Announcement

Social Science Baha

announces
The Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture 2025

Nancy Lee Peluso
on
Remittance House, Remittance Forest
Mobilising Women’s Labour for Forest Transformation

4.30 pm | 5 June 2025 (Thursday) | Hotel Shanker, Lazimpat, Kathmandu

Remittance houses are global phenomena that have transformed rural and agrarian landscapes as transnational labour migration has increased. All over the mountains of East Java, Indonesia, remittance houses are popping up on forest land, that by law cannot be converted to titled private land. With a small team of researchers, I have been doing research on migration and agrarian change around a montane village-plantation complex in Java, using ethnography and mixed methods to collect hundreds of oral histories about gendered work, migration, housing, and family relations among working-class forest labourers, all of whose families have been living on forest plantations for generations. The houses are part of a forest area that we now refer to as a ‘Remittance Forest’ because so many of its transformations have been financed/supported by women’s long-distance and often very long-term migration. In this lecture, I explore some of the ways that women’s construction of both spectacular and subdued remittance houses on state forest land demonstrates a distinct labour politics: the fixing of forest worker houses on forest land by their wives’ and daughters’ transnational mobility. We see the remittance house and the remittance forest as symbolic of what we call a ‘Plantation-Migration Nexus’, a single instance of a panoply of collisions between two major component forces of political forests in the 21st century: labour migration and plantation-making.

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Nancy Lee Peluso is Professor Emerita in Society & Environment, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, at the University of California, Berkeley, and the current President of the Association of Asian Studies. Professor Peluso held the Rausser College of Natural Resources’ Henry J. Vaux Distinguished Professorship of Forest Policy from 2009-2019. In 2022, she was selected for the Distinguished Career Award by the Cultural and Political Ecology Group of the Association of American Geographers. Trained at Cornell as a ‘natural resource sociologist’, and now a Distinguished Political Ecologist, she has been conducting research in Indonesia for over 40 years. Peluso has also held research grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Humanities Research Institute at UCI, the Ford Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for the Study of Violence.

Professor Peluso’s deepest and longest research endeavours have been in Indonesia’s Java and Kalimantan. Her research is grounded in place-based ethnography, in-depth interviews, and socio-natural histories. Her most recent book is The Social Lives of Land (co-edited, 2024). Other books include New Frontiers of Land Control (co-edited, 2012); Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, People and Nature in a Neoliberal Age (co-edited, 2008); Violent Environments (co-edited, 2001); Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation, and Development (co-edited, 1996). Her first book, Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (1992), is widely used in political ecology and environmental studies classes.

This is a public lecture and admission is free and open to all. Seating is first-come-first-served. Please direct queries to 4572807.