Orang Suku Laut Communities at Risk: Effects of Modernisation on the Resource Base, Livelihood and Culture of the 'Sea Tribe People' of the Riau Islands (Indonesia)

Abstract

Introduction The Orang Suku Laut or `Sea Tribe People' of the Indonesian Riau Archipelago are one of several mobile fishing and foraging communities of maritime Southeast Asia who have often been referred to as `sea nomads'. Today, only a few of the Orang Suku Laut still follow an entirely nomadic way of life. The majority lives in coastal settlements, where some still turn seasonally to boat-dwelling, while others have completely abandoned boat nomadism. The process of sedentarisation was hastened in the 1990s, during the late Soeharto era, by ambitious government programmes for the region's economic development and special projects of directed change conducted amongst the Orang Suku Laut. For more than ten years now, in the course of almost two years of field research among nomadic, semi-nomadic and sedentary Orang Suku Laut in the northern part of the Riau Archipelago and regular revisits of my research sites, I have witnessed enormous changes occurring at a very rapid rate, as a consequence of these modernisation efforts. The purpose of this paper is to sum up the effects of the so-called development requirements on the Orang Suku Laut's material basis for securing their cultural existence. They have resulted in the Orang Suku Laut's becoming communities at risk, economically as well as culturally: on the one hand, the efforts to improve their economic well-being have failed, on the other hand they have led to cultural alienation for those who have been resettled by the government and have therefore missed the chance of disappearing at the right moment, with some of their nomadic relatives. My paper is divided into three sections. I start with an overview of the region and the economic, demographic and ecological changes accompanying the process of modernisation. This is followed by a description of the Orang Suku Laut's changing way of life that focuses on their relationship with their habitat as reflected in spatial behaviour, material culture, modes of earning a livelihood, social organisation and belief systems. Finally, the acculturative effects on the Orang Suku Laut way of life in times of modernisation are summed up. The Riau Islands and the Growth Triangle Outline of the Region The Riau Archipelago is part of the Indonesian Province of Riau which falls into two major divisions, namely Riau mainland in the central part of eastern Sumatra and the more than three thousand small Riau islands that stretch from the Straits of Malacca in the west to the South China Sea and Borneo in the east. The Province of Riau is the heartland of the Malays in Indonesia and Indonesia's Malay-based national language. Culturally and historically, this region has always belonged to the `Malay World', or alam Melayu, a territory of genealogically related maritime kingdoms. (1) It has a long history as a trading route between China, Southeast Asia, India and the West, and as an arena of the native kingdoms' enduring disputes with the British and Dutch colonial powers about political and economic supremacy from the 16th until the beginning of the 20th century, when the Dutch colonial government finally placed the region under its direct rule (Andaya 1975, DPK 1986, Trocki 1979, Wee 1985). In 1950, this area became part of the Republic of Indonesia which had declared its independence rive years earlier. Then, in spire of its historically outstanding position, Riau remained relatively obscure, peripheral to the independent state as a rather neglected province in the context of the national economy, and with a subordinate political and administrative position. These conditions applied even more to the quite remote island territory of the province (especially after the province's capital had been moved from the island of Bintan to Riau mainland), and changed only about one decade ago, when this area became part of a so-called economic `Growth Triangle'. The island territory of the Province of Riau has been divided into two major administrative units, the district Kabupaten Kepulauan Riau and the municipality Kotamadya Batam with an autonomous status as an area of industrial development. …