19 november 2009

The gift of (be)longing: nomadic explorations, musical worlds

Sama-speaking maritime peoples are one of the most widely spread cultural groups within the Southeast Asian island world. They can be found in the Philippine Sulu Archipelago, in southwestern Mindanao, in Sabah, Borneo, east Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and across many of the east Indonesian islands. They characteristically live in shoreline and island settlements and find their identities within small local groups rather than by forming a political unity; they are commonly distinguished by the name of the distinct island or place that the members of these groups identify with. One specific, so-called sea-nomadic Sama group, however, refers to itself as the “Sea Sama” (Sama Dilaut; colloquially they are also referred to as Bajau) rather than identifying with specific localities. Historically, their relationship with the economically more powerful shore communities has been strenuous; the Sama Dilaut face open discrimination from their sedentary neighbors, usually relating to their non-sedentary or semi-sedentary organization, their religious and cosmological ideas and their putatively “unislamic” practice of the Muslim faith, which co-exists with ancestor and spirit worship. For a variety of reasons, a great number of Sama Dilaut had to take relocate to urban environments in recent decades. Among other factors, this ‘dislocation’ of the Sama Dilaut, as it is often referred to in order to clarify impact this semi-forced migration has had on the communities, has also worked its influence on musical practices.

In this talk, I shall discuss selected genres of vocal music of the Sama Dilaut communities around the Philippine island of Tawi-Tawi in the Sulu archipelago and Eastern Sabah/Borneo, Malaysia. I will identify certain musical transformations that have taken place since the mid-1960s, and reflect on their cultural implications. I will then turn to selected models of globalization theory and transnational global flows in order to sound out their usefulness for understanding the transformations that have taken place in Sama Dilaut music-making. Situating these models against the backdrop of Sama Dilaut music history, two crucial questions will emerge: What is the role of music in the negotiation of Sama Dilaut notions of Self and Other, historically and contemporarily? And can the answer(s) to this question contribute to our more general conceptualization and analysis of spaces, places and cultural identity?

Birgit Abels is currently a research fellow in Cultural Musicology of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the University of Amsterdam and the International Institute for Asian Studies in Amsterdam. She earned her doctoral degree at Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). Before that, she studied Music and Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental Studies (SOAS), University of London; and obtained her MA in Musicology, Arabic and Islamic Studies from Ruhr University. While most of her work centers on issues of identity construction through music, the geographic focus of her research is the Pacific islands (particularly Micronesia) and the Southeast Asian island world. She has conducted on-site research in India, Palau, and Sabah/Borneo (Malaysia).