4 - Inter-island Travel: Women Negotiating Boundaries of Propriety

Summary

At the end of July 1999 on one of my visits to Flores Timur, I travelled to Kedang on the island of Lembata. Like many women from the region, I took the ferry between islands because this was the most economical and practical way to circulate in the region. That day there was hardly any drama competing with other passengers to get seats on the ferry. When we were halfway into the journey, I climbed the upper deck of the ferry and thought I would take a few photographs of the view.

Even in that short four-hour inter-island trip there was a sense of surprise waiting around the corner. In an effort to extend my network I approached a group of women travelling together to attend a traditional village celebration. They were quite amicable. Apparently, my camera had signified me as a tourist — separating me as a different kind of traveller. Eventually, the four women cheerfully posed on the deck for a photograph. However, as I was about to take that shot with the beautiful background view, a man who had watched us from a distance, approached us and bluntly stopped me: “do not take their photograph!” There was confusion and tension among us women. The man was protective of the local women travellers. These women's association with me while on the voyage aroused this man's anxiety. Why?

Circulating: going with and against propriety

Inter-island movements of East Nusa Tenggaran women are characterized by temporary, short distance and sometimes repetitive trips. Women in the region have travelled as part of the family for a long time, yet this vignette indicates independent women circulating between islands can still create a sense of social unease. An implied cultural assumption that women are stationary at home underlies the problematic empirical evidence of women circulating in travel.

Historically, men's domain of mobility, for instance in pre-colonial trade and other localized interactions including migration, were conducted through the inter-island routes, as Graham (1999, p. 72) illustrates:

The ancestral migrations and early exchanges of goods and knowhow are memorialised in mythic form by many people of Flores, who regard knowing and respecting their origins as crucial to their contemporary survival. Such myths and historical accounts often depict Flores not as a bounded entity, but in relations with various “outsiders”.