Commodity Trade, Gift Exchange, and the History of Maritime Nomadism in Southeastern Sabah

Abstract

Introduction Even before the first European penetration of Island Southeast Asia, the maritime boat people of the region were already heavily engaged in trade and in many areas were incorporated in state-based political and economic systems. This paper examines one particular group, the Bajau Laut, or Sama Dilaut, of southeastern Sabah, seeing them as players in a historical circulation of goods. Different modalities of exchange, within and outside the group, involving both gifts and commodities, helped to define the embedded nature of the Bajau Laut community and its place vis-a-vis more settled populations in a hierarchical division of economic and political labour. Here I look in particular at the symbolisation of exchange, especially in local mythic discourse, in order to understand better the role that nomadism played, down to the beginning of the last century, in sustaining this circulation and in reproducing the contrasting identities of its different players, including the sea nomads themselves. Commodities and Commoditisation In this paper, I follow the example of Appadurai (1986: 3-7), at least provisionally, and define `commodities' very broadly as `objects of economic value'; essentially, `anything intended for exchange'. Commodities, in Appadurai's (1986: 13) terms, are not particular kinds of things, but, rather, `things', as he puts it, `in a certain situation'. A `commodity situation' is one `in which [an object's] exchangeability for some other thing is its socially relevant feature'. In this sense, `many different kinds of things, at different points in their social lives', may assume commodity status to the extent that exchangeability becomes their salient attribute. Viewed in this way, commodity exchange is a feature of all societies. Some societies, however, are more thoroughly commoditised than others. Similarly, while some things represent quintessential commodities, being readily exchangeable for others in a multitude of different situations, at least a few things in every society, even in the most highly commoditised, are culturally excluded from exchangeability and so precluded from commodity status (Appadurai 1986: 22; Kopytoff 1986: 73). (1) The commodities that are of primary concern to us in this paper are those that historically circulated through a major trading network that, geographically speaking, extended from the southern coast of Mindanao, through the Sulu Archipelago of the Philippines, to the adjacent eastern coast of Borneo, a region aptly termed the `Sulu Zone' by the social historian James Warren (1981). At the centre of this zone, navigational crossroads converged to link the region to distant markets well beyond its geographical frontiers, to China and mainland Southeast Asia to the north, and, to the south and west, the islands of eastern Indonesia and the western Malay world. The sea nomads were significant players in this network and supplied some of its most highly valued commodities. Some of these products, notably trepang or dried sea-cucumbers (bat), were quintessential commodities, produced exclusively for external trade, and were never consumed by the sea nomads themselves nor by any of their immediate neighbours. Ultimately, trepang supplied Chinese culinary markets well outside the Sulu zone. A number of other commodities, such as mother-of-pearl, pearls, tortoiseshell, sea-turtle eggs and sharkfin, while produced mainly for external trade, also enjoyed a degree of regional demand. Finally, the most ubiquitous and quantitatively important of all these commodities, dried fish, was supplied chiefly to local land-based trading partners and through them entered into regional exchange circuits, some eventually finding its way to upland and interior peoples in the bordering as of Borneo and Mindanao. In exchange for these commodities, the sea nomads received from their shore-based trading partners externally manufactured goods, such as cloth; local craft products, such as earthenware cooking hearths and metal implements; and cultivated produce, including fruit and cassava (panggi kayu), the latter their main dietary staple. …