Jessica Clendenning

The inevitability of leaving and the impossibility of staying away: rural youth migration and agrarian changes in Flores, Indonesia

Are there different agrarian pathways for peripheral people and places? My PhD project explores this question by examining how changing societal patterns affect younger generations’ connections to land and farming in a rural village of Flores, Indonesia. Drawing on data from multiple generations, I show how the ‘urban’ attracts greater numbers of young men and women from the village, and in turn, affects social relations to natal land. Through household surveys and ethnographic interviews, I show how a lack of male youth means that labour in the village is becoming older, feminized, limited and more expensive, and farming practices less communal. I find that the marginality of the village makes it inevitable that young people will leave the village, but at the same time, makes it difficult for them to live elsewhere. These findings suggest that the generational processes driving deagrarianization patterns in Flores are uneven across genders and generations. More widely, this research asks how peripheral people and places can progress for the future.