Sama-speaking maritime peoples are one of the most widely spread cultural groups within the Southeast Asian island world. They can be found in the Philippine Sulu Archipelago, in south-western Mindanao, in Sabah, Borneo, east Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and across many of the east Indonesian islands. They characteristically live in shoreline and island settlements and find their identities within small local groups rather than by forming a political unity; they are commonly distinguished by the name of the distinct island or place that the members of these groups identify with.

One specific, so-called sea-nomadic Sama group, however, refers to itself as the “Sea Sama” (Sama Dilaut; colloquially they are also referred to as Bajau) rather than identifying with specific localities, and lives mainly on stilt villages along the shoreline and in houseboats. Historically, their relationship with the economically more powerful land-based communities has been strenuous. The Sama Dilaut face open discrimination from their sedentary neighbors, usually related to their non-sedentary or semi-sedentary organization, their religious and cosmological ideas, and their putatively “unislamic” practice of the Muslim faith, which co-exists with ancestor and spirit worship. For a variety of reasons, a great number of Sama Dilaut has had to relocate to urban environments in recent decades. Among other factors, this “dislocation” of the Sama Dilaut—as it is often referred to to clarify the impact of the semi-forced migration on the communities—has also influenced the group’s musical practices.

In this talk, Abels discusses selected genres of mainly vocal music from the Sama Dilaut communities around the Philippine island of Tawi-Tawi in the Sulu Archipelago and Eastern Sabah/Borneo, Malaysia. Abels will identify certain musical transformations that have taken place since the mid-1960s, and reflect on their cultural implications. Abels will then turn to models of spatial theory (Lefebvre, Foucault) and transnational flows (Appadurai) to help deepen our understanding of the transformations that have taken place in Sama Dilaut music. By placing Sama Dilaut’s recent musical history against the backdrop of these theories, two questions are answered: What is the role of music, for the Sama Dilaut, in the negotiation of Self and Other, historically and contemporarily? And, how far are the dynamics of the discourses that revolve around the theme of identity accountable for musical change? The answers to these questions will lead to critical reflections upon the terms “global”, “local”, and “glocal” and their usage in cultural musicology.

Birgit Abels is currently is a research fellow in Cultural Musicology of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the University of Amsterdam and the International Institute for Asian Studies in Amsterdam. She earned her doctoral degree at Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). Before that, she studied Music and Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental Studies (SOAS), University of London, and obtained her MA in Musicology and Oriental Studies from Ruhr University. While most of her work centers on issues of identity construction through music and issues of globalization, the geographic focus of her research is the Pacific Ocean (particularly Micronesia) and the Southeast Asian island world. She has conducted on-site research in India, Palau, Sabah/Borneo (Malaysia) and the Sulu Archipelago (Philippines).