Temporariness and Belonging in a “free country”

In Malaysia, the incorporation of Nepali, mostly male, migrants as “foreign workers” has created the conditions within which they have come to see themselves as “foreigners” or just “workers” in “someone else’s place” (arkako thau). On the other hand, frequent references to Malaysia as a “free country”—where one can freely roam around and indulge in sex and alcohol unlike the Gulf where “one can’t even look a girl in the eye”; where people “forget” their country and family and “disappear” never to return; and where the hawapani (air and water) is, if not the same, better than Nepal—also signal forms of belonging. While these narratives reflect betrayal as an absent provider to both family and the nation, they also reflect failures and deviance from normative scripts and bounds of respectability and law and reveal a world of contestation, where ways of being otherwise exist not despite but through their particular predicaments as “foreign workers.” The talk examines this dual sense of exclusion and inclusion through which Nepali migrants experience work and life in Malaysia and asks what life-making and freedom might mean in a context of enforced temporariness.

Sampreety is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell.