From Sacrifice to Invulnerability: Labor, Shame, and Moral Economies in Indonesia’s SEZs

This article examines how, in an Indonesian Export Processing Zone on Batam in the Riau Archipelago, a toxic production regime orients embodied, moral, and spiritual practices among migrant electronics manufacturing workers. Drawing on biomonitoring and labor-union reports on heavy-metal contamination and solvent exposure in semiconductor manufacturing, the article argues that a regime of secrecy governs the intersection of toxic harm and the moral economy of the sacrifice zone. This regime confines internal migrant workers, celebrated as pahlawan devisa (remittance heroes), to a state of prolonged and silenced suffering, the sakit hati. Referred to as a “sacrifice zone,” the island is haunted by vengeful spirits representing unmourned deaths by suicide and reproductive harm. Drawing on ethnographic notes as a member of a pencak silat martial arts brotherhood in Batam, the article contends that workers renegotiate the regime of toxic harm, secrecy, and self-sacrifice, mobilizing the same cosmological and moral order that the zone’s secrecy regime draws on, yet redirecting it toward a collective practice of loyalty and truth. Cultivating ilmu kebal and ilmu halimunan (the sciences of invulnerability and of invisibility) on the path to the noble death, they partially displace the state’s appropriation of heroism, reorienting sakit hati (broken heart) toward setia hati (loyal heart) and collective sacrifice. Yet this rearticulation operates within the cosmological order itself, while chemical contamination and structural precarity persist on a separate material plane, unaffected.