Coming of age in- and out-of-place: frictions of adolescent mobility in island Southeast Asia

Through a comparison of adolescent experience in Manggarai, eastern Indonesia, and amongst children of migrants in Sabah, Malaysia, this article argues for the value of attending to the spatiality of adolescence as a period of transition. Biocultural development expands both adolescents’ concrete experiences of mobility and their sense of the possibility of movement. However, the ability to move is influenced by various frictions, most notably those of border infrastructures, as well as understandings of gender and kinship. I show how, in rural Manggarai, adolescence was entangled with different scales of mobility. By contrast, in urban Sabah, adolescence was a time of growing immobility. In both contexts, tensions between adolescent and parental expectations also shaped the emotionality, experience, and expectations of movement and in urban Kota Kinabalu, adolescents explicitly compared their situation with the imagined ‘freedom’ of adolescence in rural Indonesia. Ultimately, the spatiality of ‘coming of age’ is very different in a context like Manggarai, where young people are understood as ‘in‐place’, as compared with one like Sabah, where they are considered ‘out‐of‐place’.