Searching for Work: Small-Scale Mobility and Unskilled Labor in Southeast Asia

Small-scale, work-related mobility has become a constitutive feature of modern local Southeast Asian societies. This unique volume traces the lives of low-paid, mostly young, unskilled migrants who have moved away from their villages of origin in search of a job: contractual farmers in Laos; miners, young urban service workers, and construction workers in Indonesia; shoemakers in the Philippines; and factory workers in Vietnam. The case studies show how ill-defined work leads to lives of structural and symbolic precariousness and reshapes the migrants' own moral visions of work, identity, and belonging.

Silvia Vignato is associate professor in anthropology at Universita di Milano-Bicocca and chief editor of Antropologia. Matteo Carlo Alcano is a postdoctoral fellow at Universita di Milano-Bicocca. The contributors are Matteo Carlo Alcano, Vanina Bouté, Michela Cerimele, Concepcion Lagos, Pietro P. Masina, Giacomo Tabacco, and Silvia Vignato.