants?
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How do people construct place as something not given, but made—through labor, ritual, memory, and negotiation?
Context and Challenges
The fieldwork was conducted during a moment of profound instability: Indonesia’s monetary crisis, a prolonged drought, and the lead-up to Suharto’s fall amid growing civil unrest. The intended multi-site design was modified for safety and depth, focusing instead on a rich cluster of diverse settlements within one regency.
These villages offered striking internal variation in ethnicity, land tenure, environmental vulnerability, and integration with the transmigration apparatus—providing a natural laboratory for studying the ecology of community formation under state-sponsored migration.
Findings and Legacy
Transmigration settlements are intended to build an imagined community of Indonesians. But what emerged in Werdhi Agung and its neighboring dusun was something more complex: a layered negotiation between official visions of development and lived experiences of place-making. Migrants drew on personal histories, kin networks, religious beliefs, and ecological knowledge to create new forms of collective life—often in ways that resisted or reinterpreted the state’s agenda.
This project continues to inform my broader interest in migration, identity, and place, and lays the foundation for longitudinal study of transmigrant communities navigating the entangled forces of globalization, nationalism, and local survival.
An article presenting details from this research was published by the international journal Ethnology.
CITATION: Hoey, Brian A. 2003. “Nationalism in Indonesia: Building Imagined and Intentional Communities Through Transmigration.” Ethnology 42(2)109-26.
ABSTRACT: Transmigration settlements are planned according to Indonesian government priorities, which intend them to help build and imagined community, a unified nation. They are also places where settlers struggle to build their own vision of community as a place where they feel that they belong. This article introduces the history of the Indonesian program and the place of Sulawesi transmigration settlements in nation-building (keywords: Indonesia, nationalism, development, transmigration, community) [See article in Publications]
