About This Project

Bali is sold to the world as paradise. However, rapid tourism and foreign investments are reshaping everyday life in complex ways. This research seeks to uncover the human stories behind that transformation; exploring belonging, identity, and survival of the people through ethnographic fieldwork, with the research question: How do everyday moral economies shape negotiation of belonging and precarity of the people living and working in Bali's tourism-leisure spaces?

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What is the context of this research?

This project positions Bali as a conceptual vantage point to interrogate assumptions about identity, precarity and the moral economies of global mobility by understanding how post-crisis or post-colonial tourism economies are reconstituting everyday life. Fieldwork will unpack theoretical vocabularies through interpreting the lived contradictions of tourism through the social field of identity negotiations, precarity and everyday moralities. While existing studies such as by Fagertun, Green, Picard and Yamashita have mapped the structural impacts of tourism, few have centred the moral tensions and informal social regulation occurring in Southeast Asia’s places to be. This project intervenes at precisely that intersection by understanding the everyday human struggles in a post-colonial paradise.

What is the significance of this project?

The wider significance lies in its use of Bali as a strategic case for understanding a broader challenges facing the Asia-Pacific region. It unpacks how tourism-dependent societies balance market expansion with cultural continuity, social legitimacy, and sustainable development (Picard, 1996, 2008; Yamashita, 2003). Drawing on ethnographic across Bali’s tourism-leisure spaces, it will produce ethnographic evidence on how moral expectations, informal rules, and competing claims to belonging are negotiated in everyday life (Fagertun, 2017; Green, 2017, 2022). In doing so, the project offers insights relevant to tourism policy, community planning, and sustainable development by demonstrating that the success of tourism should include the assessment of cultural resilience and the legitimacy of local governance (Dolezal & Novelli, 2022; Law et al., 2016) through the lens of moral economy (Fassin, 2009).

What are the goals of the project?

The study will adopt a comparative lens by analysing how moral economies are enacted across diverse tourism intensities, allowing grounded understanding of the moral negotiations that define everyday life for tourism-leisure workers. Fieldwork duration is estimated to reach a total of 12 months including time allocated for preliminary immersion and follow-up interviews. Qualitative approach and ethnography style is most suited to the study of everyday moral ambiguity, informal governance and identity negotiation, and most importantly, answers the research problems. This method enables immersive engagement with the lived experience and unspoken norms that shape social interaction. The project will consider obtaining primary data from street-level encounters and already established contacts from researcher’s previous visits, and snowballing from there on. The study aims to conduct 25–30 in-depth interviews across key actor categories (e.g., local workers).