"There's Money but No Work": Diploma Disruptions in Urban Papua

Abstract:In this article, we explore themes of education, work, and employment in the life stories of Indigenous inhabitants of Jayapura, the capital city of Papua Province, Indonesia. We draw on life-history interviews collected from men and women ranging from the pre–World War II generation to contemporary youth. This population is the most educated and literate in the province, but education does not shield people from marginalization and displacement or from violence, tragedy, isolation, and economic hardship. What education "does" is often bittersweet, as our interlocutors reveal the rocky course of the first sixty years of formal schooling in an enduring colony. We look beyond statistics about high literacy and educational attainment to illuminate the decline of an urban public service, the stops and starts in school and work because of familial influences, and the circuitous and unpredictable pathways unleashed by a fluctuating "project" economy. All of the stories shared here involve mobility away from Jayapura, job precarity, and serial casual employment. Women's work in particular usually involves a considerable history of unpaid service and volunteer work. We suggest that education in a fluctuating, frontier economy leads to "diploma disruption" rather than "diploma inflation," in which graduates outnumber jobs or do not want low-status work. What education is for, or even what it is, is conditional and temporary, yet there is continuity in the belief that having some education, whatever it entails or brings, is better than having none.