Coming of Age on the Streets of Java

This book is based on almost five years of fieldwork with street-related communities in the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, between 2001 and 2015. The author inquires into children's and adolescents' coming of age on the streets and their remarkable social and emotional competences, instead of resorting to a dreadful discourse of pity and despair. The ethnography's multi-vocal narrative couples vivid accounts of ethnographic case studies and life stories with current theory on affect, emotion, empathy, structural violence or social interaction in the context of marginality, stigma and chronic illness. »An outstanding analysis of a socially relevant phenomenon and a significant contribution that counters the politicized and media-dominated homogenizing discourse about 'street children' in Indonesia and other parts of the world. This book offers a highly compelling anthropological focus on the manifold meanings, experiences and practices of young people's life on the streets.« (Prof. Dr. Hansjörg Dilger, Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology, Free University Berlin)

Thomas Jan Stodulka is Junior Professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.