Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia: From the Past to the Present ed. by Bérénice Bellina, Roger Blench, and Jean-Christophe Galipaud

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia: From the Past to the Present ed. by Bérénice Bellina, Roger Blench, and Jean-Christophe Galipaud Carol Warren Bérénice Bellina, Roger Blench, and Jean-Christophe Galipaud, editors. Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia: From the Past to the Present. Singapore: National University of Singapore Pres, 2021. 383. The Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia: From the Past to the Present offers impressive studies from an array of disciplines—archaeology, anthropology, history, linguistics, genomics—to piece together the longue-durée of "sea nomad" cultures in the Southeast Asian region. There is a striking paradox that peoples so central to the deep history of globalization should find their cultures marginalized in the modern era. The collection of essays grapples with the relative "invisibility" of sea nomad cultures despite rich, although scattered, historical records of sightings and engagements from the 16th century among Western explorers and earlier still in Arabic and Chinese sources. Challenging also for interpretation are substantial differences in the socioeconomic status and political relationships reported in historical and contemporary ethnographic accounts. The weight of evidence amassed in this volume goes some way toward revising the image of sea nomad populations as subordinated minorities within nation-states today. The sea nomads of Southeast Asia are shown in these studies to have contributed to linking together a Maritime Silk Road between South and East Asia in the ancient world and are credited with playing an important role in the earliest phases of the globalization of commerce. At the same time, evidence on the subsistence, trading, craft producing, and political arts of the sea peoples of the region in the historical and archaeological record leaves unresolved the questions of direct relationship with currently identified groups. Case studies in the book cover multiple disciplines focused primarily on the main contemporary "sea nomad" populations—the Moken and Orang Laut off the Malay-Thai-Myanmar coasts and the Sama Bajau who inhabit the waters of eastern Indonesia, Malaysian Borneo, and southern Philippines. Yet much of the piecing together of material deposits from prehistory, recorded encounters, and contemporary ethnographies leave the tacit connections between past and present groups practicing a more or less mobile, boat-dwelling way of life an open question: Is this a cultural adaptation that saw groups and individuals move in and out of lives on the sea? Or has it been an enduring lifeway for distinctive groups whose cultural core revolved around maritime resources and relations that represent a largely intangible cultural heritage? The chapter structure follows a roughly chronological trajectory, including early evidence of maritime movements as sea levels rose during the Pleistocene-Holocene transitional period that expanded the potential for this remarkable adaptation to the coastal cultural-ecological niche. The introductory chapter 1 by editors Bérénice Bellina, Roger Blench, and Jean-Christophe Galipaud sets out the themes around which core archaeological, historical, linguistic, genetic, and ethnographic questions are pursued in the following chapters: How should we understand the "sea nomads" and their relation to the wider traditions of maritime migration and exchange of goods, material, and intangible culture across the region? What are the relationships between mobile, [End Page 225] boat-dwelling ethnic groups of island Southeast Asia and land-based groups of the estuaries and hinterlands? What roles have they played in the evolution of state societies and of the trading polities that mediated state-building among the emerging kingdoms that rose and fell across the region? How did they fit into the network of trading relations between state societies and the "stateless" cultures of the less controllable mountains and seas, who were more or less successful in practicing the arts of "not being governed."1 Chapters 2, 3, and 4, tease out the archaeological evidence on sea peoples in painstaking detail. They will be challenging for those outside the field, however. The technical vocabulary is unfortunately taken for granted and would have proved more accessible to scholars of other disciplines if a detailed glossary had been provided. Nonetheless the inferences drawn from assemblages of implements, pottery, and ornaments offer tantalizing interpretations and points of debate in these efforts to reconstruct a partially "invisible" world of seaborne fishers...