Liquid territory: Subordination, memory and manuscripts among Sama people of Sulawesi's southern littoral.
Gaynor, Jennifer L.
2005
Abstract
<italic>Liquid Territory</italic> examines Indonesian Sama people's engagements with maritime space and their representations of maritime spatial practices toward two ends. First, to illustrate alternative ways to approach the study of insular Southeast Asia from maritime perspectives, and second, to show how maritime practices and their representation reveal aspects of past subordination and how Sama people have dealt with it. Research for the dissertation used indigenous manuscripts, colonial records, post-independence archives, and ethnographic fieldwork in order to examine Sama spatial engagements with the maritime world and their entanglements with others, as well as to investigate how outsiders have characterized Sama people, their dispersion and their mobility. Since notions of maritime space have played an important role in ideas---both scholarly and political---about Southeast Asian regional space, I first examine prominent examples of such scholarly discourse and outline how maritime ideologies have appeared in the formulation of regional political imaginaries. Then, in the rest of the dissertation, I examine three Sama-focused areas of inquiry---livelihood pursuits, stories of the distant past, and recollections of conflict in the 1950's. These three areas offer examples both of practice-oriented perspectives on maritime space, and of the character and structure of unequal social relations which Sama people have had with others. Through this approach, I hope to avoid some of the shortcomings entailed by a focus on locality, which, for the purposes of this study, is wanting in the capacity to analyze mobility, the importance of relative distance, the variety of networks and the variability of social contexts, so crucial to an investigation focused on Sama people, maritime space, and the legacies of past subordination. In an attempt to understand the shapes of Sama subordination in the past and its effect on subsequent practices, I thus analyze the traces of a history of inequality and survival at the edges of governance. This phrase is one I use to refer not simply to a geographic or administrative structure, but to describe a social location from which Sama people have often dealt with subordinating structures, processes and events. As a theoretical notion it is intended to foster attention to practices of dealing with subordination that may not, or may not only, fall under the categories of resistance or accommodation. Sama people in Sulawesi's southern littoral not only developed methods, for instance, of avoiding violence, but also had abstracted forms of knowledge about these procedures, a savvy particular to their location, which at times they sought to maintain, not just geographically in relation to liquid territory, but also socially and politically, on the edges of governance.Subjects
Indonesia Liquid Littoral Manuscripts Memory People Sama Southern Subordination Sulawesi Territory
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