2. Research Trends on Southeast Asian Sea Nomads
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.]
Sea Nomads in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, a region encompassing an expanse of coasts and islands rich in varied
maritime resources, is known widely for its long-established maritime traditions. What is
regrettably less known is the phenomenon of sea nomadism. The history and culture of
the mobile boat-dwelling people, often known as sea nomads, dates back many centuries.
Today, they continue to traverse the waters of the archipelago and to challenge the
classical idea of citizenship that is defined within bounded territories and guaranteed by a
sovereign state. Their continued widespread distribution throughout the area bears
testament to a very different indigenous perception and mapping of the region.
Debates have broiled over the most appropriate term of reference for the boat-dwelling
mariners, variously known as “sea folk,” “sea gypsies,” “sea people,” “boat people,” “sea
roaming groups,” “maritime mobile groups,” and “sea hunters and gatherers.” These
terms have all proved lacking in scientific and ethnographic merit. In comparison, the
term “sea nomads” has steadfastly remained the term of preference by the general public,
researchers, and officials. This is not to say that the term “nomad” has not been disputed.
Opponents of this appellation maintain that it is etymologically derived from the Greek
expression nomás which means “moving around and living on pasturage.” Hence, the
argument goes, the word is irrelevant for maritime communities. Proponents of the term
nonetheless argue that contemporary anthropological usage has broadened its meaning to
include all groups of people who practice spatial mobility to enhance their well being and
survival.
Communities of sea nomads are widely regarded by other inhabitants of the area as the
orang asli of the region. This term has been translated variously as “indigenous peoples”
(Chou 1997) or as “true,” “genuine,” and “real” inhabitants (Sather 1997:17, 20).
Whichever translation one is inclined toward, the heart of the matter is that the space
which others have named “Southeast Asia,” comprising a number of bordered nation-
states, is, in contrast, a space of deep emotional and personal meaning for the sea nomads.
From the latter’s perspective, it is a space charted by the extent of their sea-faring skills
and postulated as a network of places connected by inter-related kinship ties to form what
1
3. they call tempat/tanah saya (my place or my territory). Based upon these premises, sea
nomads claim ownership of and sovereignty over this entire space, despite the
interference posed by current political borders.
The existence of early and extensive trade and seafaring networks in the region (Sather
1995) reflects the almost unhampered movement of sea nomads historically. In the past,
they were vigorously involved in symbiotic relations with the early Malay states of the
western Malay region and later with a succession of sultanates in coastal Borneo, the
southern Philippines, and eastern Indonesia (Sather 1997:329-33). In the process, they
generated great wealth by providing maritime commodities to facilitate trade, formed a
naval force to secure and protect sea lanes that were absolutely vital to the development
of maritime Southeast Asia, and served as “integrating information-carriers” connecting
subsidiary chiefs with a developing peasantry. These roles were central to the larger-scale
integration of an increasingly centralized politics that shaped and developed maritime
Southeast Asia (Benjamin 1986:16). Paradoxically, as states emerged, the sea nomads
became progressively peripheralized and impoverished. It has reached the point that they
are now defined as being on the margins of “otherness” for the culturally and politically
dominant populations of the region.
My purpose in this essay is to relate briefly the study of sea nomads to current
discussions concerning flexible citizenships, borders, and borderlands. My discussion is
based on a selection of works representative of past and present writings, including
several recent, unpublished manuscripts—all of which contribute to a more refined,
deeper, and coherent understanding of the sea nomads. Regrettably, there is still a dearth
of ethnographic studies.
Numerous widely scattered communities of sea nomads can be found all over Southeast
Asia. They consist of at least three major ethnolinguistic groups, each with their own
histories, culture, and speech patterns. They are: (a) the Moken and related Moklen of the
Mergui Archipelago of Burma, with extensions southward into the islands of southwest
Thailand (Court 1971; Hogan 1972; Ivanoff 1985); (b) the Orang Suku Laut, literally the
“Tribe of Sea People,” comprising diverse congeries of variously named groups
inhabiting the Riau-Lingga Archipelago, Batam, and the coastal waters of eastern
Sumatra and southern Johor and, until recently, Singapore (Logan 1847; Carey 1970;
Andaya 1975; Sandbukt 1982:17; Mariam Mohd. Ali 1984; Wee 1985; Chou 2003); and
(c) the Bajau Laut, the largest and most widely dispersed of these groups living in the
Sulu Archipelago of the Philippines, eastern Borneo, Sulawesi, and the islands of eastern
Indonesia (Sather 1997:2).
2
4. The sea-faring activities of the sea nomads today create an endemic sense of anxiety and
social instability in state officials. Their mobility and sense of multi-local belonging-ness
greatly strains all interpretations and conceptualizations of citizenship within bounded
territories. Until the middle of the last century, the sea nomads lived entirely afloat as
boat-dwelling fishing communities. Since then, rapid change has occurred as political
borders and boundaries have been drawn and re-drawn with the birth of new nations and
the question of citizenship.
Unexpectedly, the recent catastrophic tsunami that shook the world brought international
media attention to the sea nomads of Southeast Asia (see, for example, “The Wisdom of
the Sea,” Bangkok Post, 17 January 2005:1, 8). Unfortunately, it has also given officials
an opportunity to pressure sea nomads to become sedentary. State developmental
programs have caused an increasing number of families—willingly or unwillingly—to
erect pile-houses over the shallow bays that had previously served as spots for boat
anchorage.
Revisiting Past and Present Works
A mish-mash of Chinese and Arab accounts are about the only sources of material
available for our understanding of the sea nomads before 1500. By putting together the
important work of Chau Ju-kua as complied by Hirth and Rockhill (1911) with Ferrand’s
(1913) invaluable collection of Arab and Persian documentation of this region, we see
how the sea-faring lifestyle and activities of the sea nomads were hastily interpreted and
the people themselves presented as “pirates and cruel; sailors dread them” (Chau Ju-kua
1911:11).
Gaps in information on the sea nomads speckle the time chart from the sixteenth to the
eighteenth centuries. Piecing together European records of exploration, travel
commentaries, and passing comments sketchily fills the lacunae. Samples include the
following.
• Portuguese references to the Celates or Orang Selat, sea nomads seen in the Strait of
Malacca and the Riouw-Lingga Archipelago in the sixteenth to eighteenth century
(Barros 1777; Pires 1944). There is also a scattered Dutch and English literature from
this period on the sighting of sea nomads in the same area.
• Spanish sources from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries focussing on the Sulu
Seas. In particular, the Historia de las islas de Mindanao, Joló y sus adyacentes
(1667) is a detailed and comprehensive description of the Spanish frontier by
Francisco Combés, a clergyman with a deep interest in customs and languages.
3
5. • Portuguese reports compiled by the missionary François Valentijn (1724-1726) on the
eastern Bajaus at the end of the seventeenth century.
• English reports, especially the description by English captain and explorer Thomas
Forrest (1780; 1792) of the Bajau at the close of the eighteenth century.
The character of these writings was highly descriptive and oftentimes exaggerated. Very
much based upon personal “enquiries and conjectures” (Forrest 1780: preface), these
narratives were not necessarily based on scientific methods. From the European
perspective, the sea nomads were a novel ethnographic phenomenon. Often their habitats
remained unknown to the Europeans, who were only able to write about what they
occasionally and fleetingly observed from a distance during exploratory voyages.
Information about the sea nomads was also contingent on political changes in the
archipelago. When the Dutch displaced the Portuguese in Malacca at the dawn of the
seventeenth century, Portuguese writers shifted their focus. This is why Valentijn makes
little mention of Malacca and Sumatra in his Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën and, compared to
earlier Portuguese writings, hardly mentions the Celates.
From the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the study of sea nomads was
done mostly by colonial administrators. Contributions such as Findlayson and Raffles
(1826 in Gibson-Hill 1973:122) described the sea nomads as a “lower class of Malays.”
In 1906, a two-volume compendium of Malayan ethnography by English ethnologist
W.W. Skeat and C.O. Blagden was made available. It drew up a classification based on
putative physical anthropological distinctions among what the authors regarded as the
primitive tribes of Malaya. They incorrectly classified the Orang Suku Laut as primitive
forest nomads of the interior of Batam Island and, even more confoundingly, described
the “Orang Laut, Sambimba” as possessing no boats and fearing water. This
misinformation resulted in a distorted understanding of the boat nomad culture and
misled later writers on Malaya such as Heine-Geldern (1923), who relied on this book as
a guide to the little known sea nomads of the region.
Skeat and Blagden (1906) also wrote within a political frame of mind that almost
completely ignored the ethnographic continuum running from the mainland of Johor
through the Riouw (Riau) Islands to the east coast of Sumatra. This led them and others
to miss out on a better-informed ethnographic understanding of cultures and histories that
did not correlate with recently constructed political borders. Much of the narrative
unearthed from these early writings about the sea nomads is configured in encounters
between mobile populations in fixed localities. Observing from a distance, the writers of
this period did little to map out and understand the movements and migrations of mobile
populations. Seen in this light, their understanding of sea nomads stood in a troubled
relationship with territorial boundedness.
4
6. A long period of silence followed the colonial administrative reports. It was almost fifty
years later, in 1954, that the sea nomads were thoroughly analysed in a doctoral
dissertation by David Sopher. Initially published in 1965 as Sea Nomads: A Study Based
on the Literature of the Maritime Boat People of Southeast Asia and reprinted in 1977
with a postscript under a slightly revised title, The Sea Nomads: A Study of the Maritime
Boat People of Southeast Asia, the work has since become a classic. Based on secondary
material of published research and observations by other writers, Sopher’s study is
concerned with the cultural patterning and geography of the sea nomads. For the first
time, we have a comprehensive study based on geographical methods of the mobile boat-
dwelling people “over a very extensive area…stretching more than 2,000 miles.” Sopher
looked beyond the confines of political borders and boundaries to present an overview of
the cultural geography, migratory movements, and environmental relationships of the sea
nomads.
More systematic as well as more scientifically sound work, especially by historians and
social scientists, on the society and culture of sea nomads also appeared around the time
of Sopher’s publication. Examples of other influential works were Hans Kähler’s 1960
linguistic study, Ethnographische und linguistiche Studien über die Orang Darat, Orang
Akit, Orang Laut und Orang Utan im Riau-Archipel und auf den Inseln an der Ostküste
von Sumatra, and Nicholas Tarling’s 1963 historical study, Piracy and Politics in the
Malay World. Although scientifically better informed studies were now materializing, the
topic of boat-dwelling mariners continued to be understudied and published works
remained sporadic.
Historical studies based on sound archival research and ethnographies derived from
fieldwork and close contact with the sea nomads only began to surface in the 1970s and
thereafter. A selection of exciting books and monographs with their abbreviated titles in
chronological order follows: The People of Sulu by H. Arlo Nimmo (1972), The Kingdom
of Johor by Leonard Y. Andaya (1975), The Prince of Pirates by Carl A. Trocki (1979),
Duano Littoral Fishing by Øyvind Sandbukt (1982), A History of Malaysia by Barbara
Watson Andaya and Leonard Andaya (1982), Ideology, Identity and Change by Carol
Warren (1983), Celebrations with the Sun by Bruno Bottignolo (1995), The Bajau Laut
by Clifford Sather (1997), The Moken by Jacques Ivanoff (1997), The Sulu Zone by
James Warren (1998), Fließende Grezen. Konstruktion, Oszillation und Wandel
ethnischer Identität der Orang Suku Laut im Riau-Archipel by Lioba Lenhart (2002), and
Indonesian Sea Nomads by Cynthia Chou (2003).
Journal articles have also proliferated. Examples include Carey (1970), Chou (1995, 1997,
2004), Chou and Wee (2002), Lapian (1979), Lapian and Nagatsu (1996), Lenhart (1997,
5
7. 2002), Nimmo (1970, 1986, 1990), Pelras (1972), Sandbukt (1984), Sather (1995, 1998,
1999), and Zacot (1978). The following are examples of unpublished manuscripts that are
not always easily accessible, but which provide important and up-to-date information:
Normala Manap (1983), Mariam Mohd. Ali (1984), Morrison (1994), Nagatsu (1995),
and Farwig (2002).
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. 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
6
8. 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 (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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