ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the life of the Saskia, a 30 year old German, works for a development agency. She lives in a rented apartment which is part of a hotel complex in the centre of Jakarta. In his edited collection, Embodiment and Experience, Thomas Csordas proposes to reformulate theories of culture, self and experience, with the body at the centre of analysis'. The background to his statement was a widespread tendency in the social sciences to neglect or dismiss the body as a legitimate object of research. Thomas refers to migration as a displacement', reflecting the tendency in migration studies to study transnational migration from below'. This statement sums up the attitude of many expatriates living in Jakarta in the sense that they divide the cityspace into an Inside a clean. The gaze of the Other' is also gendered. At play here is not so much the Orientalist discourse of the gaze of the black male on a white female body.
