Making Sense of Poverty in Aceh and Surabaya

In this chapter, we focus on how people ‘handle’ poverty, how they engage with it from within, embody it and make it a part of their lives and personal cultural horizons. Based on fieldworks in Aceh and Surabaya, we explore how people situate themselves within poverty to embrace or avoid a condition of marginality, to express physical limitations, thoughts and perceptions. Our hypothesis concerns the importance of developing explicit counter-narratives of poverty and within poverty in a nation where welfare policies are mainly experienced as a privilege and an unreliable source of help and less formal systems of social security imply strategic investment in relationships. Thanks to a detailed ethnography, we show that the 6 young persons that we present have become or are becoming adults through an active embodiment of poverty and by forging counter-narratives of what being poor means to them . Because of poverty they reflect upon their origins and think about where they come from. They become aware of who they are and where in society they fit. Through poverty, they either try to establish a distance from their past or select some aspects of their personal past lives and make the most out of them