This book examines how Malay women, through their mobility, produce and reproduce Malay culture and identity. It does this through an exploration of the cultural significance of the mobility of Indonesian women who identify as Sambas Malay and reside in a border zone of Indonesia. Given the ways socio-spatial practices emerge out of and define place, a related aim was to consider the influence of women's border-zone location on the meanings and directions they inscribe on their mobility. More than one border was found to influence Sambas Malay women's mobility, including the territorial border with East Malaysia, the administrative border of Sambas Regency, the amorphous borders of a translocal Malay cultural realm, and the metaphorical borders associated with socioeconomic disadvantage and political marginality. The outcome is a study of how Sambas Malay women's mobility is culturally generative; specifically, it investigates how women's cross-border work and mobility shaped the practices and meanings associated with Sambas Malay culture and identity. The implications for Sambas Malayness arising from women's work-related mobility varied, a consequence of different socio-spatial imaginaries—or borderscopes of mobility—that derived from individual women's social group memberships and socioeconomic activities.

Revisiting borderscopes and borders

In this study, Malay women's mobility is predominantly conceptualised in terms of border crossings, that is, movement across borders. A border optic was adopted in recognition of both women's actual territorial border crossings and the extent to which women's border location shaped their perspectives on socioeconomic mobility, whether or not this mobility entailed crossing the territorial border. The study's emphasis on the importance of women's imaginative construction of the border on the direction and orientation of their work-related mobility does not deny the significance of the border's material and concrete qualities, however. It mattered, for example, that the border was relatively free of conflict and remained porous. This did not mean that the border was free of tyranny or restrictions: border authorities were notorious for imposing informal taxes on people's movements and the prohibition on dependent children accompanying migrant workers had real implications for the women in this study.