ABSTRACT
Any scholar conducting research on human migration is confronted by a plethora of written sources on the topic that are circulating in the public domain. These products take many different forms, from personal testimonies to mere commentaries, and are produced by a variety of authors, including (former) migrants themselves. It is worth taking the messages, authors, intended audiences, and circulation channels of these materials into account when trying to grasp the complexity of migrant (im)mobilities. Precisely this was the aim of a study I conducted on migration imaginaries in Chile, Tanzania, and Indonesia. In this chapter, I revisit the research on Indonesia to reflect critically about what the literary products I gathered, read, and analyzed taught me, as reader-anthropologist, about migrants and migration. Among others, my findings confirm that we should not only attentively read and unpack the contents of migrant-related works but also find out more about their authors and the context that made the writing possible. Although anthropologists are not part of the intended audience, reading these materials automatically confronts us, sometimes in unexpected ways, with our own positionality and stance toward migrants and processes of migration and mobility.
