Paper short abstract:

This paper examines shifting state perspectives upon the Bajau Laut as a marginal population in a transnational maritime space subjected to contemporary nationalism, border securitisation, conservation initiatives and other processes historically reproducing and exacerbating their marginality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores impacts of national and regional policies upon the Bajau Laut, a marginal group occupying the maritime border region shared by Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. It considers how their position at the marine interstices of these nation-states has led to shifting state perspectives upon where they are supposed to belong, sometimes resulting in their statelessness. How the Bajau Laut have come to be situated as marginal and irregular is examined historically with regard to such processes as nomadic adaptations to the political and economic demands of precolonial states, ethnogenesis, colonial sedentarisation, accommodation to postcolonial state visions for economic development and commercial interaction in regional and global commodity chains. Notions of indigeneity, cultural citizenship (Rosaldo 2003) and paranoid nationalism (Hage 2003) are used to conceptualise how the marginal status of the Bajau Laut is reproduced and exacerbated across these nation-states, as contemporary nationalism, border securitisation and transnational conservation initiatives have rendered the Bajau Laut both prominent as a target of governmental action and invisible in terms of provision of social services and implementation of conservation initiatives. Some comparisons are drawn with the positions of other mobile marine populations in the Southeast Asian region, including the Moken and Orang Laut.

References:

Hage, G. (2003). Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale: Pluto Press Australia.

Rosaldo, R. (2003). Introduction: The Borders of Belonging. In R. Rosaldo (ed.), Cultural Citizenship in Island Southeast Asia: Nation and Belonging in the Hinterlands. Berkeley: University of California Press.