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ID: 152525

Performing ‘Chinese-ness’ in Singkawang: diasporic moorings, festivals and tourism / Sulianti, Dian; Ormond, Meghann ; Ong, Chin Ee

Ormond, Meghann	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

Through an examination of two festivals – Qing Ming and Cap Go Meh – in the town of Singkawang in Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan), we show how Singkawang-bound Chinese Indonesian tourists and their Singkawang-based relatives produce a diasporic heritage network through ‘moorings’ generated by both transnational and internal migration. Instead of returning to a singular ‘homeland’ in distant China, these tourists return to Chinese-majority Singkawang as a result of their personal genealogical roots and of their broader cultural allegiance with a kind of Chinese-ness that Singkawang has come to represent within a post-Suharto Indonesia. Through these two festivals, we demonstrate how personal heritage practices like ‘roots tourism’ and visiting friends and relatives are intimately bound up with identity and developmental politics at local, national and international scales. In so doing, we identify a range of ways in which migratory and tourism flows by Chinese Indonesian internal migrants shape relations to their ancestral hometowns and cultural ‘homelands’ in Indonesia within the context of membership to and participation in a broader transnational diaspora.

Key Words

Indonesia ; Diaspora ; Identity ; Chinese ; Ethnic Festivals ; Genealogical Tourism ;
Visiting Friend and Relatives

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ID: 109467

Shifting subjects of health-care: placing 'medical tourism' in the context of Malaysian domestic health-care reform / Ormond, Meghann

Ormond, Meghann	Journal Article
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Publication

2011.

Summary/Abstract

Medical tourism' has frequently been held to unsettle naturalised relationships between the state and its citizenry. Yet in casting 'medical tourism' as either an outside 'innovation' or 'invasion', scholars have often ignored the role that the neoliberal retrenchment of social welfare structures has played in shaping the domestic health-care systems of the 'developing' countries recognised as international medical travel destinations. While there is little doubt that 'medical tourism' impacts destinations' health-care systems, it remains essential to contextualise them. This paper offers a reading of the emergence of 'medical tourism' from within the context of ongoing health-care privatisation reform in one of today's most prominent destinations: Malaysia. It argues that 'medical tourism' to Malaysia has been mobilised politically both to advance domestic health-care reform and to cast off the country's 'underdeveloped' image not only among foreign patient-consumers but also among its own nationals, who are themselves increasingly envisioned by the Malaysian state as prospective health-care consumers.

Key Words

Citizenship ; Development ; Malaysia ; Consumerism ; Health - Care Privatisation ; Medical Tourism

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