Sea Nomads: From Past to Present Book Review (original) (raw)

Sea nomads of Southeast Asia: from the past to the present

2021

Sea nomads have been part of the economic and political landscape of Southeast Asia for millennia. They have played many roles over the longue-durée: in certain periods proving central to the ability of land-based polities to generate wealth, by providing valuable maritime commodities, facilitating trade, forming a naval force to secure and protect vital sea lanes and providing crucial connectivity. They have existed in complex, codified relations with different sedentary populations, as pirates, guardians of the sea-lanes, merchants and explorers. Paradoxically, as modern states emerged, the sea nomads became progressively marginalized and impoverished. For many years, the sea nomads were assumed to be without history, and even without archaeology. This has proven far from the case, and recent archaeological findings allow us to more closely describe sea nomadism from the Pleistocene through the early Holocene up to the present. Integrating these findings with the latest in historical research, linguistics, ethnography and historical genetics allows us to better understand sea-nomad ways of life over a scale of millennia and to appreciate the diversity and flexibility of this sea-nomad world. This in turn enriches our understanding of nomadism and mobility as a way of life, and the sea not only as a landscape of resources, but as a home and spiritual landscape as well. "An ambitious and provocative book.… It forces scholars to reexamine the role of sea nomads, particularly in the history of Southeast Asia."-Leonard Y. Andaya, University of Hawai'i at Manoa Bérénice Bellina is a research archaeologist focusing on South and Southeast Asia who uses a technological approach to reconstruct cultural processes. She is the Director of the French Archaeological Mission in Peninsular Thailand and Myanmar since 2005.

The linguistic background to SE Asian sea nomadism

Chapter in: Sea nomads of SE Asia past and present. Bérénice Bellina, Roger M. Blench & Jean-Christophe Galipaud eds. Singapore: NUS Press.

Sea nomadism is a unique and characteristic subsistence strategy in island SE Asia reflecting a confluence of sophisticated maritime technology and resources scattered across thousands of islands. The languages of the sea nomads in Island SE Asia fall into three major groups, Samalic or Sama-Bajaw, the Orang Laut of Eastern Sumatra and the Riau islands, and the Moken/Moklen complex of the Andaman Sea, west of Thailand and Myanmar. All of these are Austronesian, the great phylum of languages which originated in Taiwan more than five thousand years ago. Less well understood are the river nomads of Borneo and the ‘sea peoples’ of the China coast. There is reason to believe the Borneo peoples spring from the same upsurge of mercantile innovation as their seagoing cousins. However, the Chinese groups seem to have limited interaction with the ISEA networks and presumably have a quite different origin. Today they speak no unusual languages, but the antiquity of cross-straits interaction argues that their roots may well lie far in the past. The overall conclusion is that while archaeology suggests some type of maritime nomadic lifestyle may well reach back to deep antiquity in ISEA, language data shows that its modern forms are unlikely to be more than 2000 years old (in the case of Moken/Moklen) and more recent still for the other groups. This in turn suggests a replacement model; old networks were erased by the growth of new and similarly earlier sea nomads assimilated by more competitive newcomers.

Nomads: Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies John Wiley

Nomads, vagabonds, Gypsies, Travellers and other ambulatory groups prefer to remain stateless, lead nonconforming and deterritorialized lives, and avoid the comforts and claptrap of modernity and civilization. From being blamed for diseases and natural disasters to being labelled as hereditary criminals and hedonists in the past, nomads face human rights abuses and discrimination by the mainstream society which haunts their present. But they continue to persist, despite dehumanizing experiences and various governmental attempts and oppressive tactics at forced sedentarization. As the oldest form of lifestyle and as " first peoples, " nomads and nomadism have had a profound effect on societies and have emerged as a distinct area of expertise and lifestyle choice, leading to newer forms of nomadism or living " off the grid. " This entry is a multilayered engagement with the mobile history of the nomads, their travels and travails, " back to basics " philosophy, and their tryst with modernity and globalization. Nomads (nō′măd) and Gypsies(´dʒɪpsi) or Romas as groups of ambulatory communities are taken as synonymous terms having close connotations and similar interpretations and are therefore used interchangeably. However, on a closer reading, one finds differences between the given historical categories not only between but also within them. In the past, efforts were made to generalize and find a common denominator among various nomadic communities, tribal groups, and the Gypsies, but these have had to be disbanded in favor of micro studies and treating each culture as a unit. The term " nomad " is an umbrella term for different typologies of ambulant communities like the Gypsies,