Here I begin with the last of these groupings, the Sama-Bajau, with whom I conducted fieldwork in coastal Borneo.[4] The earliest mention of maritime peoples identifiable as Sama goes back to the 16th century. Today the Sama characteristically live in dispersed shoreline and island settlements, often surrounded and interpenetrated by those of more numerous land-based peoples. Everywhere the Sama lack political unity. In contrast to their politically-dominant neighbours, they identify themselves with a multitude of small, highly fragmented local groups, none of them sufficiently integrated or large enough to exist in its own right as an independent political entity. Most of these groups are distinguished toponymically by the name of an individual island or island cluster identified by its members as their homeland or principal area of settlement (Sather 1993b). The boat nomads are the chief exception. Without an exclusive land affiliation, nomadic groups characteristically identify themselves as the Sama Dilaut, the “Sea” or “Oceanic Sama” (Sather 1984:12-13, 1993a).
As a whole, the Sama are strongly associated with the littoral. In the Sulu Archipelago of the Philippines, where perhaps a half of the total Sama-speaking population lives, they predominate chiefly in the smaller coralline islands, particularly those of the northern, southern and western margins of the archipelago (Sather 1993b). On the larger, more heavily populated and mainly central islands, the Sama are greatly outnumbered by the land-based and predominantly agrarian Tausug. Historically, within the Sulu Sultanate the Sama formed a subordinate population. In the silasila, the Tausug genealogical histories of Sulu, the Sama are represented as the recently-arrived “guests” of ranking lines of local Tausug leaders (Saleeby 1908:156-157), a representation that reverses, as we shall see, their actual historical relationship. Traditionally, power in Sulu was based on factional politics, and local leaders, both Tausug and Sama, were joined in a loose, pyramidical network of personal allegiances that ran from village headmen and local title-bearing chiefs to the sultan at the apex of the political order (Kiefer 1972; Sather 1984:3-8).
Tributary trade was a central feature of the Sulu state. Power derived from control over trading commodities and the people who procured them. Thus, the sultan’s authority was sustained by a procurement economy, articulated through personal patronage and alliance, in which labour and locally-produced commodities of trade were supplied by a variety of differentially adapted ethnic and sub-ethnic communities, including local bands of boat nomads. Within the archipelago, trade was the single unifying principle, welding together people in what was otherwise a zone of enormous cultural and linguistic diversity (Sather 1985:168-175; Warren 1979).
Through this system of procurement, shore-based Sama provided their local patrons with services as skilled seamen, boat-builders, smiths, artisans, mat-makers, potters, fishermen, and inter-island carriers and traders, while the most prestigious and independent of these groups, such as the Balangingi Sama, supplied maritime raiders and procured slaves for the Tausug markets of Jolo (Sather 1984, 1985, 1993b; Warren 1978, 1981).[5] The boat nomads, who lived in scattered bands throughout the whole of Sulu, formed, together with swidden cultivators inhabiting the coastal fringes of Mindanao and eastern Borneo, the least prestigious and lowest ranking of these groups. Historically the boat nomads acted chiefly as divers and specialized fishermen, procuring for their land-based patrons a variety of important commodities of trade, including, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tortoise-shell, tripang, pearls, dried fish and pearl-shell (Sather 1984, 1993a; Warren 1981:60-61). Although the boat nomads formed only a small minority of the islands’ population, these commodities represented in the past a major source of Sulu’s export wealth.
Lacking a territorial identity, the sea nomads, in contrast to other Sama, were without formal jural status in the Sulu Sultanate (Sather 1984:15). Among them, characteristically, each boat housed a single family. Local bands were comprised of families that regularly anchored together at the same moorage site (sambuangan), or at the same seasonal sites, mooring their boats in smaller family alliance groups (Sather 1985:190-194). While at anchor, family members repaired and careened their boats, traded and engaged with others in an intense round of social transactions (Sather 1976, 1984:12, 1985:171). Each local anchorage group was under the protection of a recognized leader ashore whose land-based followers enjoyed a privileged trading relationship with its members. In the past, at every level of the alliance hierarchy, individual leaders, from village headmen to the sultan, maintained armed retinues (Kiefer 1972). In a setting of endemic factional violence, rivalry and armed feuding, nomadic bands depended for their physical security on their patron’s protection (Sather 1984: 14-15). Although patrons described “their” boat-nomadic clients as “property” (Sather 1984:14), these local groups were able to move relatively easily from the territorial sphere of one leader to another, and so had to be treated with some care for fear of losing their trade to rivals (Sather 1971, 1984:13-15).
Kemp Pallesen (1985) has proposed a model for the historical dispersion of the Sama-Bajau, based on a linguistic reconstruction that, extending over a millennium, highlights the role of trade and political relations in the development of maritime adaptations, including boat nomadism.
Sama-Bajau language relations are reconstructible only to the first millennium AD. Beyond that, wider affiliations are problematic (Pallesen 1985: 117).[6] By AD 800 speakers of Proto-Sama-Bajau were established in the area surrounding Basilan Straits, in the northern islands of the Sulu Archipelago and along the adjacent Mindanao coastline (Pallesen 1985:117). Language reconstruction indicates that these people were predominantly sea-oriented, but not exclusively so. Thus, evidence also points to a long familiarity with farming, iron-forging, pottery-making and weaving. Although their knowledge of the sea was more intimate than of the land, the early Sama were, by no means, a population made up entirely of boat nomads and fishermen. Instead, a marine orientation coexisted with “a significant and coherent tradition of land-oriented activity” (1985:255), indicating the presence,
… already at this predispersion time [of] a divergence of orientation between the land and the coastal strands … (Pallesen 1985:117).
Reflecting this divergence, different Sama groups, from the beginning, appear to have pursued, much as they do today, various permutations of this “dual orientation”, some focusing on the land, others on the strand or sea, with communities of sea nomads forming only one of a multitude of economically diverse groups (Pallesen 1985:118).
The ethnography of the Sama-Bajau is fully consistent with this reconstruction. Not only do boat-nomadic groups comprise only a small minority of all Sama-speakers,[7] but everywhere they exist within a larger cultural and linguistic matrix that includes closely related shore- and land-based communities.
When I began fieldwork in southeastern Sabah in 1964, some families making up the local community were still boat-dwelling, while others had begun a short time earlier to erect a pile-house village over the community’s principal moorage site (Sather 1984:20; 1985:173-176). The community itself, however, remained largely nomadic. Thus its families continued to move between the site and dispersed over an extended fishing zone surrounding it (Sather 1976; 1985: 187-190). Although some, particularly younger, men were beginning to seek wage-work ashore, the community as a whole remained overwhelmingly maritime and entirely non-agricultural, without crops or landed property. Yet, within the community, there existed a tradition of myths in which the narrative heroes practised swidden rice-cultivation, with the myths themselves giving a technically detailed account of swiddening (cf. Sather 1975b). In addition, mediums (jin) conducted an annual trance-ritual called magpai baha’u in which conical mounds of “new rice” (pai baha’u) were shaped into symbolic “mountains” (bud). Thus, while the Bajau Laut did not themselves farm, rice and its cultivation, nevertheless, formed an integral part of the community’s mythic and ritual vocabulary.
At one level, this example might be taken as a cautionary case, illustrating the danger of reconstructing the economy from the evidence of language alone. Yet at another, and perhaps more significant level, it can be said that the boat nomads, although non-cultivators, participated in a larger cultural and cognitive universe in which rice-cultivation is both present and familiar. The surrounding islands and coastline are relatively populous, and coastal and shoreline Sama villages, many of them agricultural, are seldom out of the sight of Bajau Laut fishing parties. Thus, farming is not unknown, even to the most sea-oriented Sama. Moreover, as I have described elsewhere (1984:10-11), all local Sama communities, whether sea nomads or shore-oriented groups, were historically enmeshed in a regional network of symbiotic exchange. Thus, for example, in addition to farming, some Sama communities in Semporna produced pottery for trade, including earthenware hearths carried by sea nomads aboard their boats; others offered iron-work, tortoise-shell jewellery and skilled carpentry; or supplied caulking resins and kajang-roofing for boats (Sather 1984:11). Locally, each of these groups constituted a named dialect community. Linguistically, each community was, and continues to be, aligned with others in continuous dialect chains. Thus, in any one region, interacting Sama, both at sea and ashore, speak mutually intelligible dialects, at once understandable, yet readily identifiable by community affiliation. Within this enmeshing network, exchange and regular contact, while fostering economic specialization, prevent groups from undergoing total dissimilation, ensuring instead that they all share in a common language and cultural tradition.
Pallesen (1985:118), in his reconstruction, sees the 10th century as the beginning of a major period of Sama dispersion. Thus, a number of sea-oriented groups probed northward, establishing ports of call around the eastern coast of Mindanao and beyond. Others settled the broad zone of mangrove swamps at the head of Sibuguey Bay. At the same time a third group, the Yakan, located on Basilan Island within the original Sama-Bajau homeland, became linguistically and socially distinct, not by sea-going migration, but, on the contrary, as a result of territorial stability, by intensifying its land-orientation, shunning the sea and becoming a settled group of inland swiddeners (Pallesen 1985:118). Today dissimilation is so complete that the Yakan are generally accepted as a separate ethnolinguistic group, distinct from other Sama-speakers (Frake 1980:325-326). Later, in the eleventh century additional sea-oriented groups spread southward, down the Sulu Archipelago. One branch eventually settled the northern and western coasts of Sabah (Sather 1993b). Another established itself along the southeastern coast of Sabah, and from there its forward advance reached the Straits of Makassar, entering eastern Indonesia some centuries before the first European penetration of the region (Fox 1977).
The turn of the millennium thus marked the beginning of a long period of Sama movement. In addition, some 700 years ago, the Sama came into first contact with the Tausug. Pallesen (1985:246-247) argues that these two events were related and that changing economic and political relations were the catalyst of both. Underlying these changes was long-distance trade with China, India and the Middle East. Pallesen (1985:247) suggests that the Sama, in probing northward, established a network of trading colonies along the rivermouths and coastlines of the islands they encountered, including Mindanao. This development, while commercial in motive, did not necessarily entail elaborate enterprise. Instead, Pallesen (1985:248) suggests,
… a major early element of … trade may well have been the protein-starch exchange which underlies much economic activity in Sulu [to the present].
Salt fish is today the major source of protein for inland peoples in the Philippines and northern Borneo and dried fish has been, throughout historical times, a principal item of trade for Sama-speaking peoples and the major export commodity of Sulu.[8] Pallesen argues that this protein-starch exchange was probably a major factor in the early dispersion of the Sama. But once they had established a network of scattered bases, they were then well-positioned to take advantage of further trading developments. Thus Pallesen (1985:249) writes:
The maritime skills of [the Sama] and the wide distribution of their settlements or ports of call would have given them an advantage in exploiting the growing trade opportunities in the centuries around 1000 AD.
By the eleventh century, Jolo Island, located at the centre of the Sulu Archipelago, emerged as the hub of this network and the primary entrepôt for the whole of the archipelago.
Pallesen argues that this spread of Sama colonies brought Sama-speaking traders into contact with the ancestors of the Tausug. Linguistically, Tausug is a Southern Central Philippine language. Its nearest sister language is Butuanon, spoken today in a limited area at the mouth of the Agusan River in eastern Mindanao (Pallesen 1985:125ff). Pallesen considers it probable that Sama traders established an early colony here, in order to command the local river trade, and that, through intermarriage, some returned to central Sulu, taking with them Tausug women and children. According to Pallesen (1985:265), the present Tausug population thus had its genesis in a bilingual trading community established chiefly at Jolo by Sama traders and their Tausug-speaking wives and children.
By the time this bilingual community took form, Jolo was already a major commercial centre with links to China, the central and northern Philippines, Borneo, and to other parts of the eastern and western Malay world. Taking advantage of its strategic location, this Jolo-based trading élite gained power and numerical strength, using its power not only to maintain Tausug as a distinct language, but to absorb the more settled land-based Sama then present in the larger central islands of Sulu, assimilating them linguistically and culturally. This process of assimilation continues to the present. Economic differences were thus accentuated and the remaining Sama came to be increasingly associated with the peripheral islands of the archipelago and with the more maritime sectors of Sulu’s economy.
With the coming of Islam, and the emergence of the Sulu sultanate in the 14th century, the Tausug assumed formal dominance over the other peoples of the Sulu Archipelago, most of them Sama-speakers. In the process the Tausug evolved a distinctive ethnic identity by way of sealing their political and economic domination, and with the rise of the Sulu Sultanate, differences of rank, religion and power came to assume ethnic characteristics (Frake 1980; Sather 1984).
The sultanate, with its defining features of political and religious hierarchy, constituted an ethnically segmented state, with political allegiance, rank and religion all united in a single, all-embracing system of ethnic stratification (Sather 1984:3-8). Thus the Tausug, concentrated in the larger central islands of the Sulu Archipelago, where the power of the state was strongest, formed its principal agrarian population, its chief traders, and through their monopoly of aristocratic titles, the holders of its most powerful political and religious offices, including that of Sultan. By contrast, the Sama, and above all the nomadic Bajau Laut, were identified with the margins of the state, its territorial peripheries, the sea and shoreline, political clientage, lesser degrees of religious piety, and in the case of the boat nomads exclusion from the Faith altogether, as non-Muslims (Sather 1984:13-15).
Outside of the Sulu Archipelago, the southward spread of Sama-speakers throughout eastern Indonesia appears to have similarly preceded the rise of commerical polities. Again, the emergence of regional trading states marked the subordination of Sama mariners and fishermen, and the related development of maritime trading networks, in particular the tripang collecting industries organized under Makassar and Bugis patronage, followed closely patterns of Sama dispersion and voyaging (Fox 1977; Pelras 1972; Reid 1983:124-129).
For the Bajau Laut, sea nomadism existed, then, in a context of states and trade, including both symbiotic trade and politically-structured tributary trade directed toward international markets (Sather 1985:168-175). The boat nomads, as we know them from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, practised a complex, highly specialized adaptation and in no sense can they be described as “primitive” foragers. In this regard, Bellwood (1985:136) is almost certainly right to regard their way of life as a comparatively recent development.
On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that, among the Sama as a whole, communities of boat nomads appear to have emerged out of a larger, more highly diverse island and coastal population. It seems probable that boat nomads everywhere in Southeast Asia evolved from a similar matrix, appearing originally as generalized coastal foragers, but becoming increasingly specialized and trade-dependent with the rise of maritime states, a development to which their presence itself almost certainly contributed.
Through trade and political clientage, the Bajau Laut appear to have become not only trade-dependent, but also increasingly specialized in an ecological sense. Two major sources accounting for the richness of marine life in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago are, as we noted earlier, its coral reefs and mangrove forests, both of which are unique to the tropics and particularly well-developed in Island Southeast Asia. Other littoral environments such as sandy or rocky shores are essentially the same as in other parts of the world. Each of these environments has a distinctive biota. However, as Dunn and Dunn (1984:254) observe:
two or more such biotypes may occur together or within a small area. For example, a coral reef may fringe any type of shore, and rocks may occur in the midst of sand beaches. Such areas have a greater variety of species than has each biotype alone, and for that reason it is likely that mixed environments would be preferred as subsistence zones by peoples who exploit marine resources.
Indeed, most sea nomadic communities exploit an extended range of habitats, typically incorporating a variety of biotypes (cf. Sather 1985:183-190). However, most contemporary communities tend to concentrate on one or two primary ecosystems. Thus, in southeastern Sabah, the Bajau Laut focus most of their fishing activity on coral reefs, submerged coral terraces, associated sandy beaches and tidal shallows. They make little use of mangrove shores, except to take firewood, and avoid altogether muddy or turbid waters. Cultivated foodstuffs are obtained entirely by trade. In contrast, some Orang Laut communities, such as the Duano of east Sumatra (Sandbukt 1984:10), occupy areas of brackish mudflats and mangrove swamps and have developed a highly specialized foraging adaptation that utilizes the extremely narrow but rich resource base represented by this particular environment. As with the Bajau Laut, such specialization does not permit economic self-subsistence, and in return for littoral produce the Duano obtain virtually all of their other necessities from trade with riverine Malay horticulturalists, including cultivated foodstuffs and even their dwelling-boats.
Such specialized adaptations appear, however, to have developed from a more generalized pattern of coastal foraging. Evidence of such an early pattern has recently come to light from Bukit Tengkorak in southeastern Sabah (Bellwood 1989; Bellwood and Koon 1989). Here archaeological materials reveal a population living during the first millennium BC in a coastal setting, heavily exploiting the area’s marine resources and engaged in long-distance sea trade, while at the same time exploiting also the nearby streams and coastal forests. Perhaps the most intriguing feature of this site is the presence of portable pottery hearths. These hearths, carried on boats, have historically been the hallmark of boat nomads and related maritime Sama in the region. Thus there may be a suggestive link here to the possible precursors of the later sea nomads in the region.
With the dissolution of the Sulu Sultanate, and the breakdown of procurement trade and its replacement by a monetized market for fish and other maritime products, the specialized adaptation of the Bajau Laut also broke down, leading in this century to an almost complete disappearance of boat nomadism and to the settlement of formerly nomadic communities in permanent strand villages (see Nimmo 1972; Sather 1984, 1993a; C. Warren 1983).