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ENGLISH
THAI
INDONESIAN
JAPANESE
FILIPINO
By
Cynthia Chou
[Dr.
Cynthia Chou is associate professor in the Department of Asian Studies,
Institute of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies–Language, Religion and
Society, University of Copenhagen. She also serves as head of the Southeast
Asian Studies Programme.]
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The
above listing of books, articles, and unpublished manuscripts is but a
suggestive and not a definitive list. There are scholars whose works are
of the highest quality who could not be mentioned here. An invaluable
project to compile a comprehensive bibliography of works on the sea nomads
was undertaken by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University,
in the early 1990s; their findings were published in the first two issues
of the Sama Bajau Studies Newsletter (1995, 1996).
This
body of work of the last forty years is of great value. Much of what has
been documented pertains to issues concerning the socialization of time,
space, and identity. A substantial amount of literature has also focussed
on processes of change, modernization, and development. This interest
is due very much to the quickening and broadening processes of economic,
social, political, and technological development that have had an impact
on intercultural contact everywhere in the post-war decades. Sound research
techniques and fieldwork participation have produced more accurate and
refined ethnographic detail that integrates viewpoints and experiences
both within and between core, semi-marginal, and marginal societies.
For the first
time, too, we see fundamental theoretical revisions about the prehistory
and indigenous cultural history of the region. New approaches in linguistics
and anthropology, including functionalism and structural-functionalism,
Marxist and neo-Marxist perspectives, and interpretive and postmodernist
approaches, have been tried, worked on, and debated.
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This
has opened an understanding of the social organization and cultural premises
that structure the sea nomads’ daily life and led to new insights into
identity, social hierarchy, and stigmatization at the local, transnational,
and supranational scale of sea nomad mobility.
Two recent
works can serve to illustrate some trends. The first is James Warren’s
1998 monograph, The Sulu Zone: The World Capitalist Economy and the
Historical Imagination. This text focuses on the relationship between
social groups like the Sama Laut, Iranun, Balangini Samal, and Taosug
and their physical environment. It develops a “critical understanding
and discussion of historiographical methods and models in problematizing
of economic and cultural ‘border zones’ in a changing global-local context”
(9). This exciting piece of work involves “framing and re-presenting the
ethnohistory of the Sulu zone in its own terms… rather than merely as
a corollary of the history of Western [imperialist] expansion” in the
region (13). Inspired by the historiographical formulations and debates
of the neo-Marxist dependency theorists, particularly Andre Gunder Frank
(1978) and Paul Baran (1957), by the World System approach of Immanuel
Wallerstein (1974), and by the theories and concepts of Latin American
economists and Annales historians, Warren demonstrates the evolution of
areas and the concept of “periphery” as “a series of intersections, encounters
or ‘historical accidents usually due to contact with foreign formations’
(Meillassoux 1972:101)” (Warren 1998: 14-15). Second, my own forthcoming
essay
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(2005)
looks at political and social tensions between fixed national boundaries
with inflexible state requirements of citizenship, on the one hand, and
the flexible requirements of the Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia, on
the other. This essay reflects attempts in recent research to capture
and place the dynamics of sea nomads, well known for their mobility, within
the wider social science of borders, citizenship, and nation states.
Closing
Thoughts
Although
great strides have been made in the study of sea nomads in Southeast Asia,
much more research is required. This exercise of revisiting older writings
and reviewing recent works has adumbrated potential directions that could
lead to new ranges of knowledge in the field. In addition, much of the
older ethnographic record—which narrowly looks at the organisation of
sea nomads’ travel routes, their techniques for spatial production of
locality, and the often humdrum preoccupations of small scale communities—can
be reread from other points of view. These issues and ethnographic details
can be reconceived as dynamic and exciting interstices of transnational
mobility and cultural belongingness. In them we can see how the ideas
of community, citizenship, and legal rights are reconfigured, reinterpreted,
and reconceptualized in the encounter between mobile populations and nation
states.
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