Email: wengki@kitlv.nl

Affiliation: Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asia and Caribbean Studies (KITLV)

Nationality: Indonesia

The 'Agrarian Others': Bajau Sea Nomads and the Political Ecology of Island Culture Transformation in Indonesia

Abstract

In 2021, Scoones (2021) advocates expanding the understanding of agrarian change beyond the dominant focus on peasant experiences by incorporating insights from pastoralist studies. He noted that it presents a productive analytical challenge while opening new political questions in agrarian studies. This intellectual convergence showed that the agrarian studies does not only enrich the analysis of production, accumulation, and political contestation within agrarian regions as Bernstein (1996, 2003) noted, but also reveals the potential and limitations of inter-group alliances for transformative social movements in the context of shared challenges like land encroachment, climate change, and resource degradation (Borras Jr et al., 2022). To see the complexity and to add the grassroots evidence from a fuller dialogue, it is valuable to extract evidence from a landless community in the island environment.

In the present paper, we take up these contemporary agrarian questions by centering an agent of rural change that fits neither the peasant, pastoralist, nor nomadic community label yet demonstrates commonalities with both. By analyzing the political ecology of Bajau sea nomad communities in rural Indonesia, we open a lens upon the dynamics of agrarian change from the perspective of alterity. Constituted as an 'agrarian other', Bajau sea nomadic communities are situated at the land and sea threshold. While they have been increasingly sedentarized under a combination of coercive governmental policies, geopolitical constraints, and environmental changes (Ariando et al., 2023; Nuraini, 2016; Sather, 1997; Stacey, 2007). They also maintain practices of spatial mobility, temporal flexibility, and adaptive knowledge required to exploit the ever-shifting resource frontiers provided by the ocean. At the same time, the increasing fixidity of the population within rural space places them at the core of agrarian change dynamics. They must now also engage with the seasonality of settled agriculture and other livelihood pathways that require new forms of knowledge production and renegotiated relationships with local agrarian populations and governmental agencies.

Under these tense dynamics, Bajau communities have become both increasingly settled yet simultaneously unsettling communities within the agrarian environment. By tracing the political ecology of livelihood change and political agency within Bajau communities, this paper foregrounds classic questions of peasant studies grounded in power, production, and social differentiation; yet it also expands these to incorporate the transformations of knowledge and community identity that are vital to living with uncertainty in a changing agrarian environment. We argue that Bajau knowledge production – like that of peasant and pastoralist communities – is an active yet underappreciated lever of political agency. While Bajau communities are sometimes positioned by governmental agencies as repositories of traditional ecological knowledge that can be drawn upon as a resource for coastal conservation practices, this perspective impoverishes the nature of Bajau knowledge (Ariando & Arunotai, 2022; Cullen et al., 2007). Local knowledge is never simply 'environmental' in terms of knowing an outside nature. Rather, it is the active process of collective learning about the varied socio-political relations that must constantly be navigated and negotiated for production and reproduction to proceed.

However, the framework developed in this research explores different contemporary Bajau as "farmer-fisher", which centrifuged into becoming contemporary rural groups. The Bajau livelihood has been influenced by various forced adaptations and unsettling practices. The existence of Bajau communities in the coastal and small island areas of Indonesia shows how contemporary changes in maritime culture also require access to the land and livelihood (re) making. As we detail, for the Bajau, this process has involved reciprocal knowledge exchange with local agrarian communities while constantly negotiating the political nature of knowledge with governmental and other outside agencies. Ultimately, the struggles of the Bajau for socio-political construction, resource access, and community autonomy highlight how these forms of knowledge politics are inseparable from the traditional foci of peasant and pastoralist studies.

Bio

Wengki Ariando is an Indonesian activist and scholar specializing in participatory action research. His work focuses on coastal and small island development, land-sea interaction, political ecology, and indigenous resource governance, particularly concerning Sea Nomads in Insular Southeast Asia (ISEA). He is a postdoctoral fellow at KITLV, researching the intersections of marine resource governance and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of Sea Nomads. He was a visiting scholar at Global Development Studies at Queen's University Kingston, a postdoctoral researcher at Chulalongkorn University, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Indonesian Research and Innovation Agency. In 2023, he was an Interdisciplinary Conservation Network Fellow at Oxford University. Wengki holds an M.A. (2019) and Ph.D. (2022) in Environment, Development, and Sustainability from Chulalongkorn University. His Ph.D. ethnographic research involved living with the Bajau people in Wakatobi National Park, Indonesia for 14 months and developing a model for integrating TEK into marine resource management. He is interested in criticizing the coastal development discourses in ISEA, which tends to be ethnocentric and sees the sea as a separate part of the land and vice versa. In his current project, he opens a lens upon the dynamics of agrarian change from the perspective of a landless community, where he argues that the 'pattern' suits the debates of agrarian futures.