Small-scale, work-related mobility has become a constitutive feature of modern local Southeast Asian societies. This unique volume traces the lives of low-paid, mostly young, unskilled migrants who have moved away from their villages of origin in search of a job: contractual farmers in Laos; miners, young urban service workers, and construction workers in Indonesia; shoemakers in the Philippines; and factory workers in Vietnam. The case studies show how ill-defined work leads to lives of structural and symbolic precariousness and reshapes the migrants' own moral visions of work, identity, and belonging.

Typically, scholars approach migrants' religions as a safeguard of cultural identity, something that connects migrants to their communities of origin. This ethnographic anthology challenges that position by reframing the religious experiences of migrants as a transformative force capable of refashioning narratives of displacement into journeys of spiritual awakening and missionary calling. These essays explore migrants' motivations in support of an argument that to travel inspires a search for new meaning in religion.

This fresh and unusual collection offers a critical reflection on Southeast Asia as a progressively integrated space of production, exchange, and circulation within and beyond national boundaries. The essays describe the successful or unsuccessful entry of specific individuals or groups into wider markets and networks in their quest for prosperity-in Thailand, by Lua peasant farmers, slum families, the last century's teak laborers, and ethnic tour hosts; in Indonesia, by communities resisting environmental destruction and the urban poor; and in Vietnam, by human trafficking returnees. The authors examine how these groups are socially and symbolically defined and redefined in the process of integration and the sense-making effort that characterizes many destitute people in urban contexts.