Cultivating extractive bodies: Labor frontiers and the social reproduction of nickel workers in North Maluku, Indonesia

Abstract

This paper examines the emergence of the labor frontier in relation to the nickel resource frontier in Weda, Halmahera, North Maluku. While the creation of extraction zones is notoriously associated with violent processes of displacement, it also requires labor—labor that must be produced and cared for within home communities. This dynamic is evident in the establishment of the nickel industrial park in Weda, which has intensified nickel mining, contributed to the ruination of earlier socio‑environmental landscapes, and generated a massive demand for labor. Beneath Weda’s changing landscape are young migrant workers from Central Maluku whose lives are intimately shaped by their home communities, the networks that emerge from them, and their own understandings of themselves in relation to—and in contribution to—the people who hold weight in their lives back home. Drawing on long‑term ethnographic engagement in Seram, Ambon, and Weda between 2015 and 2025, this paper situates this emerging group of workers within the historical transformations of livelihoods in Central Maluku and its rural communities. By drawing on social reproduction theory, which foregrounds the relational processes through which labor is produced, the paper unpacks how labor frontiers function as circuits of carework whose uncommodified nature allows for profitable extraction zones to be established, thereby unraveling the often-overlooked social dimension of frontierization.