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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Batam, Indonesia, this paper examines vengeful ghosts arising from suicides, unsafe abortions, and childbirth deaths among migrant workers.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2025 among migrant workers in Batam, Indonesia, this paper examines death, haunting, and grief as sites where necropolitical power is both enacted and contested within an Export Processing Zone. Indonesia records one of the highest numbers of unreported suicides globally, with Riau Province ranking among those with the highest suicide rates. Batam, an island in Riau, has undergone rapid transformation—from a population of approximately 3,000 residents in 1970 to a global hub for shipbuilding and electronics manufacturing hosting over one million internal migrants—and is widely described by workers as a “haunted” landscape.

In Indonesia, deaths linked to suicide, unsafe abortion, and childbirth complications are frequently classified as mati tidak baik (“bad deaths”), which in local cosmology are understood to generate vengeful ghosts. These are mediators through which workers and families articulate otherwise silenced experiences of exploitation, shame (malu), and ungrievable loss. These hauntings index necropolitical conditions under which certain lives are rendered expendable and particular deaths excluded from public mourning. Central to this process is malu—understood as moral restraint and shame—which regulates both labour discipline and mourning practices, often producing silence that forecloses accountability while protecting families from scandal.

Within this context, the paper situates nocturnal ethnography conducted in a local silat school. Nocturnal silat practice—particularly graveyard rituals and spirit invocation—reconfigures deathscapes into an embodied politics of resistance, drawing on Indo-Islamic values, mysticism, and anticolonial traditions of night training, through which death and grief are reclaimed from industrial necropolitical erasure.