Regional Development Programmes and the Life-Dynamics of Tomohonese Women‪.‬

In this article we consider local development programmes and their contributions to the life-dynamics of Tomohonese women in a peripheral region of Indonesia. In examining industrialization, tourism, and international labour migration, we will demonstrate how the life-dynamics of Tomohonese women have been intertwined with these development programmes. "Life-dynamics" here refers to an encompassing concept of lived experiences, reflexive life-strategies, a practical sense of life, and the ways in which patterns of life are generated. Life-dynamics should thus be understood in terms of active and processual changes and reflections rather than just static events or passing phenomena. In this regard, this article employs the term "life course", rather than the more familiar "life cycle", as the latter implies a fixed categorization of the stages through which individuals move in a static social system, whereas the former leads us to more reflexive contextualized biographical patterns in response to active and processual change, which in turn have implications for the extent to which one internalizes the life stages (Cohen 1987, p. 1; George 1993).