The Labour of Living Together

My PhD research explores how people make living together possible in contexts marked by long-standing antagonism. I see living together not as a stable condition but as a fragile, dynamic process that is constantly negotiated, tested, and remade. I trace how this process is assembled through interactions between people, objects, practices, and histories.

Focusing on the gold trade in Makassar, Indonesia, I examine how fragile relations of coexistence are continually made and unmade through everyday negotiations, exchanges, and forms of labor. Gold itself, along with the practices and stories that surround it, shapes the ways people connect across ethnic and class boundaries. By following the social life of gold—from its circulation as a commodity and gift to the ways trust and risk are managed—I show how markets become spaces where differences are both reproduced and unsettled.

Bringing together ethnographic research and anthropological theory, my work highlights the unseen efforts, frictions, and accommodations that hold together interdependence in a divided society.