edited by Bérénice Bellina, Roger Blench and Jean-Christophe Galipaud
Anyone who has gone even slightly off the beaten track in Southeast Asia is likely to have come across “sea people”, which go by various names: Orang Laut, Sama Bajau, Chao Le, “Sea Gypsies”. These are the people covered in Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia From the Past to the Present, a recently-published collection of (very) academic essays.
The introduction lays out the book’s rationale:
Sea nomads have been part of the economic and political landscape of Southeast Asia for millennia… But so far there have been few attempts to trace the evolution of sea nomadism in the archaeological record or to make use of modern genetics in understanding these trajectories. There has been a certain bias against these communities because of their supposed ‘archaeological invisibility’… Part of the subtext of this book is to suggest this is far from the situation. As such it is the first book providing historical, archaeological and genetic data in the attempt to explore sea nomads’ longue-durée historical trajectory as well as their role in regional historical developments.
The potential appeal, to say nothing of the importance, seems undeniable. But this book is however one for university library shelves: if you’re not familiar with terms like “swidden-farming” and “autosomal markers” or can’t identify molluscs from the Latin name alone, this is probably not the book for you. One must always be careful not to review the book one wishes had been written rather than the one that was. Nevertheless, while providing a single overview of the subject for the non-specialist is evidently not this book’s objective, Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia makes the necessity of such a volume all the more evident.
Anyone who has gone even slightly off the beaten track in Southeast Asia is likely to have come across “sea people”, which go by various names: Orang Laut, Sama Bajau, Chao Le, “Sea Gypsies”. These are the people covered in Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia From the Past to the Present, a recently-published collection of (very) academic essays.
The introduction lays out the book’s rationale:
Sea nomads have been part of the economic and political landscape of Southeast Asia for millennia… But so far there have been few attempts to trace the evolution of sea nomadism in the archaeological record or to make use of modern genetics in understanding these trajectories. There has been a certain bias against these communities because of their supposed ‘archaeological invisibility’… Part of the subtext of this book is to suggest this is far from the situation. As such it is the first book providing historical, archaeological and genetic data in the attempt to explore sea nomads’ longue-durée historical trajectory as well as their role in regional historical developments.
The potential appeal, to say nothing of the importance, seems undeniable. But this book is however one for university library shelves: if you’re not familiar with terms like “swidden-farming” and “autosomal markers” or can’t identify molluscs from the Latin name alone, this is probably not the book for you. One must always be careful not to review the book one wishes had been written rather than the one that was. Nevertheless, while providing a single overview of the subject for the non-specialist is evidently not this book’s objective, Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia makes the necessity of such a volume all the more evident.
Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia: From the Past to the Present, Bérénice Bellina (ed), Roger Blench (ed), Jean-Christophe Galipaud (ed) (NUS Press, September 2021)
That being said, there is much of interest here. Roger Blench’s fascinating paper on “Ship Construction and Navigation in the Early South China Seas” points to the central role of Southeast Asia in navigation technology:
… already by the third century CE, the Chinese were encountering extremely large trading ships with as many as four sails, far larger than anything they could construct. It seems Chinese shipwrights learnt from this and by the Sung dynasty had begun to design ships which merged both Chinese and Southeast Asian constructional techniques… All of this evidence points to a remarkable evolution of maritime technology indigenous to Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), which was far ahead of other naval traditions until the appearance of very large European vessels from the end of the sixteenth century.
But it all started far earlier:
The migrations of modern humans across large stretches of water in the Palaeolithic is incontrovertible evidence for the existence of some type of sophisticated water transport… If modern humans could reach Australia by 65,000 BP [before present] … this implies some open ocean capacity. Evidence for movement between islands in the Ryukyus goes back to 35,000 bp… Obsidian was being transported around Bismarcks as early as 20,000 BP.
This subject deserves a book of its own some day.
The various sections on linguistics are similarly interesting. It helps to know going in that conventional wisdom now has the Malay, Polynesian and related languages (and the people that speak them) originating in Taiwan. The linguistic distribution of the Sama Bajau languages and dialects helps pinpoint their historical origins:
the reasons and date of the migration of Sama Bajau ancestors to the southern Philippines are probably linked to the expansion of the Srivijaya empire in the ninth century.
Some of the links between language and identity are surprising. Despite the sea nomads being in general marginalized, it appears that in certain situations, other people would integrate into the Sama Bajau community rather than the other way around:
In Sapeken, the non-Bajau migrants from neighbouring islands such as the Mandar, Bugis or even Chinese, have, more often than not, switched their daily language as well as their ethnic identification to the Bajau. Simply speaking, the Bajau population in Sapeken swelled from 1930 through 2000 as the non-Bajau have ‘become Bajau’.
Some of the contributors express the view that the sea nomads have been badly done by—as have, it goes without saying and wasn’t here, most peoples whose traditional lifestyles do not conform to governments’ view of development. In this, the story of the sea nomads is sadly typical.
Collections of academic essays by disparate authors can be less than the sum of their parts; that is unfortunately the case here. There is considerable duplication of information (on geographical and linguistic distribution in particular) and quite a bit is left out: for a historical outline and basic ethnography, the general reader might be better off referring to online sources (Wikipedia in fact covers these peoples in no small amount of detail).
That is of course not what Sea Nomads is trying to do. While the editors express hope that
this book will encourage archaeologists, historians, ethnographers, geographers, linguists and geneticists to follow up these methodological reflections and to work together to provide a history for the ancestors of a large proportion of current Southeast Asian populations …
one might also hold out hope for a book targeted at the rest of us.
That being said, there is much of interest here. Roger Blench’s fascinating paper on “Ship Construction and Navigation in the Early South China Seas” points to the central role of Southeast Asia in navigation technology:
… already by the third century CE, the Chinese were encountering extremely large trading ships with as many as four sails, far larger than anything they could construct. It seems Chinese shipwrights learnt from this and by the Sung dynasty had begun to design ships which merged both Chinese and Southeast Asian constructional techniques… All of this evidence points to a remarkable evolution of maritime technology indigenous to Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), which was far ahead of other naval traditions until the appearance of very large European vessels from the end of the sixteenth century.
But it all started far earlier:
The migrations of modern humans across large stretches of water in the Palaeolithic is incontrovertible evidence for the existence of some type of sophisticated water transport… If modern humans could reach Australia by 65,000 BP [before present] … this implies some open ocean capacity. Evidence for movement between islands in the Ryukyus goes back to 35,000 bp… Obsidian was being transported around Bismarcks as early as 20,000 BP.
This subject deserves a book of its own some day.
The various sections on linguistics are similarly interesting. It helps to know going in that conventional wisdom now has the Malay, Polynesian and related languages (and the people that speak them) originating in Taiwan. The linguistic distribution of the Sama Bajau languages and dialects helps pinpoint their historical origins:
the reasons and date of the migration of Sama Bajau ancestors to the southern Philippines are probably linked to the expansion of the Srivijaya empire in the ninth century.
Some of the links between language and identity are surprising. Despite the sea nomads being in general marginalized, it appears that in certain situations, other people would integrate into the Sama Bajau community rather than the other way around:
In Sapeken, the non-Bajau migrants from neighbouring islands such as the Mandar, Bugis or even Chinese, have, more often than not, switched their daily language as well as their ethnic identification to the Bajau. Simply speaking, the Bajau population in Sapeken swelled from 1930 through 2000 as the non-Bajau have ‘become Bajau’.
Some of the contributors express the view that the sea nomads have been badly done by—as have, it goes without saying and wasn’t here, most peoples whose traditional lifestyles do not conform to governments’ view of development. In this, the story of the sea nomads is sadly typical.
Collections of academic essays by disparate authors can be less than the sum of their parts; that is unfortunately the case here. There is considerable duplication of information (on geographical and linguistic distribution in particular) and quite a bit is left out: for a historical outline and basic ethnography, the general reader might be better off referring to online sources (Wikipedia in fact covers these peoples in no small amount of detail).
That is of course not what Sea Nomads is trying to do. While the editors express hope that
this book will encourage archaeologists, historians, ethnographers, geographers, linguists and geneticists to follow up these methodological reflections and to work together to provide a history for the ancestors of a large proportion of current Southeast Asian populations …
one might also hold out hope for a book targeted at the rest of us.
Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.
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