Rickshaw Pullers, Prostitutes and “Pirates”: Researching and Writing about Southeast Asia and the People without History

Rickshaw Pullers, Prostitutes and “Pirates”: Researching and Writing about Southeast Asia and the People without History

The origin of my work began in personal experience rather than with books and formal training. In a very real sense, my interest in studying about Southeast Asian society and history both from interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives, started at the edge. The reason is twofold. First, my introduction to Southeast Asia was based on witnessing the traumatic experience of adjustment of a maritime-nomadic people to a sedentary way of life—a pariah people who, socially and politically, were at the edge, on the margin of society and history. Second, to acquire the socio-historical methodology necessary to investigate problems of cultural-ecological trans- formation, such as their continuing adjustment to a sedentary way of life, I subsequently chose to study for my doctorate in Southeast Asian modern history at the Australian National University in 1971, rather than Cornell University, at that time arguably the undisputed intellectual centre of the world for the study of Southeast Asia. The choice to opt for Australia, then considered in certain respects to be at the edge of Southeast Asian studies, was deliberate. It allowed me the ultimate practical experience of “passing over”into another culture situated on the rim of Southeast Asia and the chance of studying and working in a different system of education, which at the postgraduate level primarily emphasised research and participation in a variety of intra-university inter-disciplinary seminars. More importantly, the journey was to provide the opportunity, albeit in a modest way, to help re- define where the centre and the edge were located for the formal study of Southeast Asia over the next quarter of a century. I lived for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Semporna, on the east coast of Borneo (1967-69). The period from January to November 1969, was spent in Kampong Bangau-Bangau, a Samal Bajau Laut village consisting of a flotilla of boat dwellers and a semi-sedentary population of Bajau Laut in varying stages of adaptation to a house dwelling way of life, was particularly memorable. It was the rapid abandonment of sea nomadism—a life-style which has cha- racterised the Samal Bajau Laut as a people and from which they drew their sense of identity—which first motivated my interest in Southeast Asian history. My experience of attempting to write my Master’s thesis on the Sa- mal Bajau Laut under North Borneo Chartered Company rule, a history in- volving a non-western people based primarily on written (British) records, pointed out the extreme difficulty of presenting a balanced interpretation, using only traditional historiographical methods. It impressed upon me the vital importance of oral traditions and the ethnohistorical perspective in any future effort to investigate changes in values, social organisation and poli- tical patterns of the maritime people of Southeast Asia, stemming from the transition(s) initiated by the world capitalist economy, colonialism, and mo- dernity. There remained the need then to attempt to integrate my small-scale investigation of the problems of cultural ecological adaptation of the Samal Bajau Laut with the study of world historical events and experiences, and to show how they linked together. I felt the necessity too, to expand the tem- poral reach of analysis to better understand the response of the Sulu world and the rest of Eastern Indonesia to the ascendance of global capital and the colonial state.