Musicking Home in the Southeast Asian Island World

† This article is a modified version of a chapter published as Abels (in press).

Abstract

The so-called ‘gong-chime’ belt of Southeast Asia is home to great cultural diversity. Various communities, sometimes occupying borderland areas that stretch over national boundaries, are connected to one another through their practice of different but yet related styles of gong playing. Such groups ‘music’ their home. Importantly, locale is not necessarily a primary reference for all of these groups. The Sama Dilaut, for instance, a maritime people who inhabit a heartland of the gong-chime belt of the Southeast Asian islands, understand their place in the world not by maps and historiographies but by itineraries, relationship networks and chains of events. This paper investigates Sama Dilaut conceptions of space, specifically their concept of home, and that concept's relationship to tagunggu.

Keywords:

• Sama Dilaut
• Home
• Gong
• Mobility
• Alternative Spatialities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

† This article is a modified version of a chapter published as Abels (in press).

[1] See Yi-Fu Tuan's notion of experiential space (Tuan, 1977).

[2] The lepa is the traditional house-boat of the Sama Dilaut.

[3] For an analysis of how structural aspects, as opposed to sonic characteristics more generally, of tagunggu are partially engendered by spatial thinking, please see Abels (2011).

[4] This can be observed for instance during the annual Regatta Lepa (see Abels, 2012b).

[5] ‘What will be, will be./ It did not take long for him/ to go anywhere at will./ In the wink of an eye/ he arrived’. From Silungan Baltapa, a Sama Dilaut epic recitation of the story of the voyage to heaven of the hero Silungan Baltapa. See Nicole Revel et al. (2005).

[6] See Abels (2013).

[7] Sinyalhati Hj. Tiring, Kampung Bangau-Bangau/Semporna, conversation in April, 2009.

[8] There are three corpora of historical recordings: (1) the Harry A. Nimmo collection, recorded by US-American anthropologist Harry A. Nimmo in Sitangkai, Tawi-Tawi/Philippines, from 1965 to 1967. The recordings are accompanied by substantial side-information. Today, this collection is at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC/USA; (2) the Maceda-Martenot collection, recorded by Filipino musicologist José Maceda and French anthropologist Alain Martenot on Tawi-Tawi in 1976. This set of recordings, together with field notes, is at the Center for Ethnomusicology, University of the Philippines at Diliman, Quezon City/Philippines. Selected recordings from this collection have been published on LP (see discography, Martenot, 1980) and (3) recordings prepared by Ivan Polunin in Sabah, Borneo/Malaysia in 1961. Very few of these have been published on LP as well, see discography, Polunin (1978).

[9] Jammaria Ibnusani, Pulau Bohebuoal, Sabah, conversation in May, 2008.

[10] See Nimmo (2012) and Abels (2012a).