Orang laut

This withdrawn book chapter will eventually be expanded into a book with co-authors Vivienne Wee, Normala Manap & Ivan Kwek,  "Lost Singapore: The Pulau Seking Story" [provisional title]. Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society. See the posting "Serendipity Island" on this webpage for some of the photographs that will go into the book.

Singapore can never divorce itself from the sea. National narratives constantly emphasise our state as an island nation and a port city. However, present narratives seem to only see it as a conduit for economic prosperity and little else. This thesis aims to challenge this perception by showing how the sea can constitute personhood, and in turn present alternative conceptions of being an islander, and by extension, being
Singaporean. The themes of place-making, embodied knowledge and national identity are explored through a synthesis of ethnographic fieldwork and secondary research materials. The larger aim of this thesis is to consider different understandings of ecological relations between people and the environment, making the argument for including the non-human in the anthropological project.

ABSTRAK Artikel ini mendiskusikan hubungan Orang Laut di Kepulauan Riau dengan pembangunan infrastruktur dalam program pemukiman suku-suku terasing oleh pemerintah Orde Baru. Melalui perspektif governmentality, kita dapat melakukan refleksi historis dan etnografis. Pada satu pihak, ketersediaan permukiman adalah ihwal bagaimana pemerintah mewujudkan angan-angan kemajuan suatu bangsa di segala lini kehidupan warganya. Pada pihak lain, hal ini memantik sederet persoalan sosial dan kultural dalam kehidupan Orang Laut sebagai komunitas pengembara laut. Dengan adanya program pemukiman, Orang Laut justru terjerumus ke dalam kondisi kemiskinan, ketergantungan, kerentanan, dan ketersingkiran. Sejumlah konsekuensi negatif inilah yang disebut sebagai kekerasan infrastruktur (infrastructural violence). Akar dari sejumlah konsekuensi negatif tersebut terletak pada kekeliruan pemahaman pemerintah mengenai kebudayaan masyarakat berbasis laut yang amat bias dengan perspektif masyarakat berbasis darat. Kebijakan yang dilahirkan untuk menangani masalah-masalah masyarakat kelautan pun pada akhirnya meleset.


ABSTRACT This article discusses the relationship of the nomadic sea tribe, the Orang Laut, in the province of Riau Islands, with an infrastructure development project in a state-organized resettlement area from the New Order era. Using Foucault's concept of governmentality we can reflect on multiple historical and ethnographic points of view. On the one hand, the settlement infrastructure provided by the government aims at materializing the national modernization dreams, of improving the welfare and social-cultural life of citizens. On the other hand, doing this modernization project also caused some socio-cultural problems within the Orang Laut livelihood. Under this Resettlement Program the Orang Laut are subjected to new negative repercussions, such as poverty, dependency, vulnerability, and alienating conditions. This is a form of infrastructural violence. The basic argument of the negative repercussions arisen is the fallacy of the government to understand about maritime people's social system and cultural system, because what they did is based on the 'land-people perspectives' bias. Consequently, they made big mistakes designing policy to improve the quality of living and to resolve problems faced by maritime-base people.

The essay reflects on the work of Adrian Lapian (1929-2011), an Indonesian scholar of archipelagic/maritime Southeast Asia and its “sea people—sea pirates—sea kings.” The essay suggests that Lapian’s writing mirrors navigation at sea, and the constant re-orientation and ever changing, multiple points of view that are part of it. This is contrasted to Foucault’s “panopticism” and academic desire for discipline. Taking cue from Lapian’s writing and from the present author’s experience of seafaring, the essay envisions Southeast Asian studies as a fluid, precarious, disorienting, even nauseating multiplicity of experiences, dialogues, and moving, unstable, and uncertain points of view; a style of learning that is less (neo)colonial, more humble, and closer to experiences in the region, than super-scholarship that imposes universalizing, panoptic standards, theories and methods (typically self-styled as “new”) that reduce the particular into a specimen of the general, a cell in the Panopticon. The essay concludes with reflections on certain learning initiatives/traditions at the National University of Singapore, including seafaring voyages—experiences, encounters and conversations that make students and scholars alike to move and see differently, to be touched, blown away, rocked, swayed, disoriented, swallowed, transformed, and feel anew their places, roots, bonds, distances, fears, blindness, powerlessness.

The Orang Laut has been gravely misunderstood. Most historical records of the Orang Laut are colonial accounts and they have only been described as pirates, barbarians and uneducated, which is how we view them today. But unknown to the colonials, the Orang Laut had a rich and glorious past. They were more than just pirates-they were hospitable as a community and great warriors. Urak Lawoik, a dialect form of the word Orang Laut are very well known in Southeast Asia because they are associated with trade and piracy. [1] Orang Laut is "people of the sea" in Malay language. It collectively refers to several nomadic community of sea gypsies occupying different maritime spaces around the selat or straits in Malaysia and Singapore waters. The Orang Laut live aboard very small vessels. They are born and live on their boats. The vessels are their home. [2] They have always been perceived as nomadic. However, they have a specific area of preference. [3] They did not wander aimlessly but dwell within their own territorial land or sea. [4] Their "Malayic" traditional pattern is also found in lowland Sumatra and the neighbouring islands characteristically referred to as aboriginal Malay, Jakun, Orang Hulu amongst other. [5] English writers classified these boat nomads as "sea gypsies". [6] However, the word gypsies were wrongfully understood and some writers even classified the Bugis and Chinese emigration to Asia as being a movement of sea gypsies [7] which is totally untrue.

This article discusses the cultural history sketch of Orang Suku Laut (the Sea Tribe) and its implications for social relations patterns with the Malays in Riau Islands, Indonesia. Problems arise now in nomadic ethnic tribe when they interacting with the Malays. Many Malays people perceive Orang Suku Laut as a backward or primitive people. This point of view emerged from a long history of Orang Suku Laut in Riau Islands, and at present, the discourse is supported by the government which resettled them from the sea to the land as part of the modernization of disadvantaged areas in the New Order era. This government label to them was later influenced the Malays perception. Moreover, negative assumption also appears along with the cultural identity differences between both of the tribes, of which the Malays condense with Islamic tradition, while Orang Suku Laut doesn’t. At this situation, thus the identity of Orang Suku Laut is staked within socio-cultural dispute or contestation (the attraction process) among themselves in practicing their everyday lives.

Pulau Seking, one of Singapore's Southern Islands, disappeared several years ago, when it was flattened and joined to the neighbouring Pulau Semakau by a landfill made largely of refuse from the main island of Singapore. The photographs in this album were taken when the tiny island's three villages were still inhabited by descendants of its original Orang Selat population.
This document has been put together from the Island Nation Project's website at http://islandnation.sg/story/serendipity-island. My original black-and-white medium-format photographs were scanned by Zakariah Zainal. The website was produced by Dean Loh. The primary ethnographer was Vivienne Wee. See also the article by Vivienne Wee & Geoffrey Benjamin, "Pulau Seking", also posted on this website.