Abstract

Documented labor migration constitutes a central form of transnational mobility in contemporary Asia and as such is subject to intense regulatory efforts by national governments in the region. While many of the areas touched upon by these regulations are often managed in similar ways by governments across the globe, as in the case with visa rules, the regulation of health and health examination, commonly instituted in the Asian migration sphere, is only re-emerging in other parts of the world in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. My research concerns the ways in which requirements for medical examination for documented labor migrants are implemented on the ground and the dynamics that unfold in the wake of these examinations. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Lombok, Indonesia and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
In this talk, I will focus on the daily operations at a clinic in Lombok that is specialized on conducting pre-departure medical examinations for Indonesian labor migrants. Discussing the flow of people through the clinic and the nature of medical exams conducted there, I will outline the character of the clinic as a central node in the migration process that straddles the boundaries of health care and migration brokerage.

Bio

Jonathan Krämer is a doctoral candidate at the Department for Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. He has been a fellow at the Department for Economic Experimentation of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and has recently completed ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia. Jonathan holds a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology from Heidelberg University and a BA in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Toronto.