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The Sea People
of Sulu
 Leonard Broom, General Editor
L. L. Langness, Editor

Studies in Social and Economic Change

Philip H. Gulliver and David J. Parkin, Editors
The Sea People
of Sulu
A Study of Social Change
in the Philippines

H. ARLO NIMMO

CHANDLER PUBLISHING COMPANY

An lnte\t Publisher
SAN FRANCISCO • SCRANTON • LONDON • TORONTO
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Nimmo, H Arlo.
The sea people of Sulu.

(Studies in social and economic change)

Bibliography: p.
1. Samals (Philippine people) 2. Sulu Archipelago
-Social conditions. I. Title.
DS666.S3N54 301.29'599'9 70-179034
ISBN 0-8102-0453-3

COPYRIGHT © 1972 BY CHANDLER PUBLISHING COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BOOK NUMBER 0-8102-0453-3
LIBRARY OE CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 70-179034
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 To
My Parents,
Howard and Jane Nirnmo

£79792
 CONTENTS

List of Tables and Maps

FOREWORD

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

Part One. THE BOAT-DWELLING BAJAU OF TAWI-TAWI

2. Habitat
3. The Household
4. The Family-Alliance Unit
5. The Localized Kindred
6. The Moorage

Part Two. THE HOUSE-DWELLING BAJAU OF SITANGKAI

7. Habitat
8. The Household
9. The Neighborhood and Work Teams
10. The Localized Kindred
11. The Village

Part Three. Conclusions

Q1
12. Processes of Change

Bibliography 101
103
Index
vii
vm

TABLES

1. Composition of Boat-dwelling Bajau Households 18

2. Residential Patterns at Tungkalang 20
3. Marriage Patterns Among Boat-dwelling Bajau 22
4. Divorce Patterns Among Boat-dwelling Bajau 23
5. Composition of House-dwelling Bajau Households 58
6. Residential Patterns of House-dwelling Bajau 58
7. Marriage Patterns Among House-dwelling Bajau 60
8. Divorce Patterns Among House-dwelling Bajau 62

MAPS

1. The Sulu Archipelago 10

2. The Tawi-Tawi Islands 12
3. The Sibutu Islands 48
 FOREWORD

It is the intention of this series to present monographs each of which deals with
a particular group of people, without seeking to define that phrase too narrowly.
Monographs focus on, for example, an African ethnic group, a South Asian caste
village or group of villages, and the people of a Pacific island. Each monograph
is self-sufficient in its own right and not directly dependent on others in the series,
and each is written by an anthropologist who has recently carried out field
research in the area concerned.
The focus of each study is on economic, political, and cultural changes, their
causes, processes, and consequences during the twentieth century among the
selected group of people, and with particular reference to the preceding two
decades or so. The primary aim is to describe the changes that have occurred and
to give an explanation of the processes involved and their implications. Although
broader generalizations (including comparative references to cases and processes
elsewhere) are not neglected, it is not a major concern of the series to seek to
establish or promote a particular theoretical approach or conclusion. Each author
is asked to go beyond description and to make an analysis involving theoretical
considerations according to his own preferences.
In the preparation of this series we recognized the necessary diversities of
research interests and opportunities, and of theoretical orientation, but neverthe¬
less asked each author, as far as possible, to include the following:
a. in relatively brief outline, the description of a fairly clear and relevant
socioeconomic baseline from which to present the account of change (for exam¬
ple, immediately prior to the establishment of colonial rule, or of the achievement
of independence, or of the introduction of some major, radical innovation of a
technological or social nature);
b. an account of the factors responsible for producing and developing changes
and of the agencies through which those factors operated; the initial reactions of
the people to these factors and agencies, including the perceptions of the people
about them;
c. a description and analysis of the various changes, taking account both of time
sequences and of different aspects or parts of the society and culture; the identifi¬
cation of key roles such as those of innovator, entrepreneur, and reactionary (we
asked for description to be reinforced, if possible, with quantitative data on such
matters as crop production, school attendance, religious converts, and voting in
elections);
IX
X Foreword

d. a consideration of sequences of changes within a single field of activity (such

as agriculture) and the extent to which there were concomitant changes in other
fields of activity (for example, the association of agricultural change with modes
of economic cooperation, family organization, religious beliefs and practices, and
political action);
e. a summing up of the processes of change in the context of anthropological
theory.
We encourage each author to make a serious attempt to cover a wide range of
social and cultural changes among the selected people, but acknowledge his
legitimate preference to emphasize certain processes of change on which he has
most data and theoretical interest.

P. H. Gulliver
D. J. Parkin
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If the names of all persons who in some way assisted in the preparation of this
1 book were mentioned, the list would probably exceed the length of the book.
1 Consequently, only a few of the most indispensable will be mentioned here.
I could never have survived the physical and emotional ordeals of fieldwork
without Father Emile Laquerre and Father Henri LaVallee, the Oblates of Mary
Immaculate priests of Bongao. Twice they nursed me to health through critical
illness, and innumerable times they offered their home and companionship when
they were most needed during the loneliness that is so often anthropological
fieldwork. I can never hope to adequately repay their kindness, and consider
myself fortunate to have known men of their great stature.
The cooperation of the Bajau was, of course, key to whatever success my
research may have. Among the boat-dwellers, Masarani generously shared his
floating home with me as he taught me the ways of his people. Antonnio Alari,
friend and invaluable informant, served the same role among the house-dwelling
Bajau. If nothing else, these two men proved to me that deep friendships can
transcend cultural barriers. The hundreds of other Bajau who assisted me must
remain unnamed; I trust they remember my gratitude.
Many other people in the Philippines should be mentioned: members of the
Philippine Air Force, who befriended me, fed me, and bunked me many times
at their lonely Sanga-Sanga outpost; the Oblate priests throughout southern Sulu
who kindly took me into their conventos when I arrived, often hungry and
sea-soaked; the Medical Mission Sisters in Bongao who provided me with medi¬
cines and taught me new meanings of the word charity; Tarabasa Idji, friend,
assistant, and sometimes interpreter. In Hawaii, Dr. Alice G. Dewey spent much
time with my data and offered me important insights in her very human way; Dr.
Katharine Luomala was most helpful in the laborious business of writing-up. And
in Los Angeles, Marian Post and Jo Ann Johnston spent many hours in typing
the finished manuscript. The successes of the research are theirs: I alone am
accountable for the shortcomings.
And finally, I gratefully acknowledge the foundations that supported my re¬
search: the East West Center (1963-1964); the National Science Foundation
(1965-1966); the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
(1966-1967); the Carnegie Foundation (1967); and the National Defense Gradu¬
ate Fellowship Program (1967-1968).

XI
The Sea People
of Sulu
 1. Introduction

One of the most unusual peoples of the ethnically diverse Philippine nation is
a small group of boat-dwellers who inhabit the shallow seas of the Sulu Ar¬
chipelago. The Bajau, popularly known as “sea gypsies” or “sea nomads,” are one
of several enclaves of boat-dwellers found scattered throughout insular Southeast
Asia. Accounts by early Chinese and European travelers reveal that boat-dwellers
once inhabited the waters of the Mergui Islands, Singapore, Jahore, Bangka, and
Celebes, as well as the Sulu Islands. Today most of these people have abandoned
their boat-dwelling way of life to become amalgamated into land-dwelling popula¬
tions. Pockets of boat-dwellers still remain in the Mergui Islands, Celebes, and
Sulu; but these people, too, are rapidly leaving their sea-borne homes, and, if
present trends continue, the sea nomad culture will eventually disappear from
Southeast Asia.
This_book specifically deals with the changes which have occurred among one
group of sea nomads, the Bajau of southern Sulu, as they have abandoned their
boat-dwelling lives to become house-dwellers. The data were collected during
twenty-four months of field research among the Bajau of the southern Sulu
Islands in the Republic of the Philippines. A year was spent among each of two
groups of Bajau, namely, the boat-dwellers of the Tawi-Tawi Islands and the
house-dwellers of the Sibutu Islands. This study is primarily descriptive of the
structural changes wrought upon Bajau society by the abandonment of the no¬
madic boat-life and the acceptance of a sedentary house-life.
It has been stated frequently that the world produces no new ideas, but rather
rearranges past thoughts into new configurations-T^do not infend to discuss the
philosophical validity of the statement, but simply wish to acknowledge that
many of the ideas which led to the interpretation of social change presented in
this book came from other men. I have found particularly enlightening the views
of some social structuralists; thus, a review of their ideas is a necessary beginning
to this book.
Raymond Firth (1951) was one of the first to take a stand on structural change
and to suggest a reexamination of the models which social anthropologists con¬
struct to describe social structure. With minor alterations, Firth accepts the
classic definition of social structure as a model constructed from the jural rules
of society, which he feels provide the “continuity principle of society.” He in¬
troduces, however, the concept of “social organization,” which is the “systematic

1
2 The Sea People of Sulu

ordering of social relations by acts of choice and decision.” Social structure sets
a “precedent and provide[s] a limitation to the range of alternatives possible—
the arc within which seemingly free choice is exercisable is often very small. But
it is the possibility of alternative that makes for variability. A person chooses,
consciously or unconsciously, which course he will follow. And his decision will
affect the future structural alignment. In the aspect of social structure is to be
found the continuity principle of society; in the aspect of organization is to be
found the variation or change principle—by allowing evaluation of situations and
entry of individual choice” (p. 40). Thus change is possible in any social structure
because of thje alternative behavior always available to members of the society.
Presumably, when enough members of a society begin to choose an alternative
pattern of behavior, the structure of that society will alter accordingly. Conse¬
quently, to deal with structural change, the social anthropologist must deal with
social structure—the jural rules of society—as well as social organization—the
variety of actual behavior displayed by members of society.1
This view of a social system as consisting of both a social structure, or jural
rules, and a social organization, or the manipulation of those jural rules, is
particularly useful in explaining the changes which have occurred among the
Bajau. Although the structure of the sedentary, house-dwelling Bajau society at
Sitangkai appears upon first examination to be a radical departure from the
nomadic, boat-dwelling life these same people lived twenty years ago (as exem¬
plified by the Tawi-Tawi Bajau today), it is my contention that the geneses of
practically all the seemingly unique characteristics of the house-dwelling society
are to be found in the behavioral patterns of the nomadic, boat-dwelling society.
This position offers an explanation for the easy, undisruptive changes which have
occurred among the Sitangkai Bajau with the abandonment of the nomadic
boat-life.
An example may best illustrate its relevance to the Bajau case. Among the
boat-dwelling Bajau, marriage between first cousins is permissible so long as the
cousins are not patrilateral, parallel cousins or have not been close playmates or
reared in the same household. However, among the sedentary Bajau at Sitangkai,
all first-cousin marriage is beginning to meet with general disapproval. At first
blush, the prohibition of first-cousin marriage at Sitangkai seems a radical depar¬
ture from the marriage practices of the boat-dwelling Bajau. However, upon
closer examination, it appears that the initial acceptance of sedentary house-living
(which has fostered the development of large matrilocal, extended families occu¬
pying single dwellings) has led to the prohibition of first-cousin marriage, since
many first cousins live in the same household or live in neighboring households
and are therefore not proper marriage-partners by traditional Bajau mores. Thus,
the change in jural rules regarding marriage at Sitangkai has its roots in the
traditional alternative patterns in the boat-dwelling society.
Equally relevant to the Bajau case are the contentions of students of cognatic
societies (such as Goodenough, Appell, Scheffler, and Keesing) that the different
roles an individual holds throughout the society, which cross social categories,
Introduction 3

allow for and give direction to change. For example, upon marriage a boat¬
dwelling Bajau continues to belong to his personal kindred (a large, amorphous
category of cognates), but also belongs to his wife’s personal kindred. He may
decide to remain in his father's moorage to live among a group of cognates, a
localized segment of his personal kindred; he may decide to live among a compa¬
rable group of his mother's kinsmen; or he may decide to live among any of
several such groups of his wife’s kinsmen. The point is that he has membership
in several groups (none of which is mutually exclusive), and the group (or groups)
which he decides to affiliate with is determined by his personal ambitions or
wishes. And since individual wishes and ambitions tend to change over time, the
structure of Bajau society tends to alter accordingly. Thus, as many recent critics
of social-structure studies have pointed out, an adequate description of a society
must present not only the dominant patterns of behavior but the deviation from
those dominant patterns—that is, the alternative patterns of behavior found in
the reality of social life. Only then is the concept of social structure able to deal
with the changing, dynamic nature of social life.
Granted that change is possible within a structure because of the alternative
behavioral choices available to members of the society, the position as stated here
offers little in the way of explanation of why individuals begin to choose differ¬
ently from the way they have chosen in the past. The stimulus for pursuing
different patterns of behavior among the Bajau appears to have come from their
recently more intimate associations with the land-dwelling people of Sitangkai,
as well as from the innovations of individual Bajau, often sparked by desire for
economic advancement.
To the casual observer, the house-dwelling Bajau at Sitangkai would probably
represent a classic example of acculturation, a group of people who have bor¬
rowed cultural elements from an invading, dominant society. It is, however,
misleading to attribute the changes among the Sitangkai Bajau to acculturation
alone, at least as that word is traditionally defined. In the first place, the Bajau
have lived in varying degrees of intimacy with the land-dwellers for unknown
centuries during which time the two societies were doubtless influenced by one
another. Thus, even though only in recent years have the Bajau and land-dwellers
lived together in a single village, their relationships today are only a more intimate
continuation of past relationships. Like almost all societies of the world, the Bajau
have always been in contact with other peoples, and the so-called acculturation
process has always been operative among them; consequently, it alone cannot
explain the recent changes in their society. As Robert F. Murphy (1964) has so
ably argued, acculturation is an ordinary feature of almost every social system.
And because it is so broadly defined, acculturation contributes little as a theoreti¬
cal concept to a better understanding of the processes of social change; to say that
acculturation has occurred tells little more than that social change has occurred.
More recently, Fredrik Barth (1967) has taken a similar stand on acculturation
studies. Like Murphy, he maintains that acculturation studies tell little about the
processes of change and, indeed, sometimes obscure the actual processes by
4 The Sea People of Sulu

describing new behavior as elements “borrowed” from another culture. Barth

illustrates his position with data from the Fur of the southern Sudan. He notes
that some of the Fur people who live near Arabs have a family structure more
like that of the Arabs than of the more traditional, isolated Fur. Upon first glance,
this seems an obvious case of acculturation, or borrowing. However, closer exami¬
nation reveals that the “new” pattern of Fur family structure was always possible
in their traditional society, but the economic patterns of the traditional society
seldom made it practical.
Nonetheless, neither Murphy or Barth, nor other critics of acculturation stud¬
ies, would deny that change does occur when two cultures previously not in
contact with one another come together, or when two cultures with a long history
of sporadic contact become more intimate with one another. Their disagreement
is based on how such change comes about. Traditional acculturation studies are
noticeably reticent regarding the processes by which acculturation occurs, but
rather reveal the end result of the meeting of two societies, with the impression
that “elements” of culture have been “borrowed” and somehow reworked to fit
the patterns of the borrowing culture (Beals 1953). Critics of acculturation studies
want to know more about the vague processes of borrowing.
It has long been recognized that when two societies come in contact and if one
is superordinate to the other (as the land-dwelling Muslims are to the Bajau), the
superordinate society may provide models for change to the subordinate society.
And, although the subordinate society may eventually display features that are
similar to those of the dominant society, it contributes little to the understanding
of social change to state simply that these features have been borrowed from the
other culture. In fact, it may be misleading, or even false, to do so. For example,
as mentioned, one result of the Bajau contact with the land-dwelling Muslims has
been the emerging prohibition against all first-cousin marriage, rather than a
prohibition which formerly included only marriage of patrilateral parallel cous¬
ins.2 However, if the Bajau were confronted with a patrilineal society which also
forbade patrilateral-parallel-cousin marriage, the traditional Bajau prohibition
against such marriages would most likely be intensified. In either case, the real
or the hypothetical, students of acculturation may claim that the changing mar¬
riage practices of the Bajau were borrowed from the society they encountered.
However, varying prohibitions against all types of first-cousin marriages in cer¬
tain circumstances are found in traditional Bajau society; thus, rather than bor¬
rowing the prohibitions, the Bajau would simply have reemphasized certain
traditional patterns to make them more congruent to the superordinate model.
This position does not deny, however, that elements of culture are sometimes
borrowed by one society from another. This has, in fact, happened among the
Bajau in the realm of religious behavior. The Sitangkai Bajau have consciously
learned Islamic ritual from their land-dwelling neighbors, a case of obvious
borrowing, the syncretic result of which has many parallels in Afro-American
religious behavior, where African ritual and deities have been blended with
Christian ritual and deities to form a uniquely New World religion. But it is
Introduction 5

misleading to say that even these elements are borrowed; such a simplistic expla¬
nation underplays the often complex reworking and reinterpretation of tradi¬
tional patterns which must occur.
Innovation is another common, catch-all word which frequently appears in the
literature on social change to explain the origin of new behavior. I do not deny
the validity of the process in bringing about change, but rather wish to reexamine
the manner in which it normally comes about. It is well known that relatively
few “new” discoveries are made in the world, if discoveries are defined as addi¬
tions to knowledge. However, the reinterpretation and rearrangement of past
discoveries into new inventions is commonplace, as is witnessed every day in the
modern world. Thus, the child who builds a hitherto unknown structure with his
erector set has not discovered anything new, but he has invented a new structure
—he has manipulated known elements into a new arrangement. The innovators
to whom culture change is often attributed also manipulate known parts into
configurations, much like the child with his erector set. Obviously, some individu¬
als do come up with new discoveries that may revolutionize the social system, but
the majority of innovators rely upon existing knowledge for their inventions. Such
has certainly been the case among the few Bajau who have been responsible for
the innovations which have brought about radical changes in their society. An
example is needed. Twenty years ago, a bright and energetic Bajau headman in
Sitangkai apparently realized that the principal barrier to his ambitions in Sulu
society was that he and his people were considered pagans by the surrounding
Muslim people. To remedy the situation, he sent his youngest son to learn Islamic
ritual and then built a mosque in which the son, the first Bajau imam, could begin
to proselytize. The new mosque quickly gained a large following of Bajau, and
the consequent acceptance of Islam significantly changed Bajau society. The
headman’s innovation represents no new discovery. Rather, he merely utilized
elements of his own culture and the nearby Muslim culture to establish a new
institution in Bajau society. It is my contention that most innovation is of this
sort, and especially in the Bajau case. The cultural inventory of an individual
(which includes elements of the cultures around him with which he is familiar,
as well as those of his own culture which he knows) provides the material for
innovations. Thus, innovation, like most social change, is germane to the cultural
tradition of its producer.
My position throughout this discussion has been that, unlike Athena who
emerged full-grown from the head of Zeus, new social behavior can be traced
through a finite number of steps to its origin—usually in the traditional society.
Confrontation, or more intimate association, with a second society may provide
models for behavior or may open opportunities which make formerly less popular
alternatives now more popular and may create new possible configurations,
thereby setting about processes of change; but the genesis of most seemingly new
behavior can be found in the traditional society. These seemingly new patterns
of behavior emerge from the alternative patterns of the traditional society, which
were always available when the dominant patterns could not be followed. Conse-
6 The Sea People of Sulu

quently, to deal with social change, the anthropologist must not only know the
jural rules of the society, but must also know the allowable deviations from those
rules. Rather than viewing acculturation as the borrowing of certain cultural
elements, it can be better understood as the provision of models of new behavior
which set in motion new arrangements of traditional patterns in an attempt to
approximate the new model. And similarly, innovators use the traditional cul¬
tural inventory to create new manifestations of the traditional design. Obviously,
this is not the entire story of change. Sometimes societies are forced to accept new
patterns of behavior for which there is no parallel in their tradition; sometimes
unprecedented discoveries are made which revolutionize social systems; and
sometimes elements of culture are consciously borrowed which bring about subse¬
quent changes in the borrowing society. But in cases of cultural change which are
not forced and which are not the result of contact with an alien, intruding society,
1 contend that change most often follows the lines I have outlined.

NOTES

1. Llewellyn and Hoebel (1941) have found a similar distinction useful in their discussion of law.
They speak of societal norms upon which most law is based, but also recognize tolerable leeways—
deviations from the norm—which are also accepted as legitimate behavior.
2. Although patrilateral-parallel-cousin marriage is a preferred marriage form among most Mus¬
lims throughout the Arab world of the Middle East, it meets with disapproval among many Islamic
and non-Islamic peoples of Southeast Asia and apparently represents a pre-Islamic tradition in that
part of the world.
 Part One

THE BOAT-DWELLING BAJAU

OF TAWI-TAWI
 2. Habitat

The Sulu Islands, where field research for this book was conducted, lie north
of the equator between latitudes 4° 30' and 6° 50' and between east longitudes
119° 10' and 122° 25'. Major islands within the archipelago include Jolo, capital
of Sulu Province, Siasi, Tawi-Tawi, and Sibutu. Volcanic and coral islands with
extensive reefs characterize this southermost province of the Republic of the
Phillippines. The equatorial maritime climate of Sulu has a yearly average tem¬
perature of 79.6° f. The islands experience monsoon seasons—the northeast mon¬
soon in the winter months and the southwest monsoon during the summer
months—but the monsoon seasons are not as pronounced as they are in continen¬
tal Southeast Asia.
The islands are inhabited by two major ethnic groups, the Taosug and the
Samal, as well as the Chinese and Christian Filipino minorities found in most of
the port towns. The Taosug occupy the most fertile islands of the Jolo and Siasi
groups and portions of some of the southern islands, while the Samal dominate
the islands of Tawi-Tawi and Sibutu, as well as numerous smaller islands
throughout the island chain. Both groups are nominal Muslims, with the degree
of acculturation to orthodox Islam varying among members of each group.1 The
Taosug have always been the politically dominant group in Sulu and still maintain
that position today. The Samal-speaking population is much more diverse than
the Taosug. Members range from sophisticated Muslim hadjis, who have made
the pilgrimage to Mecca, to the pagan, boat-dwelling Bajau, who still spend
nomadic lives in tiny houseboats. The name Bajau is not commonly used in Sulu
to identify this boat-dwelling Samal people, but is often used in Borneo and
Celebes to identify the boat-dwellers of that area, as well as other Samal-speakers.
I have chosen to use the name because it is already established in the literature,
it does not have the offensive connotations to the Bajau that some of the other
local names do have, and it distinguishes the boat-dwelling Samal from the other
Samal people of Sulu. Bajau, then, shall be used throughout this book to identify
the boat-dwelling Samal population of Sulu, those who still occasionally use the
boat as living quarters, and those who have only recently abandoned their boat¬
dwelling. These Bajau people have been reported as far north as Surigao, Davao,
and Zamboanga on Mindanao Island, in almost all the major island groups of
Sulu, in eastern Borneo, and on numerous Celebes coasts.
The Tawi-Tawi island group of Sulu takes its name from the long, narrow
9
10
Habitat 11

island which stretches in a northesast-southwest direction for twenty-five miles.

The verdant forests and rugged volcanic peaks of the island provide a mountain¬
ous backdrop for the dozens of small, coral islands flanked about its southern
shores. For unknown centuries, its human inhabitants have chosen to live in pile
dwellings built along its miles of coast, and, even today, except for a few notable
penetrations, the interior of the island is still virgin forest. To the north and west
of the island are the deep waters of the open sea, dotted with rich fishing grounds
well-know to Tawi-Tawi’s seafaring population. Compared to other seas of the
earth, these waters are calm and gentle, but nonetheless, during the seasons of
the monsoons only the most hardy venture upon them. To the east and, especially
to the south of the island, the seas are shallow and filled with myriad coral islands
and reefs which make navigation by large ships virtually impossible. At high tide,
the waters are as varicolored as only coral seas can be, but at low tide the great,
sprawling reefs lie ugly and exposed. It is among these southern reefs and islands
that the Tawi-Tawi Bajau have carved their unique ecological niche; their small
houseboats ply the waters as regularly and as persistently as the fishes themselves.
The 1960 census of the Philippines does not provide a population breakdown
by language or ethnic group for Tawi-Tawi, but probably more than 75 percent
of the population is Samal, 20 percent is Taosug, and the remaining 5 percent,
Chinese and northern Christian Filipino. The large number of Samal-speakers is
somewhat misleading in that it connotes a cultural uniformity which is not
entirely the case. Although a general “Samal culture” may be attributed to
Tawi-Tawi, nonetheless, almost each island of Samal-speakers is somewhat differ¬
ent from all others. Dialectical differences, occupational specializations, value
systems, material culture, religious beliefs, and, in some cases, physical differ¬
ences, tend to set off the various groups. As a result, the Samal-speakers normally
identify themselves by their islands, sometimes even by villages, rather than by
Samal, which, because of its generic nature, has little value as identification
among them.
By far the most unusual group of Samal-speakers is the boat-dwellers, the
so-called Bajau. In fact, their uniqueness led earlier observers to describe them
as a people separate from the remaining Samal population, but this is not the case,
and they are best regarded as a subculture of the general Samal culture. Their
most obvious distinctions from the land-dwelling Samal are their boat-dwelling,
their “pagan” religion, and certain physical features which can be directly traced
to their boat-dwelling. All of these traits mark them as a lowly, outcast group,
in the eyes of the Muslim land-dwellers. In Tawi-Tawi, the Bajau number ap¬
proximately 1,600 and represent only about 4 percent of the Tawi-Tawi popula¬
tion. Their moorages are all located in the western half of the Tawi-Tawi Islands,
and, except for occasional fishing trips, they rarely leave these waters. The Tawi-
Tawi Bajau are among the most conservative of all the Sulu Samal and probably
reflect much of prelslamic Samal culture. Their sea-borne homes, which effec¬
tively isolate them from the land-dwelling peoples, seem most responsible for this
conservatism; it is significant in this respect that other Bajau groups in Sulu who
12 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

have abandoned the boat-dwelling life to become house-dwellers, have become,

or are quickly becoming, amalgamated into such Islamic Samal cultures as the
Sitangkai Bajau. Although greatly influenced by Sulu Islam, the Tawi-Tawi
boat-dwellers are still regarded as pagans by the surrounding Muslim peoples.
Lone Bajau houseboats and occasional clusters of houseboats can be seen at any
time throughout the Tawi-Tawi waters. However, such small groupings generally
consist of Bajau on fishing trips or en route to some other destination and cannot
be considered permanent Bajau settlements. Five sites are recognized as perma¬
nent moorages by the Bajau; these are permanent in that some houseboats are
always found there, though in varying numbers. These five moorages surround
the seas most commonly exploited by the sea folk (see Map 2).
The northernmost of these moorages is located on the southwestern tip of
Tawi-Tawi Island near the land village of Luuk Tulai. It is known among Bajau
by the name of the land village and consists of an average of twenty houseboats
and about a half-dozen poorly-constructed temporary houses. About eight miles
from Luuk Tulai is Tungkalang. Considerably larger than Luuk Tulai, this moor¬
age usually has about forty houseboats and twenty-five pile dwellings built by
Bajau who are in the process of abandoning the boat-dwelling life. Lamiun is a
small Bajau moorage at the edge of the port town of Bongao. A dozen or so
houseboats are usually found here, as are about eight pile dwellings built by more
sedentary Bajau families. A fourth moorage, Tungbangkao, is about seventeen
miles east of Lamiun near the northwest point of Bilatan Island. About thirty
 13
Habitat

A Bajau man returns to Lioboran, the smallest moorage, with a boatload of cans filled
with potable water from Tawi-Tawi. In the midday heat, the others at the moorage are
probably napping inside their houseboats.

houseboats are usually found at this moorage to supplement the forty houses,
about half of which belong to non-Bajau (land-dwelling Samal) who have recently
moved to the village from various places in eastern Tawi-Tawi. The fifth Bajau
moorage is about six miles south of Tungbangkao. Known locally as Lioboran,
this moorage has no houses and normally has about twenty-five houseboats.
Although each of the Bajau moorages is in some respects unique, the five share
several common features. Each flotilla is located on a protected reef, partly
exposed at low tide, which serves also as a source of edible marine life. This reef
may be very small, as at Lamiun, or it may extend for several miles, like the one
at Tungbangkao. Part of this exposed reef, or a nearby beach, is used for boat¬
building and other work by the adults and as a play area by the children.
Generally, several shallow channels are found among the boats, in addition to one
deeper channel which serves as a main passage for boats entering and leaving the
moorage at low tide. Throughout the moorage area, poles stuck into the reef are
used for mooring the boats. The sea-folk are usually found only a few hundred
yards from land villages, and relations between the two groups are normally
symbiotic in nature, with the boat people trading fish for the vegetables and fruits
of the land-dwellers. With the exception of the land-dwelling Samal population
14 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

at Tungbangkao, no non-Bajau people live in the moorages. Only Tungbangkao

has a few small stores operated by the land-Samal fish buyers; the other moorages
have no retail stores of any sort.
Visitors to Tawi-Tawi would probably note other Bajau moorages. For exam¬
ple, a flotilla of eight or ten houseboats may moor for a week or so at a particular
anchorage as they fish the nearby waters; however, after exhausting the waters,
they return to their home moorage or move on to other fishing grounds. In no
sense can these flotillas be considered permanent moorages. During the northeast
monsoons some Bajau boats moor near certain land villages, where they plant
small plots of dry rice on land owned by land-dwelling friends, but after the
harvest they return to their home moorages. As a result of these temporary
moorages, it is difficult to make any hard-and-fast statements regarding Bajau
settlements.
The five main moorages appear to have been Bajau settlements for a good
number of years, but, should any sort of trouble arise, they could disappear
overnight. About ten years ago, a Bajau flotilla regularly moored near the land-
village of Karundung on the southeastern part of Sanga-Sanga Island. A group
of Taosug outlaws from Jolo attacked the land village, killing seventeen persons.
Within a matter of hours after the news was learned, the Bajau boats dispersed
—some to Bongao to form the present village of Lamiun, and others to the Bilatan
villages. During my first visit to Tawi-Tawi in 1963, a sizable Bajau flotilla was
located near northern Sanga-Sanga, across the channel from Luuk Tulai. After
I left, four Bajau men died mysteriously enough to convince the boat-dwellers
that evil spirits were plaguing the moorage and that it was no longer a safe place
to dwell. When I returned to the site in 1965, not a single Bajau boat was moored
there.
Apparently throughout their history in Tawi-Tawi, the small numbers of Bajau
have never given any government serious pause. The Bajau were never fully
incorporated into the Sulu sultanate. The Spaniards had little influence in Sulu,
and even less among the Bajau. American administrators found the Bajau popula¬
tion small enough to ignore while they attended to the more pressing problems
of the land-dwellers, and, similarly, the government of the independent Philippine
nation has had enough problems in Sulu without concerning itself with the affairs
of a handful of boat-dwellers. Thus, their small population and their nomadic
boat-dwelling habit have been important factors in the retention of their tradi¬
tional way of life.
The population of a single Bajau moorage varies greatly at different times of
the month and at different seasons of the year. For example, on a Monday of an
October week in 1965, a wedding had attracted 120 houseboats to the moorage
of Tungkalang; by Thursday of that week, only 28 houseboats remained. During
the season of the northeast monsoons, the winds sometimes build up swells in the
open sea which break over the protective reefs of Luuk Tulai and Tungkalang to
cause considerable agitation in the reef waters and occasional damage to
houseboats. As a result, during this season many Bajau choose to leave these
moorages to fish the calm Bilatan waters or to moor near other land-dwelling
' Habitat 15

, villages more protected from the destructive breakers, where they sometimes
plant dry rice on borrowed land.
Fishing cycles also determine Bajau movements. During the spring tides of the
j full moon, seas spill over the normally exposed reefs of Bilatan to attract fish from
the deeper waters of the newly available feeding grounds. Awaiting their arrival
are Bajau from all over Tawi-Tawi, including many from the western moorages
i who monthly make the trip to Bilatan at full moon. As the moon wanes and the
differences between high and low tides are less dramatic, other types of fishing
j become more practical. At the time of the neap tides, the Bilatan reefs are again
the scene of intensive fishing, in the form of communal fish drives practiced by
the Bajau when fish are attracted to the reefs in great schools for feeding. Tides,

i. winds, and, of course, fish must be properly disposed during the daylight hours
to make this type of fishing feasible; therefore, during the neaps of many months
when drives are practiced, many Sanga-Sanga Bajau travel to Bilatan to join in.
When the moon disappears completely, the Bajau engage in net fishing with
pressure lanterns. This type of fishing is lucrative on many reefs throughout
Tawi-Tawi and contributes to much Bajau movement; Bilatan Bajau regularly
seek the fish on Sanga-Sanga reefs, whereas the Sanga-Sanga people equally
regularly visit the Bilatan reefs for the same purpose. Many other types of fishing
are practiced during the month, but the above types attract the greatest number
of fishermen at any single time.
The deep seas to the west of the Sanga-Sanga moorages have several fishing
grounds which yield large fish to the hook-and-line fisherman, some of whom
engage almost exclusively in this type of fishing and rarely travel to the Bilatan
reefs. At one time, the reefs of the Basun Islands (northeast of Luuk Tulai)
apparently attracted almost as many Bajau as the Bilatan reefs presently do;
however, in recent years the area has been rumored to be the hangout of Jolo
outlaws, so Bajau fishermen have avoided those reefs. More Sanga-Sanga Bajau
travel to the Bilatan reefs for fishing than do Bilatan Bajau to Sanga-Sanga;
nonetheless, in spite of the rich fishing grounds in their home waters, many
Bilatan Bajau regularly visit the deep-sea fishing grounds of the Sanga-Sanga
moorages. In addition, shark fishing attracts many of them to the seas off Sanga-
Sanga during the northeast monsoons.
Those few Bilatan Bajau who wish to practice agriculture during the growing
season of the northeast monsoon must temporarily reside near Sanga-Sanga or
Tawi-Tawi moorages, since the dry, rocky islands of Bilatan do not allow this type
of cultivation. Even the Sanga-Sanga Bajau frequently moor near a land village
where a land-dwelling friend permits them to use his land for their small gardens.
Ceremonies contribute to much Bajau movement. Kinsmen are expected to
attend each other’s ceremonies of marriage, healing, and incision, and, since any
Bajau’s kinsmen are scattered among the five major moorages, a single ceremony
in one of the moorages attracts visitors from the others. Not surprisingly, the
ceremonial cycles complement the general movements of the fishing cycles: the
Bilatan moorages hold their ceremonies during full moon, apparently to take
advantage of the presence of many visiting fishermen already in the area, w hereas
16 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

in the Sanga-Sanga moorages ceremonies are held during the period of no moon,
when the inhabitants have returned from the full-moon fishing at Bilatan and
when many of the Bilatan people are in the area to sell their full-moon catches
in Bongao.
The two small cemetery islands near Bilatan Island, Bunabunaan and Bilatan
Poon, also account for some Bajau movements. Since all Bajau are buried on these
islands, a death at any of the moorages means that an entourage of mourners must
travel to one of the cemetery islands for the burial. In addition, the Bajau religious
beliefs demand that periodic visits be made to the graves of deceased relatives.
Because the Bilatan Islands produce no cassava, the Bajau vegetable staple, and
have no potable water, it is necessary for these Bajau to make periodic journeys
to Tawi-Tawi or Sanga-Sanga to obtain these necessities. Furthermore, the Bila¬
tan Islands have no trees suitable for boat-building. Consequently, if a Bilatan
Bajau needs to construct a new boat or repair an old one, he usually moves to
one of the Sanga-Sanga Bajau moorages which are located near forests with trees
suitable for boat-building. Rather than attempt to pull the large logs back to his
home moorage, he normally remains at the Sanga-Sanga moorage until the boat
is completed.
The nomadic territory of the Tawi-Tawi Bajau is difficult to delimit, since some
Bajau have traveled almost the entire length of the Sulu Archipelago, while others
have never been outside the Tawi-Tawi area. However, most Bajau travels are
limited to the vicinity of Tawi-Tawi, with occasional fishing trips to Sitangkai,
and the nomadic territory most commonly exploited by a Bajau generally does
not exceed twenty-five miles in any direction from his home moorage.
Bajau men travel more extensively than Bajau women. Almost all the Tawi-
Tawi Bajau men have been to Sitangkai (a distance of 40 miles), whereas fewer
have traveled to Siasi (75 miles) or Jolo (100 miles). Several Bajau from Tawi-
Tawi have traveled to Zamboanga (200 miles), and a considerable number have
visited Bajau villages in the Darvel Bay region of Sabah (75 miles).
Much journalistic ink has been spilled on the reportedly senseless wanderings
of these “sea gypsies” who are usually depicted as aimless wanderers drifting a
carefree life over romantic seas. Such is certainly not the case. A touch of
wanderlust may account for some Bajau travels, but most are undertaken for
practical reasons of necessity and are patterened, as well as predictable.

NOTES

1. The Islam found in Sulu is a variant of the Sufi sect and was apparently introduced at the end
of the fourteenth century by missionaries from Malaya and Sumatra. In recent years, missionaries
from the Middle East have introduced elements of modernist Islam in Jolo, but their influence has
been little felt in Sulu beyond that city.
 3. The Household

The independent, nuclear family of a man, his wife, and their children is
the basic unit of Bajau society. It consequently is not surprising to find that
the strongest, most enduring, and most important kin relationships are those
fostered within this unit, called mataan by the Bajau. The nuclear family is
the only face-to-face grouping of individuals that endures over an extensive
period of time, and even its span is limited by the lives of its members and
the marriages of its offspring. Although regularly associated with a larger
grouping of kinsmen, the nuclear family is extremely self-sufficient. Much of
its time is spent traveling or fishing alone away from the larger Bajau com¬
munity, and, even when at rest in a moorage, the isolation provided each
houseboat by the water separating it from others acts effectively to allow a
great deal of privacy to its occupants.
A survey of Bajau households reveals two basic features: (1) The household
ideally consists of a single nuclear family, and any variation of this is either
temporary or an adjustment to a fragmented nuclear family; and (2) each broken
nuclear family adds persons, so that it approximates the structure of the nuclear
household. Reasons for this are practical and realistic. First, the size of a Bajau
houseboat limits the size of the household, since the average living area of a
houseboat is only about ten feet long, five feet wide, and four feet high; conse¬
quently, few houseboats are large enough to accommodate more than a single
nuclear family, even by the Bajau cramped definition of comfort. Secondly, the
Bajau household has a fairly well defined division of labor between husband and
wife; essentially, the husband provides sustenance and protection, while the wife
cares for the household and the children. While it is not impossible for a widow
or widower to live alone, it is difficult and often taxes their immediate kinsmen,
who must frequently fill the vacant role. As a result, widows or widowers remarry
as soon as possible or form alliances with kinsmen who are left in similar circum¬
stances.
Although the most common composition of households among the boat-dwell¬
ing Bajau is that of the nuclear family—that is, husband, wife, and their unmar¬
ried offspring—with an average of five members, Table 1 reveals that considerable
variation is found within this common structure.

17
18 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

Table 1. Household Composition oe Boat-Dwelling Bajau

number of
households

nuclear family 103 (78%)

nuclear family and additional unmarried members

nuclear family and husband’s widowed father 1
nuclear family and wife’s widowed mother 6
nuclear family and wife’s widowed mother and
divorced sister 1
nuclear family and wife’s widowed mother and
widowed sister 1
nuclear family and husband’s adult nephew 1
nuclear family and husband’s male patrilateral
cousin 1

TOTAL 11 (8.3%)

extended family
nuclear family and married son and family 4
nuclear family and two married sons and
families 1
nuclear family and married daughter and
husband 2
nuclear family and mother and father of
both husband and wife 2
widow and children and her nephew and
wife 1

TOTAL 10 (7.6%)

fragmented family
widower and children 1
widow and children 2
widow, her two sons, her two teen-aged
brothers, and her widowed father 1
widow 1
widower and his grandson 1
widow and her children and her widowed
mother 1
two widows (second cousins) and children
of one 1

TOTAL 8 (6.1%)

Total 132
The Household 19

A biological rather than structural variation of the nuclear family is the case
when a man and his wife adopt children. Not uncommonly, a childless couple
raises an orphaned child or takes a child or two of a sibling who has more children
than he can manage. Sometimes they may be the only children in the household,
and sometimes they may have adoptive siblings, but in either case they are treated
as biological offspring. Probably there were more cases of adoptions among the
Bajau than I was able to discover, since such children are normally referred to
by the term used also for biological offspring, and their adoptive status is not
significant in the family structure or sentiment. Consequently, unless pressed to
do so, a Bajau rarely mentions that a child is adopted.
Frequently an aged adult, a widow or widower, will attach himself to a nu¬
clear household. Most commonly, this is one parent or both parents of either
the husband or wife. Occasionally, even an aged couple may join a nuclear
family household, but usually, as long as they are both alive and still able, an
old couple lives alone until the death of one. If an aged person has several
children, he normally moves among their several houseboats rather than stay¬
ing with one child permanently. There are some cases, however, where an
aged adult has chosen to remain permanently with one of his married chil¬
dren, either because there is no space for him elsewhere or because of close
emotional ties with that particular child. In rare cases, an aged person lives
alone.
Several closely related adults who have been left without spouses and who
constitute "fragmented families” (Table 1) sometimes form a household for their
mutual economic and social benefit.
Orphaned, unmarried siblings of either the husband or wife are sometimes
attached to nuclear family units. Normally, these are the youngest members of
their families and are staying with siblings only until they marry and form their
own households.
Much diversity is revealed in where each household, whether an independent,
nuclear family or a reconstituted or variant form of it, prefers to moor its
houseboat. By far the most dominant Bajau residence pattern may be called, for
lack of a better term, ambilocal, a general term which covers a number of
variations. For the few truly nomadic Bajau it refers to their lifelong movements
among the several Bajau moorages and fishing grounds in Tawi-Tawi. For couples
who otherwise reside at a single moorage, it refers to those movements which
monthly take them away from the moorage in pursuit of fish. For some couples
it is a conscious decision to spend part of the year in the home waters of the
husband and the other part in the home waters of the wife. For still other couples,
it refers to their seasonal residence near certain fertile islands where they practice
agriculture.
Because of the frequent movements of Bajau houseboats, the residence pattern
in a Bajau moorage on any single day is different—and sometimes dramatically
different—from the pattern found on any other day.
20 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

Table 2. Residential Patterns at Tungkalang.

Nov. 1965 Dec. 1965 Jan. 1966

number of number of number of
type of residence couples couples couples

uxorilocal moorage' 14 (23%) 10 (29.4%) 8 (19.5%)

virilocal moorage 10 (16.4%) 8 (23.5%) 10 (24.4%)
natolocal moorage 14 (23%) 8 (23.5%) 10 (24.4%)
neolocal moorage 17 (27.9%) 5 (14.7%) 8 (19.5%)
virilocal moorage/virilocal household2 3 ( 4.9%) 1 ( 2.9%)
uxorilocal moorage/uxorilocal household 1 ( 1.6%) 2 ( 5.9%) 1 ( 2.4%)
uxorilocal moorage/virilocal household 1 ( 1.6%) 2 ( 4.9%)
natolocal moorage/virilocal household 1 ( 1.6%) 2 ( 4.9%)
TOTAL 61 34 41

1. Uxorilocal moorage: the married couple lives in its own houseboat in the moorage of the wife’s
parents.
2. Virilocal household: the married couple lives in the houseboat of the husband’s parents.

Table 2, constructed from surveys of residence taken at the moorage of Tung¬

kalang on three different occasions, illustrates the changing nature of Bajau
residence.
If one were to survey Bajau public opinion as to the preferred pattern of
postmarital residence among Bajau, he would discover, as I did, that most Bajau
profess the ideal that after marriage the couple should spend the first few months
moving between the moorages or houseboats of both sets of parents, and then
eventually settle down to married life in the moorage of the wife—that is, an
initial ambilocality which develops into a more permanent uxorilocality. How¬
ever, like many social ideals, their stated preference does not always reflect reality,
and more practical considerations actually determine the residence of the Bajau.
An initial ambilocality is typical of most marriages. Since newlyweds are often
from different moorages, the ambilocal practice allows them to become ac¬
quainted with their new in-laws and at the same time relieves a single household
of the strain of having to support and find space for an additional person. Some¬
times the couple may forego the initial ambilocality and live in the houseboat of
a kinsman who needs a male or female to complete the household unit. In one
case, this was the groom’s mother’s widowed sister, who needed an adult male
in the household and had space for the extra couple. In another case, it was a
widowed man who needed his new daughter-in-law to assume the female respon¬
sibilities of his household. Sometimes, if one set of parents has a small and
crowded houseboat, the couple may spend all its first months with the other set
of parents, which has more space for them. But, whatever the case, the couple
expects, and is expected, to have its own houseboat within a year or so after
marriage, and most usually do.
Residence becomes even more complicated after the couple acquires its own
boat. Some Bajau seldom leave a single moorage, whereas others spend almost
The Household 21

their entire lives traveling among the five Bajau moorages in Tawi-Tawi; most
Bajau fall somewhere between these two extremes. Those Bajau who rarely travel
beyond their home moorages are normally those who have married persons from
those same moorages. Often these people are less dependent upon fishing as a
livelihood than most Bajau and practice boat-building or agriculture. What
fishing they do is limited to the nearby waters, and, except for rare fishing trips
to other parts of Tawi-Tawi or visits to the cemetery islands, they seldom leave
the moorage. They consequently represent the stable core of the moorage popula¬
tion.
Other considerations may influence a couple's decision to spend most of its time
at a single moorage. If one of the couple has few and insignificant kinsmen, the
couple normally moors at the moorage where the most important kin ties are.
Similarly, if for some reason the couple is on unfriendly terms with the kinsmen
of one spouse, it usually moors at the moorage of those kinsmen with whom both
are friendly.
A virilocality found in some couples is related to ecological factors. Bajau men
living in the western moorages—Luuk Tulai and Tungkalang—most commonly
practice deep-sea fishing in the nearby fishing grounds and less comonly do
gill-net fishing on the few and small reefs of the area. The reverse situation is
found in the eastern moorages—Tungbangkao and Lioboran. Here the extensive
reefs allow for profitable net fishing, and rarely do the men practice deep-sea
fishing. As a result, those men who grow up in one of these two areas are most
familiar with the fishing techniques which most profitably exploit that environ¬
ment. And, since successful fishing is obviously important in Bajau society, most
men prefer to fish those waters where they can use familiar techniques. As a
result, when men more familiar with one fishing method marry outside their home
waters, most commonly the wife goes to live in the husband’s home moorage,
where he can most profitably fish the waters. Women’s work is less specialized
and allows greater freedom of movement.
The couples with neolocal residence frequently have moved to the new moor¬
age after being frightened or driven away from another moorage by land-dwellers.
Some listed in the neolocal category also represent couples who are staying in a
moorage for only a few days en route to some other destination.
The Bajau contend that for a good marriage it is best to marry relatives, and
most do. Indeed, if one were able to completely unravel the web of kinship among
the Bajau, he would probably find that all Bajau couples are related in some
manner. Bajau are free to marry all relatives except siblings of parents and
grandparents, grandparents, and, of course, members of the nuclear family. First-
cousin marriage is permissible, except between patrilateral parallel cousins, whose
marriage would be considered incestuous unless they had performed a special
ritual which involved throwing certain possessions of minor value into the sea.
Also, any first cousins who have been reared together intimately are considered
improper marriage-partners.
22 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

Table 3. Marriage Patterns Among Boat- dwelling Bajau.

number
genealogical relationship of couples

patrilateral parallel first cousins 8( 5%)

matrilateral parallel first cousins 9( 6%)
cross-cousins 14(9%)
second cousins 30(19%)
second kamanakan' 14( 9%)
related, but exact relationship unknown 47(30%)
uncertain of whether relationship
exists 7( 5%)
unrelated 26(17%)

TOTAL 155

1. Second kamanakan: a relationship of persons separated by one generation in the second degree
of collaterality, such as the relationship between ego and the child of his first cousin.

Table 3 reveals the variation found in Bajau marriage patterns among 155 boat¬
dwelling couples.
Although romantic love is no prerequisite to marriage in Bajau society, many
young couples are in love at the time of their weddings. These are the couples
who have expressed their desire for marriage to one another through their par¬
ents, who have taken care of the formalities of the arrangement, or those not
uncommon couples who have eloped rather than waited for the formalities and
possible opposition to their marriages. Since Bajau youth are rarely forced into
distasteful matches, attraction between the couple characterizes most marriages.
After the novelty of the marriage wears away, the romantic love is frequently
replaced by a genuine, deep, mutual affection. If it is not, the marriage may end
in divorce, or, if a child is on the way, the two learn to tolerate one another.
Deep sentiment between husband and wife seems to be fostered by the intimacy
they share by being together virtually all their adult lives in a small houseboat.
Very rarely is the Bajau husband away from the houseboat overnight, and com¬
monly he is with his wife and children twenty-four hours of the day. And, since
the houseboat is often at sea, separated from the larger Bajau community, it is
not surprising that extremely intimate and close ties characterize the nuclear
family.
The husband is the recognized head of the household, but most matters are
discussed with the wife before any decisions are made. Most commonly the wife
is in charge of the small finances each family maintains, which she parcels out
for purchases and payments. The husband is in charge of fishing, repairing and
maintaining the boat, and making and repairing fish nets and other equipment;
the wife is also in charge of cooking, preparing cassava, and gathering firewood
The Household 23

from the beaches and edibles from the reef and frequently assists in fishing. Both
are actively involved in caring for the children, although infants are, of course,
cared for almost exclusively by the wife.
If the husband or wife should die, the surviving spouse expresses real as well
as conventional grief at the death. Because Bajau have so little property, the
distribution of the dead spouse’s property follows only loosely defined custom.
When her husband dies, a wife inherits all his property, but she normally redis¬
tributes some of it among family members. Male children usually claim his fishing
equipment, while the houseboat continues as the wife’s home. Sometimes the
houseboat is destroyed at a man’s death, but only in cases of extreme grief or if
the boat is not greatly needed by the living. Similarly, a woman's property
normally passes to her husband. What jewelry she may have goes to her daugh¬
ters, or to her sisters if there are no daughters. An aged couple usually has few
belongings left by the time one or both have died, having long ago either given
them away to children or worn them out. Personal items of any deceased, young
or old, such as clothing, betel boxes, and sometimes jewelry, are placed in the
grave with the corpse.
If the married couple finds the marriage distasteful and decides that even the
children born to them are not reason enough to maintain an unhappy home,
divorce is the frequent way out. Incompatible personalities, barrenness, irrespon¬
sibility, and interfering relatives are the most common causes of divorce. If
divorce occurs shortly after marriage, the brideprice or a portion of it is returned
to the groom’s family. Money and goods acquired by the couple, and sometimes
even the children, are divided between them. Table 4 summarizes Bajau divorce
patterns.

Table 4. Divorce Patterns Among Boat-dwelling Bajau.

number of number of number of

divorces married men married women

0 126 (76%) 122 (79.2%)

1 34 (21%) 25 (16.2%)
2 5 (3%) 6 (3.9%)
3 0 1 (0.6%)

TOTAL 165 154

The intimacy that breeds close ties between husband and wife is responsible for
the same sort of ties and sentiments between parents and children. Children are
greatly desired in Bajau society for emotional, as well as practical, reasons. Indeed
barrenness is a just cause for divorce, and those barren couples who do not want
divorce frequently adopt children from more fortunate siblings. The few children
24 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

a Bajau family does have are cherished even more because of the high rate of
infant mortality. There appears to be no preference for male or for female chil¬
dren, and most couples agree that an equal number of each is ideal, since then
both husband and wife will have assistance in their work.
Sibling relationships are characteristically intimate and protective. When the
family houseboat is at moorage in one of the Bajau moorages, Bajau siblings spend
the daylight hours playing together with other moorage children on the nearby
beach. But, when the family is away from the moorage, the only playmates
usually available for the child are his siblings, and as a result of this periodic
separation from the Bajau community brothers and sisters become very depend¬
ent upon one another. Older girls frequently assume most maternal responsibili¬
ties for younger siblings while the mother is occupied with a newly born infant.
If a child somehow acquires food or some item of childhood value, he invariably
shares it with his brothers and sisters, but feels no compunction to share it with
nonsiblings who may be watching hungrily as he gorges himself. In serious
childhood quarrels between two nonsiblings, the siblings of each often become
involved, since brothers and sisters usually assist one another in such instances.
This intimacy between siblings frequently continues even after marriage, for they
prefer to moor their boats together and work as a sibling group.
As noted, the Bajau household sometimes includes additional members, such
as aged adults, unmarried siblings of either the husband or wife, or married
siblings of either the husband or wife. So long as the aged are physically active
and mentally alert, they are vital and respected members of the household. But
when they become senile or physically inactive, or both, they are largely disre¬
garded by the other members of the household. They are, however, never mal¬
treated, because of the responsibility children feel toward their parents and
because of the belief that old people can curse others with bad luck and illness.
Often old Bajau people retain their prestige within the family and moorage
because of their knowledge of ceremonial ritual and curing lore. Some old women
enjoy renown as midwives. For the most part, the Bajau aged do whatever small
jobs they can and then sit back to be cared for by their children.
Unmarried adult siblings of either the husband or wife are expected to assist
in the household duties appropriate to their sexes. They assist in disciplining and
caring for the children in a parental role, but their position in the household is
usually regarded as temporary, and they expect, and are expected, to leave when
they marry.
Additional couples in a household are also regarded as temporary members.
They, too, assist in duties appropriate to their sexes and discipline and care for
one another’s children. The crowded houseboat resulting from extended-family
households discourages their formation, and they usually last only as long as it
takes one of the families to acquire its own boat.
 4. The Family Alliance Unit

Although the Bajau nuclear family is extremely independent, it is not an

isolated unit unto itself but, rather, periodically attaches itself to a larger social
grouping—especially during those periods when it is at one of the moorages.
When a Bajau family arrives at one of the five moorages, it normally anchors near
the houseboats of whatever kinsmen are there. Usually these kinsmen are siblings
of either the wife or husband and are the main reason the family has chosen to
stop at the moorage. This group of married siblings who normally moor together
in a Bajau moorage and assist one another in work and ceremonies is the second
most important social unit in Bajau society, second only to the nuclear family.
Although the Bajau call such a group pagmundah, a word meaning a group of
boats traveling or mooring together, 1 shall refer to it by the more descriptive term
family alliance.
The family alliances follow no single structural type, except that they are
usually no deeper than two generations and are rarely extended collaterally
beyond siblings. The unit may consist of a married man and his several married
sons, a married man and his several married daughters, or a married man and
his several married sons and daughters. Or it may represent the adults of a single
generation—several married brothers, several married sisters, or several married
brothers and sisters. However, not all married siblings who reside in a single
moorage are necessarily members of the same alliance. For any number of rea¬
sons, such as family quarrels, social prestige, or economic factors, married sib¬
lings may choose to align themselves with the siblings of their spouses and never
act together in a single alliance.
Of the 25 alliance units I surveyed, 1 is composed of two nuclear families, 6
are composed of three nuclear families each, 10 are composed of four nuclear
families each, 7 are composed of five nuclear families each, and 1 is composed
of six nuclear families. Six consist of married siblings, one consists of married
brothers, and five consist of married brothers and sisters. Seventeen are two
generations deep; 11 of these consist of a married man and his married children,
an extension of the nuclear family; 6 are married siblings and their married child
or children. Two are three generations deep; in both cases, they are a married
man, his married children, and his married grandchild or grandchildren. Thus,
the most common Bajau family-alliance unit is two generations in depth and
consists of four nuclear families. The average nuclear family has five members,

25
 26 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

which provides an approximate twenty persons to each Bajau alliance unit.

Within the family-alliance units, work teams are formed for certain activities.
Sometimes these work teams—for example, fishing groups—consist of all the
adult males of the family-alliance unit, whereas at other times only two or three
members may form such a group. In general, the family-alliance unit provides a
group of closely related, trusted persons from which work teams are formed.
Factors important in determining the composition of the work teams, as well
as the family-alliance units, include compatibility, occupational preferences, and
age. Obviously, only persons who can get along well can work well together. Also,
if members of an alliance unit have different occupational interests they will rarely
be together in a work team. And since certain fishing techniques require the
efforts of several able-bodied men, a family-alliance unit must have several men
of this age among its members. If siblings satisfy these requirements, the Bajau
work team consists of such siblings or their affinal counterparts. Otherwise, one
seeks less closely related persons for alliances. However, I encountered no cases
of alliances between nonkinsmen, either in work teams or family-alliance units
partly, no doubt, because, if forced to do so, a Bajau can trace a kin connection
to almost every other Bajau in Tawi-Tawi. The Bajau ideal is to align with
siblings, and most family-alliance units and work teams realize this ideal.
Because of the frequent movements of the individual nuclear families, the
composition of a family-alliance unit is constantly changing. While in his home
moorage, a man normally forms an alliance with those of his own siblings who
may be there, but, when in his wife's moorage, he is a member of a unit composed
primarily of her siblings. While mooring at moorages different from those of his
own or his wife’s, he ideally forms alliances with siblings of his own or his wife’s
who moor there or with less closely related persons. When it is remembered that
almost each nuclear household of any single unit is extremely mobile, some
appreciation of the fluidity of the units may be gleaned.
Single Bajau households begin to break from traditional alliances as their
members marry and form their own households. Once a man has married chil¬
dren, he tends gradually to dissolve alliances with his siblings in favor of forming
alliances with his children. Eventually this alliance completely replaces his earlier
ones, and he never again participates in a unit with his former partners. Most
commonly, he acts as leader of the newly formed unit, but as he becomes older
he relinquishes this position to a younger member. With his death, the tie with
the earlier alliance unit is completely dissolved.
The less nomadic households of the moorages add an element of stability to
the otherwise fluid family-alliance units, because it is around these more seden¬
tary households that the nomadic households cluster. These sedentary
households, as noted earlier, are those families who rarely travel beyond the
waters of the home moorage. Often both spouses are from that moorage and, if
they fish, they are content to fish the nearby waters. Frequently, however, they
are not fishermen but boat-builders or agriculturalists, who have no need to follow
the fishing cycles. Because they are almost always at the home moorage, their less
The Family Alliance Unit 27

stable siblings, when they arrive at the moorage, form alliances with them.
However, it must be noted that not all family-alliance units have such sedentary
members.
Leaders (nakura) are not chosen through any formal decision, but rather
emerge through innate personal qualities. Frequently, but not always, they are
among the more sedentary members of the alliance and have some talent in
boat-building or fishing or the like, as well as respected characteristics which set
them off from their peers. Leadership, however, is as subject to change as is the
composition of the unit itself, and different leaders may emerge for the different
activities of the unit. For example, ceremonies are led by that person familiar with
the proper ritual; fishing activities are led by the man acknowledged as an expert
fisherman; boat-building activities may be in the hands of still another man,
recognized as a master boat-builder. To add a further complication to this already
complicated pattern, all positions are subject to change as the composition of the
alliance unit changes.
Social factors provide cohesion to the family-alliance units, whereas work
teams are more often formed for economic reasons. Even when intimately in¬
volved with a unit over an extended period of time, the nuclear family remains
for the most part economically independent of the larger unit. In no sense is the
family-alliance unit corporate. A great deal of borrowing and loaning of such
essentials as food, water, firewood, betel nut, and cigarettes occurs among the
members of a family-alliance unit, but it is all reciprocal. Anyone who borrows
from fellow members too consistently without making loans in return will eventu¬
ally find himself without an alliance unit.
When traveling on fishing trips as an alliance unit, each nuclear family nor¬
mally fishes independently unless the husband has no one in his family to help
him because either his children are too young or his wife has too many demanding
duties. In such a case, he may form a work team with one or two adult males
of the unit. But, if at all possible, each man prefers to fish alone with other
members of his family of procreation, since then he need not divide the catch with
others. During these trips, the boats of the alliance unit moor at a central place
in the fishing grounds, and some of the members fish in smaller boats away trom
the anchorage in family groups or work teams, while others, usually older
females, remain with the houseboats. All return to the boats at night. It a family
does not catch enough fish for immediate consumption, others of the alliance unit
give them fish, but surplus catches which are dried and sold in Bongao are the
personal property of each nuclear family. Certain types of fishing are more
profitably done with several boats, and for these work teams are always formed.
At night, if tides and winds are favorable, Bajau practice spear-fishing with
kerosene lanterns. For such fishing, nuclear-family units accompany one another,
but each in its own boat with its own lantern and claiming its own catch. The
additional lights illuminate more fish, to the benefit of all, and the additional
persons provide companionship as well as protection from outlaws, who occasion¬
ally harass lone Bajau fishermen.
28 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

During the day when the men are fishing away from the houseboats, women
who have not accompanied their husbands usually scavenge the reefs which are
exposed during the low tides. They almost always collect in groups, but whatever
each finds is claimed individually and, unless one member is extremely unlucky
and finds nothing, no division occurs. The women individually collect firewood
in similar groups.
When at one of the five permanent moorages, individual nuclear family units
continue to be economically independent of the others. During stays at such
moorages, men frequently seek additional income and diversion from fishing,
especially if they are not well versed in the fishing techniques of the area, by
making boards from trees in the forests. Bajau men always go to the forest in work
groups, but, once there, each works individually and claims for himself all boards
he cuts. The group provides companionship, as well as occasional assistance, for
the individual and allays his fear of traveling alone in the forest.
Boat-building is normally an individual project, but occasionally a man needs
assistance to help him over a difficult stage of construction or to provide skills,
such as carving, which he does not have. At such times, he calls upon members
of the family-alliance unit to form a work team; unless their assistance is needed
for a long time, these members expect no payment for their services beyond
reciprocal favors. A man with little talent for boat-building, or a young, inex¬
perienced man, sometimes must depend upon members of his alliance unit to
construct his entire boat. In this case, the owner provides all materials for the boat
and does whatever work he can under the direction of the master boat-builder;
in addition, he may be expected to provide sustenance for some of the workers
during this period. All depends upon the closeness of the relationship between the
men. Most men closely related to the boat-owner would demand no payment, but
would certainly feel no qualms about seeking reciprocity from him in a time of
their own need. He would, of course, be obligated to give such assistance. On rare
occasions, two or three men of an alliance unit may form a work team to construct
a boat to sell, in which case profits are equally divided.
Unlike economic activities, Bajau ceremonies usually demand the participation
of the entire alliance unit, and sometimes of more distantly related kinsmen. In
fact, besides the obvious functions connected with marriage, healing, and initia¬
tion, the chief effect of Bajau ceremonies is to congregate the otherwise dispersed
Bajau households. Only for ceremonies do large groupings of Bajau houseboats
moor at a single moorage.
The simplest Bajau ceremonies are performed alone by the nuclear family. If
the family happens to be in the vicinity of the cemetery islands, some members
may visit family graves to leave small offerings of betel nut or cigarettes to a
recently deceased relative. Sometimes the offering is left out of thoughtfulness for
the deceased, but more commonly it is left to insure that his spirit will not visit
the living with illness or bad luck. A similar ceremony occurs when a Bajau
advertently or inadvertently passes a place known to be the hangout of saitan (evil
spirits). As a placation for having possibly aroused the displeasure of the saitan
The Family Alliance Unit 29

by disturbing their home, the trespassers frequently leave offerings of betel or

cigarettes or small green or white flags (favorite colors of the spirits). A chant may
be recited as the offering is left, but often no formal ritual is involved.
By far the great majority of Bajau ceremonies involve the attendance and
participation of an entire alliance unit. Participation frequently extends well
beyond the alliance unit, but the unit is most actively involved in the planning
and execution of the ceremony. Certain healing ceremonies, which are attended
only by members of an alliance unit, are held in response to serious or prolonged
illnesses. Members of the unit congregate in the houseboat of the patient while
a person familiar with the proper ritual asks the spirits believed to be causing the
illness to refrain from their disease-causing activities. Each unit normally has one
among its members who is familiar with curing rituals, but, if not, an outsider
—almost always a relative—may be asked to conduct the ceremony. The ritual
consists of a simple prayer, made in the presence of burning incense to call the
spirits, and offerings of food. Several types of curing ceremonies are observed by
the Bajau, depending upon the illness, but all initially involve only members of
the alliance unit. If the ceremony is the first for the illness, and if the illness is
not particularly serious, some members of the unit may feel it unnecessary to
attend. However, the more serious the illness—especially the illness of an adult
—the more members of the unit attend. And in a case of the critical illness of
an adult, all adult members of the unit attend—partly out of real concern for the
patient and partly out of fear that, in the event of his death, his spirit may punish
those persons who have acted unconcerned with his fate.
One type of Bajau curing ceremony, the magtimbang (literally, ‘to scale' or ‘to
weigh’), involves considerably more persons than are in the family-alliance unit,
although unit members plan and execute it. In the event of a serious illness, close
relatives of the patient may promise the disease-causing spirits to hold a magtim¬
bang if the afflicted is allowed to survive. If the patient recovers, the ceremony
is held shortly thereafter. A pole, about twelve feet long, with a sling at either
end, is tied at the center to a rope which, in turn, is fastened to a brace erected
on the boat for this special purpose. The patient sits in one of the slings, while
goods, such as bananas, sugar cane, and firewood, are placed in the other end to
balance his weight. The entire pole is then turned several times to the chant of
a religious leader and then returned to its original position; the patient is then
removed from the sling, and the goods are distributed to the relatives who have
attended the ceremony. Although the family-alliance unit of the recovered patient
plans the ceremony and contributes to the goods, anyone in the moorage is free
to attend, and most relatives of the patient are expected to do so.
The ear-piercing operation performed on all girls, usually during infancy, is
normally attended only by the family-alliance unit and other close relatives—
siblings or parents of the child’s parents. The ceremony probably once had
religious significance but now consists only of a minor operation performed by
an older person, usually a woman of the alliance unit who is experienced in such
matters. An older man familiar with religious lore usually sits in to chant a prayer
30 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

to insure good luck and health for the child. Almost all female members of the
alliance unit attend the ceremony, but most male members, except the father of
the child and other adult males of her household, usually do not attend.
The magislam ceremony is held for boys when they reach adolescence. The
ceremony is patterned after the circumcision of some land-dwelling peoples of
Sulu, but the operation involves a mere knicking of the foreskin, incision rather
than true circumcision. The celebration may involve only the family-alliance unit,
or, if very elaborate, may extend to include additional relatives, or even nonrela¬
tives. If the family is poor or simply does not care to spend the money for an
elaborate celebration, the ceremony is a small affair held in the family boat.
Persons who are not unit members may attend, such as siblings or first cousins
of the boy’s parents, and unit members are usually there. Some play music before,
during, and after the brief ceremony, while others, especially girls, may dance on
the boat, which may be decorated. Both men and women of the unit assist in
bathing and dressing the boy. Often, the older man who performs the simple
operation is a member of the family-alliance unit; if not, he is a relative of the
boy. More elaborate ceremonies include a distribution of rice or sugar, or both,
to the entire moorage, with music and dancing on the reef or nearby beach
throughout the afternoon and evening hours, during which betel nut and ciga¬
rettes are provided to all adult guests. Such elaborate ceremonies may involve
considerable cost, and, although the father of the boy is expected to bear the main
expense of the celebration, he sometimes will call upon relatives to assist in
financing a large celebration. His own and his wife’s siblings usually contribute
equal shares to the celebration, regardless of whether they are members of his
present family-alliance unit, since all probably have been in the past and will be
again in the future. All share some of the limelight of the elaborate affair, and
all expect reciprocity for their sons’ magislams or when they seek a wife for one
of their boys. Rarely are contributions asked from relatives more distantly related
than siblings of the boy’s parents.
A boy depends almost completely upon his kinsmen in obtaining a wife. Even
if he should elope and thereby avoid a large brideprice, a settlement nonetheless
must be paid which he normally does not have, since whatever money he may
have earned is part of the family savings. Because most nuclear families are unable
to afford the usual brideprices of 80 to 100 pesos, they must call upon kinsmen
—siblings of the boy’s parents—to assist. And, even if the boy’s family could
afford to pay the entire price, tradition would demand that others be asked for
some assistance. In one case, the groom's family, being poor, paid less toward the
brideprice than any of the other contributors; in another case, the groom’s family
paid more than 75 percent of the total, with the remainder shared by the eight
siblings of the groom’s parents. Both cases are unusual, and most fall somewhere
between these two extremes. As in all Bajau social and economic relations,
reciprocity is the keynote to the event. One always contributes to a brideprice
what one has received from that family for a past brideprice or magislam.
Division of the brideprice received by the bride’s family follows lines similar
The Family Alliance Unit 31

to those by which it was collected among the groom’s family; that is, it is parceled
out to the siblings of the bride’s parents, with the parents normally receiving the
largest share. Division among the parent’s siblings is determined by the amounts
they have contributed to past family ceremonies, but, if family quarrels have
separated some siblings, they are no longer included in the social activities of the
group. It is not unusual for a man to contribute to a brideprice and then a day
or so later receive a share, possibly larger than his original contribution, from the
same brideprice. This would, of course, be the case if the bride and groom were
first cousins; the actual transfer of goods and money usually occurs, even though
a good deal of it may return to the donors.
As the preceding discussion reveals, a family with only sons has considerably
more expenses than a family with only females; boys require money for both
circumcision and marriage, whereas girls have no comparable expenses. The
Bajau recognize this disequilibrium, but generally feel that the nearly equal
number of males and females in the kin group balances it over time—which it
does. But, nonetheless, a family with many sons is a drain on its kinsmen.
Aside from economics, the family-alliance unit has another important function
at marriage. It is considered poor taste for the parents of the bride and groom
to be directly involved in the sometimes sticky business of coming to an agreement
on the brideprice. Consequently, all the negotiation between the two parties is
done by siblings of the parents of the bride and groom. Once the boy has indicated
his choice for his bride or his family has talked him into marrying a particular
girl, adult members of the unit, siblings of his mother or father, or both, visit a
houseboat of the future bride's family-alliance unit—never the boat of the future
bride. At this time, after they have made their proposal to the family, they leave
a gift consisting of family jewelry or other valuables. If the girl’s family is
interested in the proposal, often after long hours of discussion with the girl’s
parents and after her own consent, they return the gift to the houseboat of the
boy’s relatives and announce the price they have decided upon. If they are not
interested in the marriage, they ask an unreasonably high brideprice, which the
boy’s family usually interprets as a rejection of the proposal. But, even if the
proposed brideprice is a reasonable one, the boy’s family may try to bargain the
price down. Eventually an agreement is reached between the two parties, but at
no time are the parents of the couple or the bride and groom present at the actual
meeting, although the parents do take an active part in the discussions prelimi¬
nary to the meetings. Once the brideprice has been paid, the marriage can be held.
Arrangements for the entire affair are made by the members of the alliance units
and other siblings of the prospective parents-in-law. Bride, groom, and their
parents continue to have insignificant roles in making the arrangements.
The death of an adult Bajau also demands the participation of the family-
alliance unit, as well as any other relatives who may be in the vicinity. After an
initial display of grief and mourning by the deceased’s alliance unit, the more
responsible members conduct the funeral activities. An older person, normally an
uncle or older in-law of the deceased (female, if the dead person is female), washes
32 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

the body and prepares it for burial. Throughout the night following death, a wake
is held in honor of the dead man. In the case of an adult death,, most adults of
the moorage visit the funeral boat during the night to chant prayers and sing
mourning songs; if the deceased is a child, normally only close relatives, such as
siblings of the parents, attend the wake. The following morning the body is taken
to the cemetery islands for burial. The number and composition of the entourage
of mourners vary greatly; in an infant’s death, only a couple of boats with
members of the family-alliance unit may attend, whereas the death of an adult
may be mourned by a dozen boats, with relatives of second and third degrees of
collaterally also in attendance. As with all Bajau ceremonies, the alliance unit
initiates the activities and invites less intimate relatives, or even nonrelatives, to
attend the formal ceremony.
Death does not involve a great deal of expense to the survivors, although some
outlays of cash are necessary. Most important, a shroud of white cloth must be
purchased. Usually, the immediate nuclear family of the deceased has the neces¬
sary cash, but, if not, members of the family-alliance unit contribute to the
purchase of the cloth. Some families provide food for the mourners who accom¬
pany the corpse to the burial islands; in such case, the family-alliance unit makes
a contribution, although, if the nuclear family of the deceased is fairly well off,
it may pay all the expenses.
Interpersonal relations within the family-alliance unit vary greatly, of course,
depending upon the intimacy and duration of the contact between members, the
relationships of the members, and individual personality factors. Nonetheless,
some generalizations may be made. Normally the sibling tie remains strong even
after marriage, although it tends to weaken as one’s own children attain adult¬
hood and marriage, to form their own alliance units. Circumstances may separate
siblings for months or years, but, even after such separation, the sibling tie may
be reactivated. During the early months and years of marriage the sibling tie
occasionally overrides the marital bond; I observed many family quarrels in
which a spouse sided with a sibling rather than his mate, and, on the other hand,
I have heard individuals being chastised by siblings because they have defended
mates rather than siblings. However, as the marriage bond lengthens and loyalties
are more completely transferred to spouses, the sibling bond weakens. Unin¬
volved unit members act as mediators in the event of serious quarrels between
spouses or other persons of the unit. If differences cannot be resolved, families
sometimes break from one unit to join another, either in the same or in a different
moorage.
Among the adult members of the alliance unit, patterns of friendship and
intimacy follow sex lines; that is, females form close friendships among them¬
selves, as do the males among themselves. Two types of sibling “in-law” relation¬
ships are recognized by the Bajau, namely, the relationship between a man and
his sibling’s spouse or the relationship between a man and his spouse’s sibling (the
ipal relationship), and the relationship between two persons married to siblings
(the bilas relationship). The nature of the relationship varies greatly among
The Family Alliance Unit 33

individuals, with the most significant variables, perhaps, being compatibility and
the duration of the relationship. Persons who get along and work well together
tend to remain in the same alliance unit and work team for long periods of time,
perhaps until they break off to form alliances with their own married children.
In such cases, intimate relationships develop, which may even override sibling ties
on some occasions. Two men who are married to sisters and belong to the same
alliance unit over a long period of time develop sentiments and reciprocal rela¬
tionships not unlike those between siblings. The same is true for men in the ipal
relationship, as it is, of course, also for females.
On the other hand, siblings may, for reasons mentioned earlier, form different
alliances and never act together in the same unit. Even in such cases, obligations
for mutual assistance are always present; but sentiments between siblings often
weaken in favor of persons more intimately involved in their everyday lives. Also,
family quarrels sometimes separate siblings for years, or even a lifetime.
Relationships among children of an alliance unit are determined by the same
variables. First cousins reared within a single alliance unit form almost siblinglike
relationships, whereas those who never act together in a single alliance unit feel
little intimacy. Illustrative of this is the belief among the Bajau that first cousins
who have been intimately reared together are improper marriage-partners,
whereas those who have been reared separately may be married without qualms,
unless they are patrilineal, parallel cousins.1

NOTES

1. Such marriages are believed to be incestuous because cousins in this relationship are considered
to be as closely related as siblings. The implication is that children created by the semen of brothers
are siblinglike, whereas children born of two sisters or of a brother and sister, are less closely related
because females are more passive in conception and merely provide a receptacle for the development
of the fetus which is implanted by the male. The prohibition has no significant structural influence
on Bajau society, since many such marriages do occur and are legitimized by performing a brief
ceremony which includes throwing some object of minor value into the sea.
 5. The Localized Kindred

Dakampungan has two meanings among the Bajau. In its most general mean¬
ing, it is the totality of ego’s relatives, as traced lineally and collaterally through
his male and female progenitors—the so-called generalized kindred. But, in a
more restricted sense, it means the group of cognatic kinsmen or a group of
related family-alliance units who regularly tie up together at a moorage. To avoid
confusion, I shall call the first, most general, group a generalized kindred and
refer to the second, more restricted, group as a localized kindred.
Theoretically, the generalized kindred could be extended indefinitely to all
related persons, and in such a theoretical consideration one could probably speak
of all the Tawi-Tawi Bajau as members of one generalized kindred. Such a
generalized kindred, of course, never meets as a social group and has little
function other than to generate sentiments of obligation and reciprocity among
its members, by virtue of their being recognized as kinsmen to one another.
Consequently, except as a term for describing the totality of one’s relatives, the
generalized kindred has little meaning for the Bajau.
The localized kindred, however, is quite a different matter, and the boat¬
dwelling Bajau of Tawi-Tawi recognize about seven such groups among them¬
selves. Obviously, these localized kindred are not closed kin groups, since every
member has kin ties which extend into other groups, either in the same or in a
different moorage. And, except for the sedentary core of people found at each
Bajau moorage, membership in the groups is constantly changing as families
move in and out of the moorage. Each is identified by a headman, or panglima,
who is considered leader of the groups as well as by the moorage where the
majority of its boats are normally found. A single, localized kindred may consti¬
tute an entire Bajau moorage, or a moorage may harbor two or three such
localized groups.
If a Bajau’s mother and father are from different localized kindreds, matters
of circumstance usually determine to which he belongs. Or, quite conceivably, he
may never find it necessary to state membership in one or the other, but simply
use each at his convenience. Most often, though, he comes to identify more closely
with one than the other because of the residential preferences of his parents. And,
upon marriage he may choose to identify with his wife’s localized kindred, which
may or may not be different from his own. Two important leads in discovering
a Bajau’s kin affiliations are his participation in the maggomboh ceremony, a

34
The Localized Kindred 35

first-fruits celebration held during the dry-rice harvest season which theoretically
involves all members of a generalized kindred, and the man he recognizes as the
headman of the localized kindred.
Bajau kin relationships are vividly demonstrated in the maggomboh (from
omboh, meaning 'grandparent' or 'ancestor') ceremony which is held each year,
usually in July or August. Each household head acquires dry rice from land¬
dwelling Samal farmers or from other Bajau who raise their own small plots. The
rice, having been pounded by the women to remove the husk, is put in a specially
made basket which is placed at the bow of the houseboat. That night members
of the household sleep with their heads directed toward the rice. The following
morning the rice is cooked, molded into a conical shape in a bowl, and taken by
family members to a central houseboat, where other relatives have assembled with
their own bowls of rice. The bowls—sometimes as many as twenty or thirty—
are placed on the deck of the boat, after which a shaman conducts a brief
ceremony to call the ancestral spirits to partake of the rice and to bless the living
with good luck and health. Taking small portions of rice from each bowl, he mixes
them in an empty bowl and offers the combined rice to all the children present.
Each family then takes its own bowl of rice home to eat at the next meal. All
families do not hold the ceremony on the same day, and any family may partici¬
pate in any number of ceremonies, so long as they are conducted by relatives. The
ceremony serves to reinforce ties among all living kinsmen (not only members of
a localized kindred), to remind persons of their deceased kinsmen, and to socialize
the children into the kin group. Bajau explain that, if it is not held, illness and
death will occur, or great storms with rough seas, strong winds, and heavy rains
will visit the area.
If one were somehow able to map out all the maggomboh ceremonies of any
one season and the individuals participating in them, he could arrive at the Bajau
definition of the generalized kindred. This ceremony emphasizes even distant
kinsmen. The ceremony is not limited to the Tawi-Tawi Bajau. Some of these
Bajau travel to Sitangkai to participate in the ceremony with kinsmen there, while
the Sitangkai Bajau occasionally travel to Tawi-Tawi for the same reason. Simi¬
larly, Bajau people living near Semporna, Sabah, participate in some of he Sitang¬
kai ceremonies with people from Tawi-Tawi. Groups participating in the
ceremony comprise the bangsa (ethnic group) delimited by these Bajau as their
own, namely, the Bajau of Tawi-Tawi, Sibutu, and Semporna.
Each localized kindred recognizes a panglima whose chief functions are arbi¬
tration and ritual leadership. When disputes cross localized kindred lines, as they
may in moorages where there are several such kindreds, the headman of the
leading localized kindred of the moorage handles the case. The position of head¬
man ideally passes from father to eldest son, but matters of practicality, such as
leadership and wisdom, are more important in determining who holds the posi¬
tion. An old headman in one moorage had several sons, none of whom had
leadership abilities and none of whom was interested in the position. At the old
headman's death, the eldest son was acknowledged as the headman and was
36 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

Two Shanghai women pound rice for the maggomboh ceremony, in which the many
members of their generalized kindred will take part.

addressed by the title, but the position was taken over by the younger brother of
the old headman. People gravitated to him because of his natural charisma, and,
before long, with no formal decision or announcement, he was recognized as the
headman of the group. The eldest son of the deceased headman did not object,
because he was not interested in the position. Practical considerations of this sort
probably more often determine succession than ideal patterns of inheritance.
The headman ideally settles all disputes in the localized kindred, collects fines,
and sometimes solemnizes weddings. In reality, his participation in these events
is often minor, although his presence at a dispute seems to give official recognition
to the disagreement. He may collect fines from offenders, but often the persons
involved refuse to accept his decision and eventually settle the argument among
themselves. Any fines which he does succeed in collecting, he usually divides with
the offended party. I never saw nor heard of any instance when the decision of
the headman was enforced against someone’s will. If a man arouses too much
antipathy in a moorage, he simply moves on to another and returns after several
months have allowed the incident to be forgotten. If a case is particularly difficult,
the headman may call in other older men to act as advisers, while serious prob¬
lems are taken to law-enforcement officials in Bongao; however, the Bajau usually
avoid such officials, most of whom they do not trust.
The Localized Kindred 37

Only in extreme cases is the headman called upon to settle disputes, since most
disagreements within a family-alliance unit are settled by the members, them¬
selves. Thus, disputes brought to the headman are usually those which cross
alliance units.
The position of headman carries certain social prestige, though not a great deal
of wealth. Any wealth a headman may succeed in accumulating is usually
through his efforts at fishing or some other such activity, and not through his
duties as headman. Frequently, fines are not paid even when levied, and, when
they are paid, the normally small amounts must always be divided with the
offended party. In general, headmen have very little power, and it would be
difficult for them to exert it, even if they so desired. The mobile nature of the
scattered individual Bajau families discourages the development of any strong,
central political authority. If any headman should become inordinately demand¬
ing, in all likelihood, the persons under him would simply move to another
moorage and a more tolerant headman.
Title, alone, does not necessarily identify a headman, since the title is often
extended to any older man as a term of respect for his age and wisdom. In
addition, certain Bajau men have been given appointments as headmen through
the office of the sultan in Jolo because of special favors they have done for local
politicans. Consequently, any single moorage may have several men who have
been appointed at various times as headman, in addition to the traditionally
recognized headman. However, these political appointees rarely press their
claims, since most do not understand or care about the nature of their appoint¬
ments.
Besides the headman, each localized kindred has a number of other specialists
who perform primarily for members, but whose services may extend beyond the
group—especially if their talents have gained some renown. These roles often
overlap, however; for example, three headmen in Tawi-Tawi are also recognized
as outstanding shamans, and one enjoys local renown as an excellent boat-builder.
The anambar, a herb-doctor, has knowledge of the use of certain plants in the
treatment of wounds, headaches, stomach disorders, and other such ailments.
Normally, an ill person is first treated by such a person, but, if the illness persists,
then the shaman is called for further treatment. Some shamans are only casual
practitioners who rarely perform beyond their own alliance units, whereas others
are full-time specialists, who practice even among the land-dwelling Samal and
Taosug and enjoy considerable fame throughout Tawi-Tawi. Most shamans fall
somewhere between the two extremes. All localized kindred number several
shamans among their members who are called upon whenever there is need for
their services. Those most closely related are consulted first, but, should the illness
persist, a famous, although unrelated, shaman may be consulted. Shamans rarely
charge close relatives for the services, although they may charge considerable to
nonrelatives—especially non-Bajau. Each family-alliance unit usually has at least
one woman who acts as midwife, but, within each localized kindred, several older
women are recognized as expert midwives, who are consulted in the event of
difficult childbirth. Some men who call themselves imam (Islamic ritual leaders)
38 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

have learned some Arabic chants and are asked to chant at curing ceremonies,
funerals, or weddings. Only four such men are found among the Tawi-Tawi
Bajau, and they all belong to a single localized kindred. As the Bajau become
more Islamic, such men will, no doubt, become more numerous and will achieve
greater importance. Most localized kindred also have several men recognized as
wood-carvers. These men do the carvings on new boats and on grave markers.
Like the shamans, they never charge close relatives for their services, although
they usually receive some compensation from distantly related persons and espe¬
cially from nonkinsmen. Expert boat-builders, too, are frequently called upon by
members of their localized kindreds to assist in building or to build an entire boat;
except when assisting closely related persons, these men are usually paid for their
work.
Although the localized kindred never meets as a group, most of its members
come together in the event of an important wedding, curing ceremony, or inci¬
sion. In no sense is it a corporate group, nor is it a descent group. The meagre
property of the Bajau is always held by individuals or individual families; descent
is of little importance in Bajau society and is called upon only in selection of a
headman, and, as noted earlier, even in this case more practical considerations
than lineage come into play.
Members of both the generalized and the localized kindreds are identified by
kinship terms that reflect the cognatic principle of organization. Besides genera¬
tional groupings and consanguinal-affinal groupings, the only persons within the
generalized kindred who are distinguished by distinct kin terms are members of
the nuclear family. The kin terms which identify them are extended beyond the
nuclear family only in very special cases, for example, intimate friendships where
nuclear-family kin terms may be used in address or reference. The dispute regard¬
ing the degree to which kinship terminology reflects society has yet to be resolved,
but the distinctive terms for the nuclear family reflect its basic and independent
role in Bajau society. Furthermore, the lack of terminological distinction between
father’s and mother’s relatives is in keeping with the cognatic nature of Bajau
society.
Bajau kin terms are a combination of the so-called Eskimo- and Hawaiian-type
systems. Ego terminologically distinguishes his mother and father from their
siblings, and parents’ siblings are called by male and female terms which are
extended collaterally to all relatives of their generation. A single term (the same
term used for ancestors) is used for all relatives in the second and subsequent
ascending generations from ego. Within his own generation, ego distinguishes
siblings from cousins and further distinguishes collaterality of counsinship by
suffixing “first,” “second,” “third,” and so forth, to the term. Ego’s own children
are distinguished from nephews and nieces, although the term for nephew or niece
is extended to the offspring of anyone in ego’s generation. All persons in the
second and subsequent descending generations from ego are addressed by a single
term. Persons married to ego’s spouse’s siblings are called by a term which is also
extended to include all persons married to kinsmen of ego’s spouse’s generation.
The Localized Kindred 39

Persons married to ego’s siblings and collateral consanguines of his generation are
called by a single term, as are those persons married to ego’s consanguines of
descending generations (including his own children’s spouses). Ego calls all
afhnes in ascending generations by a single term. Excepting the terms for mother
and father and uncle and aunt, all Bajau kin terms are neuter; sex may be
indicated by adding the proper suffix. An older term, less often used, makes no
sexual distinction between mother’s and father’s collaterals.
Bajau kinship terms are predominantly classificatory. The grandparental and
ascending generations are called by a single term. At one time, all members of
ego’s parents’ generation (excluding the parents) were called by a single term;
now, division occurs along sex lines. Excluding his own children, all members of
the first descending generation from ego are called by a single term, as are all
members of the second and descending generations. Affines are lumped even
more. A single term describes all affines in ascending generations from ego, while
another term describes all affines in descending generations from ego. All affines
married to consanguines of ego’s generation are called by one term.
 6. The Moorage

Although Bajau dwellings are not land-based or sedentary, the Bajau moorages
are similar to villages, in that they are places where some Bajau are found all the
time, the number depending upon factors discussed earlier.
In each of the five Bajau moorages in Tawi-Tawi, one localized kindred is
recognized as the first, or leading, kin group. In most cases, this first group is the
one that originally began mooring at the place. Others who began to moor there
later recognized the priority of the first group. Tungkalang and Luuk Tulai have
two localized kindreds; Tungbangkao has three; while tiny Lioboran and Lamiun
have one each. Certain rights and prestige are enjoyed by these “first families.”
In the event of quarrels, others are often chastized as being outsiders, even though
they may have moored there for many years. The headman of the original group
is recognized as headman of the moorage, and, although each localized kindred
calls upon its own headman for problems within the group, any quarrels which
cross group lines are taken to the moorage headman. And should it be necessary
for the moorage to be represented at a celebration in a land village, the headman
of the first localized kindred would attend.
Lamium illustrates how Bajau moorages are founded. This moorage consists
almost exclusively of the married sons and daughters of two brothers and their
female first cousin, who began to moor at the place ten years ago after having been
frightened from a nearby village of land-dwellers. The moorage is identified
among Bajau as the home place of this localized kindred, even though a consider¬
able number of other Bajau have begun to moor there. Eventually, several other
localized kindreds will probably emerge at Lamium if the present trend continues,
but the founding group will be considered the natives of the moorage, and their
headman will continue to be headman of the moorage.
A shift in power occurred between two localized kindreds at Tungkalang. The
original localized kindred in that moorage was led by a headman who had enjoyed
great renown as a good leader in his younger days. His siblings were equally well
known; one was an outstanding magician, another a powerful shaman, another
an expert boat-builder, and still another, an excellent fisherman. When I first met
the family in 1963, they were living on past laurels, and most were old and
somewhat senile. The headman, himself, had only one daughter; one of his
brothers had eight children; and the other siblings had only one or two children
each. None of the younger generation had the skills or charisma of their parents.

40
The Localized Kindred 41

Some four years before my arrival, a localized kindred from a moorage now
dispersed had moved to Tungkalang. The adults of the new group were much as
the leaders of the old group must have been when they were young—extremely
competent in a number of skills, with outstanding abilities in leadership. The new
localized kindred, in acknowledgment of the priority of the first group, paid the
proper respect to the old headman. At his death they recognized the ascendancy
of his oldest nephew to the position. The nephew, unfortunately, was not qua¬
lified; he was unlearned in traditional law, had poor judgment, and in general
lacked the ingredients of a good leader. After a few rather pathetic cases, it
became apparent to the moorage that the man was not a proper headman. No
one else in his family fared better than he, so the moorage’s inhabitants began to
look elsewhere for someone to settle their disputes. The headman of the recently
arrived kin group was still faily young—perhaps forty—but well-versed in Bajau
tradition and a competent leader of his own localized kindred. Before long,
persons began to seek his advice on problems, and, by the time I left the moorage
in 1967, he was recognized as the headman of the moorage, and his kin group
was considered the leading localized kindred. The older members of the original
localized kindred revealed some resentment at the shift in power, but realized that
they had failed to provide a competent leader for the moorage. The nephew of
the deceased headman continued to act as headman of his localized kindred, but
his position of moorage leadership was lost.
In all localized kindreds in the moorage, three different types of households are
discernible—namely, sedentary, seminomadic, and nomadic. A nucleus of boats
which rarely leave the moorage forms the stable element of the population around
which the other boats are clustered. Generally, these households are composed
of the immediate family of the moorage headman, married couples of which both
are natives of the moorage, families who are predominantly agriculturalists, and
those who are involved in some other nonfishing activity. The second group, the
seminomads, are usually fishermen whose residence in the moorage is determined
by the phases of the moon, or others who, for various reasons discussed earlier,
are in the moorage only part-time. The third and smallest group, the nomads,
usually moor at the fringes of the moorage and are seldom in any moorage for
longer than a couple of weeks at a time. Also included in this last group are those
persons passing through the moorage en route to some other destination.
The moorage may be viewed as three concentric circles, the innermost circle
being the sedentary population, the second circle the seminomads, and the third
the nomads. Overlaying these concentric circles are the localized kindreds.
Within these localized-kindred boundaries, the family-alliance units may be con¬
sidered as a series of smaller circles, not concentric, but overlapping one another
and overlaying the three major concentric circles, since a family-alliance unit
often consists of sedentary persons, seminomads, and sometimes even nomads.
Also, any single member of an alliance unit may at some other time belong to
a number of other alliance units in the moorage, conceivably in a different
localized kindred. If another dimension is added to the above circles, it is possible
42 The Boat-dwelling Bajau

to illustrate how the alliance units of one moorage extend to and include members
of other moorages, thereby revealing the web of kinship ties which connect the
five Tawi-Tawi Bajau moorages.
Ideally, social stratification in a Bajau moorage follows a pyramidal structure
which ignores localized-kindred affiliation. At the top of the pyramid is the
headman; on the second step are the spritual leaders, the healers, and the magi¬
cians; on the third step are the permanent residents of the moorage, followed on
the fourth step by the seminomads, and ending on the fifth with the true nomads.
However, this stratification is artificial in that it fails to account for the many
exceptions. For instance, a seminomadic man, because of his success as a commer¬
cial fisherman, may have considerable wealth, which, coupled with a strong
personality, may make him one of the most influential persons in the moorage.
Similarly, a very old man, although recognized as the moorage headman, may be
mostly disregarded by the moorage dwellers because of his senility. Some of the
seminomadic commercial fishermen, even though they may be wealthier than
some permanent residents of the moorage, may be considered somewhat inferior
because of their transitory position in the moorage. Likewise, many an imam or
shaman, whose position has high status, leads a seminomadic life. A sense of
prestige is rapidly becoming associated with house-living, and a corresponding
sense of inferiority, with boat-living. This will, no doubt, be a strong influence in
accelerating the move to houses within the next few years as more sea folk
embrace house-dwelling.
Only on two occasions do the several localized kindreds of the moorage act as
a unit: (1) during a ceremony to rid the moorage of disease-causing spirits, and
(2) during a communal fish drive, held most commonly in the Bilatan waters.
Although a large wedding celebration may attract the entire moorage to the
evening activities, the affair is sponsored by one or two localized kindreds and not
the entire moorage; most guests are simply passive observers. The curing cere¬
mony and the fish drive cut across localized-kindred lines and involve active
participation and planning by almost all moorage members.
During periods of much illness, death, or unusually bad luck, a ceremony is
held to rid the moorage of the evil spirits believed to be causing the misfortune.
This probably occurs no more than once or twice a year. Each family contributes
a small amount of money or goods toward the construction of a small boat to
carry away the trouble: one family may provide a sail, another bamboo outriggers,
another food offerings, and so forth. Members of the moorage representing the
several localized kindred then construct the boat and place offerings on it. The
shamans of the moorage from the several localized kindreds pull the boat through
the moorage while chanting to attract the disease-causing spirits. After they have
traveled through the moorage waters, the boat is taken to the open sea and set
adrift, in the belief that the disease-causing spirits have been attracted to the boat
and will drift away from the moorage with it.
The communal fish drives held especially at Tungbangkao also involve the
active participation of most members of the moorage as well as any Bajau fisher-
The Localized Kindred 43

man who may be fishing nearby. As mentioned, during the neap tides fish are
attracted to the Bilatan reefs for feeding. When weather conditions permit—
usually about four or five times a year—the moorage men and boys, and some¬
times a few women, leave the moorage in as many as a hundred boats to entrap
the fish in nets. Certain men, recognized as expert fishermen, act as leaders, and
the catch is divided equally among the participants. Although most of the partici¬
pants are related, kinship in itself is not a prerequisite for joining the drive.
Because of the kinship ties and frequent movement among the moorage mem¬
bers, in many respects all five Tawi-Tawi Bajau moorages represent a single
community. Moorages in close proximity naturally have more contacts together
than with distant moorages. Frequent—indeed, daily—communication exists be¬
tween Luuk Tulai and Tungkalang, as well as between Tungkalang and Lamiun,
and Tungbangkao and Lioboran. Contacts between the Sanga-Sanga moorages
and the Bilatan moorages are less frequent, but, as indicated earlier, the rich
fishing grounds and the burial islands attract many of the Sanga-Sanga Bajau to
Bilatan. Bajau from Tungbangkao or Lioboran, who have several days’ business
in Bongao town, generally moor their boats at Tungkalang, since many are afraid
of possible maltreatment from the non-Bajau population in Bongao. As a result,
Tungkalang often has a large transient population.
The Tawi-Tawi Bajau recognize the Sitangkai Bajau as members of their
bangsa, or ethnic group, but view the Bajau of Siasi, Jolo, and Zamboanga as a
different, albeit closely related, group. Kinship ties verify the Bajau view; many,
and significant, kinship ties connect the Tawi-Tawi and Sitangkai Bajau, whereas
few and insignificant ties extend northward to Siasi and Jolo.
 Part Two

THE HOUSE-DWELLING BAJAU

OF SITANGKAI
 7. Habitat

Twenty miles southwest of Tawi-Tawi Island is the Sibutu Island group, home
of the most Islamicized Bajau in Sulu. These Bajau, concentrated in the adminis¬
trative center of Sitangkai, are more closely related to the Tawi-Tawi Bajau
through kinship and other cultural features than to any other group of Bajau,
excepting perhaps those of Semporna. The scant evidence indicates that the
ancestors of the Tawi-Tawi Bajau once lived in their houseboats in the Sibutu
Islands. Long before any of the Sibutu Bajau built houses, a small group of Bajau
apparently migrated to the Tawi-Tawi Islands, while the remainder continued
their boat-dwelling way of life in the Sibutu Islands until twenty-five years ago,
when they began to move into houses.
About thirty miles from Borneo, the Sibutu Islands are the southernmost
islands in the Republic of the Philippines. Low coral islands unsuited for little
agriculture except copra production, all are plagued with perennial shortages of
drinking water. Sibutu, the largest island, is only sixteen and one half miles long,
with a maximum breadth of two and one half miles, and, except for one hill which
rises 448 feet, is only a few feet above sea level. A narrow channel about three
miles wide separates Sibutu from Tumindao Island, the second largest island of
the group. Other important islands in the area include Sitangkai, the commercial
and administrative center of Sibutu; Tanduwak, a tiny island off the southern tip
of Sibutu and host to a Bajau village;Siculan, site of the only lighthouse in the
islands; Sipangkot, home of a village of land-dwelling Samal; and Omapoi, the
northernmost Bajau village in the islands (see Map 3). All the islands of the
archipelago are low, only a few hundred yards in extent, and surrounded by reefs
which are bared at low tide.
South and west of the islands, extensive reefs support an incredibly rich marine
life, to make the Sibutu Islands one of the most lucrative fishing grounds in Sulu
—indeed, in all the Philippines. Because of these reefs, most of the waters sur¬
rounding the Sibutu Islands are calm and gentle, with an exception in the north¬
ern portion of Sibutu Island, which is protected by only a narrow, fringing reef.
The extensive reefs make it unnecessary for the Bajau to travel to the open sea
for fish, and they are consequently the most confirmed reef-fishermen of all the
Sulu Bajau.
Until fairly recent times, the Sibutu Islands were inhabited exclusively by
Samal-speakers, who even today probably represent more than 90 percent of the

47
48 The House-dwelling Bajau

population. The remaining 10 percent consists mostly of Taosug, and a few

Chinese and northern Filipinos.
The prehistory of the islands is virtually unknown. Earliest written reports of
the area are by American administrators who first went to the islands at the turn
of this century. The Spaniards never had settlements beyond Bongao, and, al¬
though scouting parties doubtless visited the Sibutu Islands, they left no known
records of their observations. Consequently, the islands were almost completely
bypassed by the mainstreams of Western activity in Southeast Asia until fairly
recent years. The first written accounts of the islands mention two groups of
people—one living in boats on the sea and one living in houses on the land.
In the early days of this century, flotillas of boat-dwelling Banjau regularly
Habitat 49

moored at Bolong-Bolong, Andulingan, Omapoi, and Tanduwak, while large

communities of land-dwelling Samal were at Sibutu, Tumindao, Tandobanuk,
and Tungnehat (see Map 3). Before the recent commercial contacts with the
outside world, the two peoples apparently carried on a symbiotic relationship,
with the boat-dwellers trading their fish and sea products for the cassava and few
fruits of the land-dwellers. Today the traditional specializations persist, although
some Bajau have abandoned fishing and some land-dwellers of Sibutu Island have
gained renown throughout Sulu as master launch-builders. Besides their different
sea and land orientations, religious differences also have traditionally separated
the groups: the Bajau continued to follow their native religious practices long
after the land people were converted to Islam.
Politically, the islands were a part of the Sulu sultanate and were governed by
several hereditary datu directly responsible to the sultan, who ruled locally over
village headmen. It is unclear how the Bajau fit into this political structure. The
first official Bajau panglima was appointed by the Sultan in about 1920, but before
that the datu periodically demanded tribute from the boat-dwelling people. The
boat-dwellers were, however, never directly involved in the affairs of the sulta¬
nate.
At the beginning of this century, the tiny, uninhabited island of Sitangkai was
used as a Bajau burial ground. The nearest Bajau moorage was at Bolong-Bolong,
about a mile north, while other Bajau moorages were located at Andulingan,
Omapoi, and Tanduwak. According to local lore, some time around 1900, a
Chinese man from Borneo, named Bua, visited the Sibutu Islands to investigate
the possibility of setting up a small trading store in Sitangkai. Well knowing that
the success of his venture depended upon his contacts with the Bajau, Bua
cultivated close friendships with the nearby Bolong-Bolong Bajau, as he traded
his manufactured goods for their dried fish. His business attracted a few land¬
dwelling Samal from Sibutu, and, before long, half a dozen houses were strung
along the eastern side of Sitangkai Island. Soon the population was further
increased as the Bolong-Bolong boat-dwellers began to moor regularly at Sitang¬
kai. More land-dwelling Samal moved to Sitangkai, and more Bajau boats began
to moor there, so that by 1905, when the first American administrator arrived
in the Sibutu Islands, Sitangkai was regarded as the commercial center of the
archipelago, with about twenty-five houses and a sizable flotilla of Bajau
houseboats. During the same year, the first mayor of the Sibutu Islands was
appointed by the American administration; before that time the islands had been
ruled by the old datu under the watchful eye of the United States Army in
Bongao. In 1915, the first school was built in Sitangkai, and an American customs
officer regularly lived in the settlement. The village continued to attract more
Bajau and land-dwelling Samal, as well as a few Taosug families from Jolo. The
present wharf was built in the mid-1930s to facilitate the loading and unloading
of the interisland steamers, which some years before had made Sitangkai a port
of call, to pick up the dried fish of the Chinese fish-buyers. In the late thirties a
few flimsy shacks were the first Bajau houses to appear on the reef in front of the
50 The House-dwelling Bajau

emerging Sitangkai settlement. However, with the outbreak of World War II and
the establishment of a Japanese outpost at Sitangkai, the Bajau returned to their
boats and fled to the more remote islands and reefs, and the Chinese either left
the village also, or died at the hands of the Japanese. As a result, Sitangkai almost
reverted to its former uninhabited state.
With the cessation of hostilities and the reestablishment of peace, the Bajau and
the Chinese merchants returned to Sitangkai. In 1946, an enterprising and
imaginative Bajau headman, named Alari, constructed the first permanent Bajau
house on the reef a thousand feet in front of the landhouses of Sitangkai. It was
an elaborate structure of two stories, with several balconies and ornate carvings
throughout, built largely to display the wealth he had somehow managed to
accumulate. Within months, another Bajau headman, Atari’s rival for leadership
among the Sitangkai Bajau, erected an equally impressive edifice a few hundred
feet from Atari’s original house. Other Bajau began to follow the innovation of
their leaders, and within a short time a small village of Bajau houses was clustered
in front of the Sitangkai land dwellings. The same Alari apparently learned that
house-living per se was not sufficient to qualify him as a respectable member of
Sulu society, so a few years after his house-building experiment, he built the first
Bajau mosque in Sitangkai. He had planned the mosque project for some time,
having in the previous year sent his youngest son to Tawi-Tawi to learn Islamic
ritual from an imam who had earlier befriended Alari. With the son’s return and
with the assistance of friendly land-dwellers of Sitangkai, Alari and his kinsmen
began to learn Islam and to throw off the pagan shackles that had marked them
as outcasts for centuries. Other house-dwelling Bajau observed the metamorpho¬
sis of Alari and his family from outcast pagan boat-dwellers to respectable Mus¬
lim house-dwellers and were sufficiently impressed to join the new Islamic Bajau
community. The move to houses accelerated with such great speed that by 1963,
when I first visited Sitangkai, there were only about thirty families still dwelling
in houseboats. In 1966, when I returned for a longer stay, fewer than a dozen
families were still clinging to the boat-dwelling life, while more than 2,400 Bajau
were living in houses built over the reef.
It is difficult to pinpoint any single reason why the Bajau moved to houses;
rather, a series of events, interacting at an appropriate time, seems responsible for
the movement. The Bajau were apparently first attracted to Sitangkai by the early
Chinese fish-buyers, who offered a ready market for their fish as well as a supply
of essential small manufactured items, such as clothing, fishing supplies, matches,
and tobacco. Hard upon the heels of the Chinese, American administrators
arrived to usher in a period of peace and stability, a rare phenomenon in Sulu,
if early sources are to be believed. The northern islands had long been battlefields
for countless conflicts between the Spaniards and Muslims, and, even before the
arrival of the Spaniards, Sulu history was heavily punctuated with petty wars
between datu attempting to usurp one another’s power. Add to these hostilities
the piracy endemic to the islands for unknown centuries and the occasional
slave-raiders from Borneo, still remembered by Bajau old people, and one may
Habitat 51

glean some notion of the hostilities of the area. Probably this hostility, coupled
with their migratory fishing habits, encouraged the Bajau to live in boats away
from the more heavily populated areas. With the coming of the Americans and
their police powers, Sitangkai became a safe, as well as a convenient, place to live,
so Bajau houseboats began regularly to moor there; as they rested from their
fishing cycles. The intimate contacts with the house-dwellers, as well as Sitang-
kai’s new cash economy encouraged some Bajau to experiment with house-living
and then with Islam. House-living and Islam had always been the hallmarks of
their social superiors, and those first few ambitious Bajau who saw in them a way
out of their traditional outcast, pagan state grasped the opportunity. Their success
spurred others to follow suit, until now, when boat-dwelling pagans have almost
vanished from the Sibutu waters.
The Bajau move to houses was not confined to Sitangkai, although it began
there. The Bajau at Omapoi have almost completely moved to houses, while at
Andulingan and Bolong-Bolong there are no longer villages of any sort, since the
boat-dwellers who formerly moored there now live in houses at Sitangkai. Some
of the boat-dwellers of Tanduwak built houses there, as others moved up to
Tungnehat on the eastern shore of Sibutu, where they constructed houses to form
the second largest Bajau community in Sibutu.
Today Sitangkai is a unique spot in the Philippines and is "blessed with almost
everything a village should not have. The island has no drinking water, so all
water must be caught during the rains or, during droughts, transported from the
brackish wells of Sibutu Island. Two miles of shallow reef water separates the
town from the wharf, and all goods must therefore be moved to and from the large
ships in small boats. Low tides expose surrounding reefs, which completely isolate
the community from sea traffic. And, finally, inadequate, infertile soil on Sitang¬
kai Island discourages any argiculture other than copra production, thereby
necessitating the importation of all agricultural products from elsewhere, mostly
Tawi-Tawi.
Nonetheless, promoters of tourism have labeled it “the Venice of the Philip¬
pines.” And, althouth it is not quite Venice, Sitangkai may warrant the appella¬
tion. A main canal, the continuation of a shallow channel that cuts through the
surrounding reef, roughly divides Sitangkai s 3,400 persons in half. In recent
years, walkways of coral rock have been constructed on either side of the canal;
two elevated bridges, high enough to allow the passage of small motor launches
at high tides, connect the two halves of the village. A large, roofed deck adjoins
one of the bridges, to provide Sitangkai’s elevated counterpart of the village plaza.
On either side of the canal nearby houses are connected by a maze ot bridges and
boardwalks, while more distant houses are unconnected and must depend upon
small boats for access to the main part of town. A few shops are still housed in
the original structures built by the Chinese along the island shore, but most are
scattered on either side of the canal, having moved to sea to join the rest of
Sitangkai’s population. The village boasts two mosques, one tor the Bajau and one
for the non-Bajau, and various branches of a public school, which offers instruc-
52 The House-dwelling Bajau

The main canal in Shanghai, lined mostly with shops, serves as a thoroughfare for the
villagers in their small boats. The walkways on either side of this important passage are made
of coral, rather than the usual wooden slats.

tion through the sixth grade. A small post office and a telegraph office keep the
community in touch with the outside world. Some former land-dwellers reveal
their terrestrial origins in the small gardens they have planted on man-made islets
of coral stone and earth which they have carried from neighboring islands. Others
are content with patios of potted plants. A few enterprising individuals, mostly
Chinese and non-Bajau, have capitalized on Sitangkai’s water shortage by con¬
structing large concrete tanks to store up water during the rainy periods to sell
at often phenomenally high prices during the droughts.
Tides govern most activity within the community. At lowest tides it is impossi¬
ble to move by boat through some sections, while during the highest spring tides,
water occasionally spills over some of the eight-feet-high walkways. Fishermen
normally leave on the receding morning tide and return on the rising evening tide.
Traffic to and from the big boats at the wharf must also await the high tides.
Sitangkai’s economy is based almost exclusively upon fishing. In general, the
Bajau are fishermen who sell their catches to non-Bajau middlemen—mostly
Chinese—who ship them to retail outlets in Mindanao. All the stores and shops
are managed by Chinese and other non-Bajau, while most of the nearby cultivable
islands are planted in copra by land-Samal.
Habitat 53

Sitangkai’s regular contact with the outside world is through the two interis¬
land steamers which call weekly from Zamboanga. In addition, unscheduled
steamers occasionally call, and several motor launches make frequent trips to
Bongao and Semporna in the Darvel Bay of Sabah. Launches regularly move
passengers and goods within the island group, but the.majority of local movement
is still wind- and man-powered.
The Bajau are the largest ethnic group in Sitangkai and represent two-thirds
of the population of 3,400. The second largest group is the land-dwelling Samal,
followed by the Taosug, the Chinese, and the Christian Filipinos.
The Bajau communities in Sibutu have apparently always been more involved
in the political and economic affairs of the land-dwelling Samal than have the
Tawi-Tawi Bajau. This is partly related to the larger size of the Sibutu Bajau
community. In Sitangkai, they represent about 66 percent of the total population,
although this proportion probably falls to about 33 percent when placed in the
context of the entire Situbu Islands population. Nonetheless, the number is
considerably greater than the mere 4 percent which constitutes the Bajau portion
of the Tawi-Tawi population. Thus, in terms of sheer size, the Bajau community
in Sibutu could not be ignored by the land-dwelling population. The symbiosis
noted between the Tawi-Tawi land-dwellers and sea-dwellers is even more pro¬
nounced in Sibutu. This stems partly from the fact that the Sibutu land-dwelling
Samal are more confirmed land-dwellers than are most of their Tawi-Tawi kins¬
men. The Sibutu Islands are claimed almost exclusively by the land-dwellers, and,
even if the Bajau so desired, they could not find land there for agriculture.
The Bajau community in Sibutu has always been more actively involved in the
greater political structure of Sulu. Early visitors to the area (such as Taylor) noted
that the Bajau owed some sort of ill-defined allegiance to certain land-dwelling
datu, who, in return, offered them protection from outside harassment. Old Bajau
informants at Sitangkai still recall the early days of this century when they had
to pay tribute in dried fish to certain datu. The headman Alari, noted earlier for
his important role in initiating the move to houses, was apparently the close friend
of a local datu who wanted to gain the political support of the Bajau community.
Today, the Bajau represent an importaant voting bloc in Sibutu, and no politician
seeking office can ignore them. This is quite a different situation from the one
prevailing in Tawi-Tawi, where the small Bajau community is almost completely
outside the political community of the islands. Obviously, then, the differences
in the sizes of the two Bajau communities are (and apparently always have been)
important variables in their relationships with the land-dwelling people.
The Bajau community of Sitangkai is variously acculturated to Islam. Immedi¬
ate relatives of the Bajau who built the first mosque tend to be the most accul¬
turated, in that they most regularly attend mosque services and three members
of their kin group have made the pilgrimage to Mecca. They also tend to live in
the central portion of Sitangkai, where many have intimate contacts with non-
Bajau. On the other hand, the more recent Bajau arrivals are the least Islamicized,
live at the fringes of the village, and have few intimate contacts with non-Bajau.
Mosque attendance is an important indication of the degree of Islamicization.
54 The House-dwelling Bajau

About one-fourth of the Bajau adult male population attends the mosque services
fairly regularly, whereas that number is no more than one-fifth among the women.
If the men who periodically attend mosque services are added, adult male partici¬
pation rises to almost one-half, while if comparable females are added, their
participation still involves little more than one-fourth of their total population.
Virtually all the remaining Bajau claim to be Muslims, but they rarely attend
mosque services—some are unfamiliar with the ritual, some claim not to have
time, and some are simply not interested. Practically all adults, however, observe
and variously participate in certain Muslim life-cycle ceremonies, which some
members of all Bajau kin groups have adopted. Most of the ceremonies are not
greatly different from those observed by the boat-dwelling Bajau of Tawi-Tawi,
except that they reveal the greater influence of Islam in Sitangkai. The younger
Bajau, who are more Islamicized, conduct the ceremonies while the older people
and less Islamicized younger people observe and assist. Some ceremonies, such
as the magtamat ceremony held when a youth has mastered certain Koranic
chants, are observed only by the most Islamicized Bajau. These ceremonies are
not, of course, found among the Tawi-Tawi Bajau, but are universally observed
by the Muslim population of Sulu.
Monthly fishing cycles of the Sitangkai Bajau, in general, follow those of the
Tawi-Tawi Bajau, except that they are almost completely confined to the sur¬
rounding reefs. The communal fish drives, described for the Tungbangkao Bajau,
are more popular among the Sitangkai Bajau, largely because the myriad reefs
of the area can be most profitably exploited by large groups of fishermen. During
the neap tides, flotillas of often well over a hundred boats leave Sitangkai to fish
the nearby reefs. During the spring tides of the dark moon, fish are netted by
lantern-light in the same manner as in Tawi-Tawi, but, with the waxing of the
new moon, a type of seine-net fishing not found in Tawi-Tawi is practiced. The
full moon normally demands time away from fishing for ceremonies, but those
men who do fish practice net-fishing in nuclear-family units or with one or two
male companions. All men, of course, do not always follow these cycles, and
many prefer individual net-fishing at all times of the month, but, nonetheless, the
above general patterns characterize most Sitangkai fishing.
The Sitangkai Bajau are less mobile than the Tawi-Tawi Bajau, partly because
of their house-dwelling and partly because of the proximity of their homes to rich
fishing grounds. In addition, they do not have to travel for water, since what water
is available in the area is from rain, caught and stored as it flows from the roofs.
Nor must they travel for cassava and other food products, which are always
available in the Sitangkai market. The occasional trips that the Tawi-Tawi people
make to the burial islands are not characteristic of the Sitangkai Bajau, since their
dead are buried on their home island. A cemetery located conveniently between
Tanduwak and Tungnehat eliminates the same trips for Bajau in those moorages.
However, the Omapoi people still use the Sitangkai cemetery and consequently
must make periodic visits to it. A trend toward endogamous marriage character¬
izes the Sitangkai people, who thus have fewer relatives in other Sibutu moorages
Habitat 55

who must be visited. Some Bajau do, however, regularly visit relatives in the
Bajau moorage of Bongau-Bongau, located at the outskirts of Semporna, Sabah,
and apparently founded by Sibutu Bajau. Also, many Bajau families periodically
return to boat-living for extended fishing trips and when it is necessary to spend
several days at wood-working in the Sibutu forests.'
But, in general, the Sibutu Bajau are much less mobile than their Tawi-Tawi
kinsmen, and some are remarkably sedentary, like the several women I met who,
except for brief visits to the very nearby islets, had never left Sitangkai—a far cry
from some of the truly nomadic Tawi-Tawi boat-dwellers, who rarely stay in a
single place longer than a couple of weeks.
 $. The Household

The houses at Sitangkai are, of course, the most glaring difference between
this Bajau community and the Bajau communities of Tawi-Tawi. Further in¬
quiry and observation is necessary to uncover the other, more subtle differ¬
ences between the two groups, but even the most indifferent visitor to Sitang¬
kai cannot help noticing that most of these Bajau are confirmed house-dwell¬
ers.
As houses go in Sulu, the Sitangkai houses are well constructed and reflect
the general prosperity for which the community is noted throughout the ar¬
chipelago. All are built on piles driven into the reef floor. Atop these piles,
most houses are one-story structures, although the two stories, balconies, and
ostentatious carvings of some of the older houses recall a time when families
attempted to outdo one another in elaborateness and ornateness. The houses
vary greatly in size; older houses tend to be larger—some, 80 feet by 40 feet
by 30 feet high at the gable, while some of the more recent ones are only 12
by 20 by 10. Most fall between the two extremes. Except the very poorest
houses, all are roofed with corrugated metal, so that the precious rains can be
most easily caught and stored for drinking water. Walls and floors are either
of commercially-made planks, most of which originate in Zamboanga, or are
hand-cut from local trees. Glass windows are nonexistent, but all houses have
shutters which are closed during inclement weather and in the nighttime
hours. Most houses have extensive, open porches, usually facing to the east,
which are used for outdoor household activities, such as drying fish, wood¬
working, preparing cassava, ceremonies, and children’s play. The interior is
normally a single room used for daytime activities and for sleeping, while a
small house built on the porch serves as kitchen for the household. Bridges
connect the house to neighboring houses, which, in turn, are connected to
other houses to form the labyrinth of walkways that is Sitangkai. The more
seaward houses, however, are often unconnected to their neighboring houses,
and their inhabitants must depend upon boats when they visit other parts of
the village. Some of the more affluent and aesthetically sensitive have painted

56
The Household 57

Temporary shacks like these on the outskirts of Liuk Tulai are often the first tentative
steps of a boat-dwelling family toward becoming house-dwellers. Such shacks are occupied
for the few months of a fishing season and then abandoned.

their houses and keep small verandas of potted flowers; most houses, however,
are unpainted and unflowered.
The composition of the Sitangkai household, or dapaningan (‘a group living
in a single dwelling’), reveals considerable differences from the households of the
boat-dwelling Bajau. Whereas 77 percent of the boat-dwellers live in single,
nuclear-family households, such a composition is found in only 14 percent of the
Sitangkai households; all other households in Sitangkai are variations of the
extended family. Some of the households are phenomenally large, such as the
one-room house I often visited which was home for fifteen nuclear families with
a total of forty-six persons. The average, however, is only two or three nuclear
families.
As summarized in Table 5, the most common composition of households
among the house-dwelling Bajau is based on female relationships, that is, uxorilo-
cality.
58 The House-dwelling Bajau

Table 5. Composition of House-dwelling Bajau Households.

number of
households

nuclear family 23(14.4%)

uxorilateral extended family 8( 5%)
uxorilineal extended family 71(44.4%)
uxorilineal-mixed extended family' 10( 6.3%)
virilateral extended family 2( 1.3%)
virilineal extended family 13( 8.1%)
virilateral-mixed extended family 3( 1.9%)
virilineal-mixed extended family 7( 4.4%)
mixed2 23(14.4%)

TOTAL 160

1. A household that is predominantly uxorilineal, with an additional family related through other
kin ties.
2. Households from whose composition no dominant pattern emerges.

Fifty-six percent of the Bajau households reveal this organization. The typical
household is an uxorilineal extended family of two or three generations in depth
—a married couple, their married daughters, and possibly their married grand¬
daughters. The next most common household—16 percent of the total—has a
virilocal basis and is typically composed of a married couple, their married sons,
and perhaps their married grandsons. Each of the final two types of household,
the nuclear family and the mixed, includes 14 percent of the households.
Households within the “mixed” category have much variation.
Table 6 reveals that post-marital residence of individual couples, of course, has

Table 6. Residential Patt erns of House-dwelling Bajau.

type of residence number of couples

Natolocal village/uxorilocal household 192(65.5%)

Natolocal village/virilocal household 51(17.4%)
Uxorilocal village/uxorilocal household 37(12.6%)
Virilocal village/virilocal household 13( 4.4%)

TOTAL 293

the same tendency toward uxorilocality that is found in the composition of

households. More than 78 percent of the couples reside uxorilocally, the ideal
Bajau residence, exceptions to which are usually based on practical reasons. An
elderly couple who had no daughters were quickly approaching the time when
The Household 59

they could no longer care for themselves; consequently, their youngest son chose
to continue living with them rather than with his wife's family after his marriage.
In another case, a wife was orphaned and, rather than live in her deceased
mother’s uxorilocal household, she chose to live in the household of her husband’s
parents. Numerous couples leave the wives' parents’ households because of quar¬
rels. One young man told me that he and his wife left his wife's household because
it was so crowded that they never had privacy for sexual intercourse. The list of
exceptions to the ideal of uxorilocal residence could be expanded, but the preced¬
ing illustrate the factors which sometimes interfere with the realization of the
ideal.
In village residence, natolocality is far more common than other types, as, for
example, persons from Shanghai are more likely to marry one another than they
are persons from outside Sitangkai. As could be expected, virilocal village resi¬
dence occurs the least often.
Perhaps the most dramatic difference between the households of the boat-
dwellers and the house-dwellers is in sheer size. However, an examination of the
considerations which have contributed to the sizes of households shows that they
are not so greatly different from the considerations which determine the boat-
dwellers' residence practices. In the first place, the size of the boat-dwelling
household is limited by that of the typical houseboat; in most, there simply is not
space for more than one nuclear family. And, if the boat is built large enough to
accommodate several families, it becomes awkward to maneuver and loses its
efficiency in a nomadic fishing culture. Nonetheless, as noted earlier, some
houseboats are large enough to house more than one family, and some extended-
family households are found among the boat-dwelling Bajau. The more perma¬
nent extended-family households are limited to the larger houseboats, whereas
those found in small boats are usually emergency adaptations to housing short¬
ages. Thus, the notion of having several related families living together in a single
dwelling is certainly not alien to the boat-dwellers.
In many respects, the large, extended households of the Sitangkai Bajau are
only a solidification, under one roof, of the fluid family-alliance units of the
boat-dwelling Bajau. As noted, except when fishing alone away from the moorage,
the Bajau family always joins a larger social unit, composed ideally of siblings of
the husband or wife. It is thus a practiced ideal to live intimately with close
relatives whenever possible. Consequently, one could predict that, given a more
sedentary way of life and larger dwellings, the boat-dwelling Bajau would live in
large, extended households. Such, indeed, is what happened when they moved
into houses at Sitangkai. Another, very practical, consideration voiced by many
Bajau when asked why they prefer to live in extended-family households is that
if each family lived in a separate house, the house would be vacant several months
of the year as the family followed the monthly fishing cycles. As it is, with several
families in one dwelling, the house is always occupied by some families while
others are away for fishing or wood-working.
The pronounced uxorilocality found at Sitangkai also has its genesis among the
60 The House-dwelling Bajau

boat-dwellers. As noted, uxorilocality is an ideal among them. A survey among

the boat-dwellers revealed that more than 80 percent maintained that a couple
should have uxorilocal residence, even though more practical problems connected
with fishing cycles and other necessary movements discouraged such residence.
It appears that when the Sitangkai Bajau were faced with the prospect of seden¬
tary residence in one household, the ideal of uxorilocality came into play. As a
result, almost 80 percent of the Sitangkai couples reside uxorilocally. Another
factor reinforcing uxorilocality is the fact that Sitangkai men commonly fish in
male groups, rather than with their wives as the Tawi-Tawi Bajau do. If women
are to be separated periodically from their husbands to reside in an extended
household, they will be most compatible and comfortable with their own female
siblings. This, too, was remarked upon by many Bajau informants.
The preponderance of natolocal village residence at Sitangkai is due primarily
to the large concentration of Bajau in Sitangkai, as well as to their more sedentary
way of life. Although the boat-dwelling Bajau claims that it is best to marry a
well-known girl from his own moorage, sometimes a youth cannot find a suitable
bride among the few unmarried girls in the small moorage he claims as home and
consequently must look beyond the intimate circle of acquaintances. His search
for a bride is facilitated by his frequent travels, during which he is able to meet
many girls in different moorages—meetings which not uncommonly blossom into
romance and eventual marriage. In this respect, his contacts are much more
dispersed than his more sedentary house-dwelling counterpart in Sitangkai. But
the Sitangkai youth has less trouble finding a marriage-partner in his own com¬
munity, since a large number of unmarried girls is readily available. Thus the
trend toward village endogamy.
Like the boat-dwelling Bajau of Tawi-Tawi, the Sitangkai Bajau believe that
it is best to marry relatives; however, notions about the best type of relationship
differ between the two groups. The boat-dwellers’ disapproval of patrilateral-
parallel-cousin marriage has been extended to all first-cousin marriage among the
more Islamicized Sitangkai Bajau (see Chapter 1, note 2). The recentness of this
disapproval reveals itself in that most of the first-cousin marriages in Table 7 are

Table 7. Marriage Patterns Among House-dwelling Bajau.

number
relationship of couples

patrilateral parallel first cousins 14( 3.5%)

matrilateral parallel first cousins 6( 1.5%)
cross-cousins 10( 2.5%)
second cousins 59(14.75%)
third cousins 27( 6.75%)
fourth cousins 2( 0.5%)
second kamanakan 16( 4%)
related, but exact relationship unknown 40(10%)
distant relationship 136(34%)
unrelated 90(22.5%)

TOTAL 400
The Household 61

older couples or ones least acculturated to Islam. First-cousin marriage, except

between patrilateral parallel cousins, is still fairly common among the less accul¬
turated Bajau. And the fact that 77.5 percent of all married couples in Sitangkai
are relatives indicates that the house-dwellers, like their boat-dwelling kinsmen,
still prefer to marry relatives. Indeed, because of the complex web of kinship ties
in Sitangkai, it would probably be difficult to find many potential marriage-
partners who were not kinsmen.
As noted in the Introduction, the emerging prohibition against first-cousin
marriage among the Sitangkai Bajau cannot be adequately explained as accultura¬
tion to the land-dwellers’ disapproval of such marriages. Rather, it has direct
antecedents in the boat-dwelling society. Among the boat-dwellers, marriage
between patrilateral parallel cousins is considered incestuous, as is marriage
between any first cousins who have been raised together intimately or who have
been nursed by the same woman. The same prohibitions have been retained by
the house-dwellers, and, because of the large, extended households of the Sitang¬
kai Bajau, the number of first cousins raised together intimately in the same
households (who are thereby improper marriage-partners) has been greatly in¬
creased. Add to the household mates those first cousins living in neighboring
households who intimately interact with one another, and few first cousins remain
suitable marriage-partners by traditional Bajau norms. Acculturation to the land-
dwellers’ prohibitions against first-cousin marriage adds a tinge of disapproval to
marriage between those few first cousins who would otherwise be approved
marriage-partners. The combination of all these factors will probably eliminate
all first-cousin marriage within a couple of generations, if present trends continue.
Although Sitangkai Bajau couples most commonly share a dwelling with sev¬
eral other nuclear families, the family unit has retained much of the individualism
and independence found among the boat-dwellers. At marriage, the young hus¬
band and wife typically spend the first few weeks moving between the two
parental households and eventually settle as part of the wife’s uxorilocal
household. During these early months, whatever money the husband earns is
normally handed over to his mother-in-law, who keeps it with other savings to
be used for family expenses. Also at this time the newlyweds eat with the wife’s
family and, in general, are economically dependent upon it. However, as the
husband establishes himself as a bread-winner and when the marriage stabilizes
with the birth of a child, the young couple tends to break economic ties with the
wife’s parents and begins to keep its earnings separate. Like the other nuclear
families in the house, they acquire their own cooking utensils, buy their own food,
and eat separately from the other families. Whatever equipment the husband may
acquire, such as a boat, an outboard motor, or fishing gear, becomes his personal
property. In short, despite its membership in a large, extended household, the
nuclear family at Sitangkai is almost as independent as its boat-dwelling counter¬
part in Tawi-Tawi.
During the early months of marriage, separations are common and frequently
develop into divorces. Some problems are due to incompatible personalities, since
many couples are not well acquainted before marriage. More often, disputes
62 The House-dwelling Bajau

develop between the newlywed husband and his in-laws. In the event of disagree¬
ments between the newlywed and his spouse, members of the household, of
course, always side with their kinswoman. Many Bajau, especially young men,
often spoke of the intolerable loneliness they felt during the early months in their
new households. The birth of a child, however, tends to bridge the emotional gap
between the newcomer and the rest of the household.
In the event of immediate divorce, the portion of the brideprice not spent on
the wedding is refunded to the groom’s family. The later the divorce, the less
brideprice is returned; rarely is any returned if the marriage lasts longer than a
year. What property the couple may have accumulated is divided between them,
with household items going to the wife and fishing equipment and boats to the
husband. Children most commonly stay with the wife, although some may go
with the husband and in rare cases the husband may take them all. As among
the Tawi-Tawi boat-dwellers, the spouse responsible for the divorce must pay the
fee to the headman; if both press the divorce, the cost is equally divided.

Table 8. Divorce Patterns Among House-dwelling Bajau.

number of number of number of

divorces married men married women

0 338 (82.3%) 322 (77.2%)

1 60 (14.6%) 82 (19.7%)
2 12 ( 2.9%) 11 ( 2.6%)
3 1 ( 0.2%) 2 ( 0.5%)

TOTAL 411 417

As indicated in Table 8, the divorce-rate in Sitangkai is higher among women

than men. This may be partly accounted for by the fact that some of the formerly
married young men have migrated to Semporna in search of work and that some
men who previously lived uxorilocally with Sitangkai wives have returned to their
home villages since their divorces.
The greater frequency of divorce in Sitangkai appears to be related to house¬
dwelling, or, more specifically, to the extended-family households. Upon mar¬
riage, a young couple resides in an extended-family household, most typically an
uxorilocal household. Frequently, the young husband and wife have not known
each other well before marriage and one of them is living in the household as an
outsider. Whenever disagreements arise, little mutual love or attraction exists to
override them, and the members of the household, of course, always side with
their kinsman. As a result, early marriage is a very brittle period, which not
uncommonly ends in divorce. The pattern is different among the boat-dwellers.
As soon as possible after marriage the new couple is expected to have its own
household in which it faces its marital problems alone. Because of the smaller size
The Household 63

of the Tawi-Tawi Bajau population, rarely are a young husband and wife stran¬
gers at marriage. And because they live alone in their own houseboat, moving
between the relatives of each other, they do not have continual residence with one
group of in-laws, with their accompanying interference. I have no data to suggest
that boat-dwelling couples who live in joint-family households divorce more
frequently, nor would I necessarily expect such to be the case, since the two- or
three-family households of the boat-dwellers are usually temporary arrangements
and are hardly comparable to the permanent joint households of five, six, or even
ten families found in Sitangkai. However, the sentiments that lead to divorce
among the house-dwellers are found among the boat-dwellers, namely, that a
Bajau is expected to be loyal to kinsmen in the event of quarrels and conflicts
which involve nonkinsmen, even spouses. And this is indeed usually the case in
the early months of marriage before loyalties have been transferred from kinsmen
to spouses. And since the large households of Sitangkai appear to generate such
conflict, it should not be surprising to find more divorce among the house¬
dwelling Bajau.
In no sense is the Sitangkai household a corporate group, but rather each family
is an economically independent unit, as are those among the boat-dwellers. On
rare occassions, brothers-in-law may decide to buy an outboard motor or fishing
nets together, but far more commonly such items are owned individually. Men
of a household may fish together, but their catches are always equally divided and
are claimed individually. Household members usually share a water-storage tank,
but in the event of drought, when water must be purchased, each family purchases
and consumes its own. Each family has an area of the house where its daytime
activities are localized and where it sleeps on mats at night.
In the larger households, rarely do all members reside in the house at a single
time, except during important ceremonies of the household, such as weddings,
incisions, or healing ceremonies, which all members are expected to attend. More
commonly, two or three of the nuclear families are away on fishing trips or
perhaps temporarily residing near Sibutu Island while engaged in wood-working.
For some of the more confirmed fishing families, the house is simply a place to
live while resting from fishing activities; for others, however, especially the most
acculturated, it is their permanent residence, from which they seldom, if ever,
return to boat-living.
Although each nuclear family functions independently as an economic unit,
some household activities are performed in work groups. Females of the
household always assist one another in any work that requires more than individ¬
ual effort, such as the preparation of cassava or the initial stages of mat-making.
Those women who collect from the reefs or who seek firewood on nearby beaches
always do so in household groups. Less consistently, men also work as household
units. Some men always work and fish with other household males, whereas
others prefer to fish with siblings who live in different households. However,
group work directly connected with the household is always done by male mem¬
bers as a group. In general, the sphere of male activity and contacts outside the
64 The House-dwelling Bajau

household is much greater than that of the females; some women rarely leave their
neighborhoods, whereas men leave daily for work, to visit relatives, or to attend
ceremonies.
One man of the household is usually regarded as owner of the house; in many
cases he is the one who actually built the original structure or who contributed
the major finances toward its construction. Most often he is the eldest male
member of the household, although house ownership reveals much variation.
Each family living in the house contributes to whatever repairs need to be made
on the dwelling. In the case of the older houses, which tend to be the largest in
physical size and household membership, the dwelling is regarded as the joint
property of the inhabitants, consanguineal relatives of the original owner, who
in most cases has now died. At the demise of the owner, the house passes on to
the other residents, ideally the owner's married daughters and granddaughters.
The house-owner is usually also recognized as the head of the household group.
Matters of a household nature are handled by him; he mediates in quarrels,
organizes household ceremonies, instigates household repairs, and represents the
household to the rest of the community. In general, his function is not greatly
different from the leader of a family-alliance unit of the Tawi-Tawi boat-dwellers.
The extended-family household of the Sitangkai Bajau has tended to break
down some of the intimacy characteristic of the boat-dwelling nuclear family.
Except for occasional fishing trips for some families, the nuclear family never lives
apart from other household members. The ties between sisters and between
mothers and daughters are never severed and often override those between hus¬
band and wife. On the other hand, husband and wife have less opportunity to
develop extreme dependence upon one another. Similiarly, because siblings al¬
most always share a household with first cousins and a neighborhood with less
closely related persons, their ties to one another are less strong than are those
among their boat-dwelling counterparts.
The most intimate and enduring ties within the household are among the
female members, excepting, of course, those households which are not based on
an uxorilocal axis. In most cases, sisters are raised together as children and
continue to live together as married adults until their deaths. Conversely, adult
male members of a household have usually come from outside, and boys born into
the household know that at marriage they probably will leave for residence in
their respective brides’ homes. It should not be surprising, then, to discover that
sentiments between brothers, as well as between brothers and sisters, tend to
weaken and sometimes almost disappear after marriage. Exceptions, of course,
occur when married brothers and sisters continue to live in a single household
and when married brothers continue to fish and work together, even though they
dwell in different households. On the other hand, the intimacy and sentiments
men once shared with brothers are often transferred to their brothers-in-law, the
husbands of their wives' sisters, who also live in the uxorilocal household. All in
all, adult relationships are not greatly different from those found among the
boat-dwellers.
The Household 65

Children are most commonly disciplined by their parents, but, in the absence
or indifference of a parent, an aunt, uncle, or grandparent disciplines them.
Children who attend school are frequently left with other members of the
household while their parents spend a week or so fishing away from the
household. As a result, all adults in the household, at one time or another, act
in the parental role toward the child. Ties of affection between children who have
grown up in the same household, that is, between first cousins, are as strong as
and sometimes stronger than those between siblings.
A change in kinship terminology among the Sitangkai Bajau appears to reflect
the change in household composition. In general, terms for the nuclear family
have been extended collaterally in both reference and address. The term for
mother may also include mother’s sisters and father's sisters; similarly, the term
for father has been extended to mother's brothers and father’s brothers. Sibling
includes first cousins, while the term for child or offspring may also mean
'nephew' and 'niece.' Grandfather and grandmother are often called, literally, 'big
father' and 'big mother.’ The terms of endearment used for siblings and offspring
(otoh and a rung) have similarly been extended collaterally.
These changes appear to be related to the extended-family households, espe¬
cially in light of the fact that the extension of the terms is made only to those
kinsmen with whom one lives intimately. Traditional terms are retained for
kinsmen with whom one interacts less intimately. If pressed to define a relation¬
ship, a Bajau always falls back on the traditional terms, and, for some kinsmen
in these categories with whom he is less familiar, he always uses the traditional
terms for both reference and address. Thus, the nuclear-family terms are most
often extended to members of a household or close neighbors.
This change toward a more classificatory kinship terminology at Sitangkai is
not without precedence in the boat-dwelling society. Among the boat-dwellers,
the greatest indication of intimacy between two persons is the extension of nu¬
clear-family kinship terms to one another. Most often these terms are used
between two men—two brothers-in-law, or perhaps two first cousins, who regu¬
larly work together and refer to one another by the sibling term. The nuclear-
family terms are less often extended to other relationships, but, when they are,
they reveal an intimacy between the two persons which is greater than their
biological relationship normally would warrant. Such relationships usually de¬
velop after a long period of intimate living and working together. Given this
practice among the nomadic boat-dwellers, it should come as no great surprise
to discover that when several Bajau families live together in a single household,
terms of the nuclear family are extended to other members to reflect this intimacy.
Aunts become “mothers,” uncles become “fathers,” cousins become “siblings,”
nieces become “daughters,” and nephews become “sons.” The more common
extension of these terms by the Sitangkai Bajau directly reflects the more intimate
and enduring ties that characterize most of their social groupings.
If a Sitangkai Bajau dies, his widow and children are usually cared for by the
other members of the household, and, because of the large size of many
66 The House-dwelling Bajau

households, their support is no great burden to any single family. Nonetheless,

a young widow expects, and is expected, to remarry after a proper period of
mourning—usually about a year. In the case of a wife’s death, her husband less
commonly remains in the household, but rather returns to his natal household.
Whether or not his children accompany him depends upon a number of factors.
If the children are older, they frequently prefer to stay in their mother’s
household, or if the father’s household has no one to care for them or is already
overcrowded, the children may remain in their mother's household. If the father
or his deceased wife has childless married siblings, the children may be adopted
by them. I encountered four widowers who married either their wives’ sisters or
first cousins and thereby continued to live in the same households. This would
seemingly be the best solution, but is not, of course, always feasible.
As households become excessively large and crowded, they tend to segment.
Most often this segmentation occurs when a child or two of a nuclear-family unit
attempts to continue to live in the household after marriage; the cramped quarters
encourage the newlyweds and the parental family to form their own household.
Quarrels among household members also account for some segmentation. When
such segmentation does occur, the new house is usually built near the parent
house. As a result, the entire Bajau section of Sitangkai can be blocked off into
kin neighborhoods. The same sort of segmentation has been described for the
sibling-alliance units of the boat-dwelling Bajau, but, because of their nomadic
movements, neighborhoods do not develop among them.
A definite trend toward smaller households is evident at Sitangkai. The first
Bajau houses were large structures built by the three headmen of the three
kindreds then residing at Sitangkai. These three houses are still the largest in
Sitangkai and have the largest memberships. They were apparently built large in
order to display the wealth of the families, as well as to serve as family meeting
halls where all the boat-dwelling kinsmen could rest from fishing activities and
attend ceremonies. The houses still partly serve these functions. Later houses have
been smaller, since they are not needed as family meeting places, but rather only
to house a few nuclear families. The most recent houses, especially those of the
most acculturated Bajau, are even smaller and are obviously intended to house
only one nuclear family, which many of them do. Most of the young, acculturated
couples desire their own houses and often mentioned the difficulties of living in
households run by the traditional notions of the older members. The trend toward
single-family households, actually a return to the boat-dwelling pattern, appears
to have been partly influenced by the land-dwelling people, who typically live in
nuclear-family households. Equally contributive is the greater wealth enjoyed by
the present generation of Bajau—wealth which may be displayed in individual
family homes.
 9. The Neighborhood and Work Teams

If things were as the Bajau profess them to be, each household in Sitangkai
would be uxorilocal and surrounded by other households related to one another
through female kin ties. And, although this seems to be the case at first glance,
the reality of residence patterns rarely adheres to this ideal. The Bajau neighbor¬
hood often has a preponderance of related uxorilocal households, but in all
neighborhoods the uxorilocal ideal gives way to more practical considerations—
not greatly different from those which account for the deviance from the ideal
of uxorilocal household composition. Nonetheless, the houses comprising a
neighborhood—usually four or five—-are closely related, although the genealogi¬
cal relationship has considerable variation. The houses are physically near one
another, and the neighborhood is often identified by the name of the man who
most commonly acts as its leader.
In contrast to Sitangkai, the boat-dwellers’ neighborhood is a fairly insignifi¬
cant social unit and may be said to exist only in that family-alliance units tend
rather consistently to moor their houseboats in the same part of the moorage near
other family-alliance units, which they recognize as being more closely related to
them than other units of the moorage. Interaction between the units, however,
is at a minimum, except for occasional large ceremonies and the rare communal
fish drives at some of the moorages. And since members of the units are constantly
moving in and out, little opportunity exists to develop intimacy beyond one’s own
alliance unit. In many ways, the Sitangkai neighborhood is only a crystalization
of the clusters of related family-alliance units found in the boat moorages. The
family-alliance unit has become a household, and the several family-alliance units
have become a neighborhood; however, because of the sedentary life of these
people, the neighborhood is a permanent social grouping, with enduring social
ties that intensify the ties of kinship which unite the several households. And, of
course, as noted, the Sitangkai neighborhoods are predominantly uxorilocal.
An examination of twenty-two Sitangkai neighborhoods, constituting slightly
over half the Bajau neighborhoods in Sitangkai, reveals several structural types.
Only two have an exclusively uxorilocal organization, nine are predominantly
uxorilocal with various exceptional individual households, three are predomi¬
nantly virilocal with individual household exceptions, and the remaining eight
reveal no dominant pattern of organization. Sizes of neighborhoods range from
three to eight houses with an average of five, or from sixteen to seventy-four

67
68 The House-dwelling Bajau

persons with an average of forty-six. The households are usually, but not always,
connected by bridges. Adult members visit back and forth freely, and work
groups and ceremonies which extend beyond a household are often composed of
neighbors. The neighborhood, also, of course, includes children’s play groups.
Even though households within a neighborhood are related and generally
interact with one another more frequently than with households outside the
neighborhood, they are in no sense isolated social islands within the Bajau com¬
munity. Each household has members who have left the household, and often the
neighborhood, for marriage, and each, of course, has members who have married
into it from outside that neighborhood. These members who marry outside or into
each household relate it to other neighborhoods in the Bajau community with
whose members they form work and ceremonial alliances.
Variation is the keynote in the structure of all Bajau alliance groups, but,
nonetheless, certain common features may be abstracted. In the case of work
alliances, compatibility is the most important criterion for membership; the men
must get along well to work together, and, if they do not, they simply do not form
alliances. Other criteria for membership include acculturation to Islam, occupa¬
tional preferences, age, and, of course, sex. Men acculturated to Islam choose to
work with other acculturated men. Obviously, only persons who work at the same
occupation form work groups. Age is important in that the work of certain work
groups demands able-bodied men and is too strenuous for older men. On the other
hand, ceremonial action groups usually recruit older, more learned men. And
because of the nature of the work, most groups, excepting some ceremonial
groups, exclude members of the opposite sex.
Ideally, one works with his siblings or his parent or other members of his natal
household, if they meet the above criteria, since these are the persons who can
always be trusted and with whom one has learned to work. If for some reason
these people are not available, one works with one’s household mates (if they are
different from those mentioned before)—often because of the convenience of the
alliance, the trust and intimacy that develops between members of a household,
and common interests. If additional men are needed, members are recruited from
the neighborhood of one’s own household or one’s affinal household—again,
because kinsmen are the most dependable and trustworthy. In all work teams,
the closer the relationship of the two men, the better; if closely related persons
are not available, then one looks further in the kinship field, or even beyond the
kinship field.
Compatibility is less important in ceremonial work teams, although persons
openly hostile to each other avoid actively participating in the same ceremony.
A core of closely related kinsmen, often composed of members of work teams,
forms the nucleus of every Bajau ceremony. If additional participants are desired,
invitations are extended further into the kin field, or even to nonkinsmen. Peri¬
pheral guests at the larger ceremonies—weddings or incisions—may include even
non-Bajau.
Women's work teams are fewer and display less variation than the male al-
The Neighborhood and Work Teams 69

liances. Work teams always consist of persons from the household or the neigh¬
borhood. Women attend ceremonies away from the household less commonly
than men, and, when they do, the ceremonies are usually those of siblings or
siblings-in-law. They rarely participate actively in ceremonies, but rather assist
other females in preparing food for those occasions.
Male members of a common household may regularly work together in a work
team, or they may each more frequently establish alliances beyond the household.
And, although two men may work more often with one another than with anyone
else, they sometimes form alliances with other men for different activities.
The similarities between this land-dwelling household group and the boat-
dwellers’ family-alliance unit should be apparent. Membership in both groups is
usually based on consanguineal or affinal sibling relationships, or on the most
immediate extension of these relationships. And, although both the Tawi-Tawi
and Sitangkai Bajau tend to work fairly regularly in groups with two or three
other persons, they both periodically change alliances when they engage in differ¬
ent activities. In general, Sitangkai women more consistently work in the same
work teams and range afield less than the men. And upon closer examination,
further distinguishing features are seen to differentiate the Sitangkai work and
ceremonial teams from those of the Tawi-Tawi Bajau.
Less acculturated Bajau tend to fish with their wives, whereas the more accul-
turated fish with other males, their wives having accepted the land-dwellers’
notion that fishing is unfit work for women. The type of gill-net fishing most
frequently practiced by the Bajau can efficiently be done by two or three persons,
so most fishing alliances between men consist of these small groups. The composi¬
tion of these groups varies greatly. In some cases, men married to sisters in a
common household fish together exclusively, whereas other men in a similar
household situation may all have fishing partners from outside the household, and
even outside the neighborhood. Obviously, personal factors determine each case.
If a man who has no other fishing partner enters a household that has only one
other adult male, he most likely will fish rather consistently with that man unless
the two personalities prove incompatible. Quite often the newly arrived man
discovers that the other household men already have fishing alliances. He has the
alternative of either joining one of the household work teams or continuing his
fishing habits with his own male kinsmen. Frequently in the early months, and
even years, of marriage, a man does the latter. As his ties in his wife’s household
become stronger and more intimate, he may dissolve the alliance with his consan-
guines in favor of his affines. Or he may continue to fish with his own kinsmen
until such time as he begins to fish with his son or sons-in-law. Men who continue
to live in their parental households after marriage, of course, continue to fish with
the other males of the household. Frequently, men from other households of the
neighborhood prove more compatible as fishing companions; often these are men
who fished together before marriage and who married into the same neighbor¬
hood. Whatever the relationship, it rarely extends beyond the first degree of
collaterality, affinal or consanguinal, and most commonly is a sibling-sibling.
70 The House-dwelling Bajau

A Bajau mother and daughter of Sitangkai mend the nets while the men of the household
are out fishing.

sibling-in-law-sibling-in-law, father-son, or father-in-law-son-in-law relationship.

Other types of fishing practiced in the Sitangkai waters demand more partici¬
pants than the two or three persons usually involved in gill-net fishing. Among
these is the so-called tnagsauk, or seine-net, fishing practiced during the periods
of no moon and new moon. Anywhere from four to eight boats, each usually with
two men, participate in magsauk fishing. After arriving at a promising fishing
spot, the large net is submerged between two boats. Other participating boats
leave with lighted lanterns to attract schools of fish which they then direct over
the seine net. After all lanterns have returned and a sizable school of fish is above
the net, dynamite is exploded and the stunned fish are raised in the net. The fish
are scooped up in five-gallon tins and are equally divided among the participants.
The net and dynamite used in this type of fishing are usually owned by one man,
who acts as leader. At dawn, the boats all return to Sitangkai and take their
catches to the fish-buyer regularly patronized by the net-owner. The net-owner
gets about one-fourth of the price received for each of the participants’ tins as his
payment for furnishing the net and dynamite. In addition, he, of course, receives
payment from the fish-buyer for his own share of the catch. The crews are usually
organized along kin lines. The fishermen of each boat are usually men who
regularly fish together with gill-nets; thus the group is simply a collection of the
The Neighborhood and Work Teams 71

boat crews discussed previously. Although the majority of a magsauk crew is

often drawn from a single neighborhood, there are usually some nonneighbor¬
hood men, related in varying ways to members of the neighborhood.
Another type of net fishing, the sinsoro, also demands the efforts of a group
of fishermen. This method may be practiced either flight or day. Once a school
of fish is spotted, it is surrounded by the large nylon mesh net, which is then
pulled to the boat with the entrapped fish. The net itself is usually owned by one
man, who receives the largest share of the catch. Sinsoro fishing demands no more
than two or three boats, and, like the magsauk crews, these crews are simply
combinations of the gill-net crews and are frequently neighborhood-based.
The second most important male work teams in Sitangkai are those of the
stevedores. A few stevedores also fish, but most find stevedoring a full-time job
that provides a sufficient income. Ten merchants in Sitangkai regularly employ
crews of stevedores to transport their merchandise to and from the interisland
steamers that call at the wharf. Crews range from three to six members, with an
average of five. They are paid a fixed price for each item—tins of fish, crates of
dried fish, bags of copra, cases of soft drinks—that is moved to and from the
wharf. Each crew has a leader who coordinates activities with the merchant and
the ship’s captain. He and the merchant both keep account of all items trans¬
ferred, and after each ship leaves, they compare notes; once a month the merchant
pays the leader, who, in turn, divides the cash equally among his fellow crew
members. Other than prestige, the leader receives no additional compensation for
his extra duties as leader. The only requirement for the position, besides personal
leadership, is literacy, since he must keep account of the cargo.
Like other work teams, the stevedore crews display much individual structural
variation. They usually consist of kinsmen, such as brothers, fathers, first cousins,
and the affinal counterparts. Only one of the ten crews is composed exclusively
of members of a single household; members of three of the crews are all from
different households—one represents a single neighborhood, and each of the
remaining two represents two neighborhoods; the other crews have members who
represent from two to five households, distributed among two to four neighbor¬
hoods.
Other work teams are formed to make wooden boxes which are sold to the
Chinese fish-buyers, who use them for packing dried fish for shipment. Box¬
making work teams take two forms, a large flotilla of related persons and smaller
groups of workers. A large group of related families, sometimes as many as twenty
couples, periodically leaves Sitangkai for several days of houseboat-living near the
forests of Sibutu Island. During the daytime the women do enough fishing and
collecting to keep the family in fish, while the men go to the forests in groups of
three or four to fell trees which they cut into boards. After a sizable number of
boards has been cut, the flotilla returns to Sitangkai, where each man makes boxes
to sell to the resident fish-buyer. The flotillas reveal no consistent structural type;
the majority of the members are usually from one neighborhood, and the non-
neighbors who join are often related in some fashion. However, some unrelated
72 The House-dwelling Bajau

houseboats sometimes join a flotilla, rather than mooring alone. The flotilla
convenes largely for companionship, whereas the male work groups are
utilitarian, in that members assist one another in the tedious business of felling
and splitting trees. These work teams reveal the same familiar varied structure
of other Bajau work teams.
Six Bajau men who own motor launches regularly employ small crews. These
crews range from two to four members, are kin-based, and are structurally similar
to other Bajau work teams. Members of two of the crews are all from different
households; members of one crew are all from the same household; while the
remaining three represent two and three different households, each. One man, the
owner of the launch, acts as captain. Usually several other persons, variously
related to the crew, accompany the launch, but they are not regular crew mem¬
bers and always have some other occupation at which they work more consis¬
tently.
A few Bajau who are engaged in small-time smuggling between Semporna and
Sitangkai constitute three work teams. All of these men are from the most
acculturated segment of Sitangkai and, because of their profession, are among the
wealthiest and most respected members of the community.1 One distinctive fea¬
ture of these smugglers’ work teams is the closeness of the relationship of the men,
a feature possibly explainable by the fact that, since smuggling is illegal, it is best
to work with persons such as siblings, whom one can always trust. One unit
consists of a father and his two married sons; another, two married brothers and
the husband of their sister; and the third, three married brothers. No members
of any of the groups share a household. Again, one man usually acts as leader
and is responsible for making the Borneo contacts for buying and the Sulu
contacts for selling.
Female work teams are considerably fewer and simpler than those of the men.
The women who occasionally fish always do so with their husbands, or, if they
are widowed or divorced, with a brother or father from their household. Women
who collect from the reef or gather firewood from the beaches usually do so with
other household women and children. Few other duties take women away from
the house. When household chores require assistance, other female members are
readily available. In the larger households, women, of course, form closer rela¬
tionships with some members than with others and more consistently work with
them. In the event of a ceremony which involves neighborhood participation,
neighboring women assist women of the sponsoring household in preparing food,
playing music, and decorating the house.
As noted previously, few Bajau ceremonies involve the participation of only the
members of a single household. Perhaps the simplest of all Bajau ceremonies is
when a lone individual, or one with one or two housemates, leaves a small offering
of betel or cigarettes for a deceased relative at the graveside, followed by a short
prayer. All other ceremonies demand attendance by most adult members of the
The Neighborhood and Work Teams 73

household, as well as persons from outside the household, and even the neighbor¬
hood.
The simplest of the curing ceremonies, usually the first stage of treatment for
any illness, involves only a handful of persons. Rarely do all household members
attend such a ceremony, but two or three persons from outside the household and,
possibly, from the neighborhood are usually in attendance. A young wife who
resided in the household of her father-in-law had suffered for several days from
a painful toothache. Older members of the household decided that it might be the
result of a curse from her recently deceased father and arranged a ceremony to
remove the curse. One of the older men of the household, a shaman, conducted
the ceremony; others in attendance included the patient’s husband, another adult
man and two adult women from the household, a neighboring adult woman, and
the patient’s mother and married sister from a different household and neighbor¬
hood, as well as several children who had accompanied the adults. Such ceremo¬
nies recruit those persons most intimately concerned with the patient’s welfare
who happen to be available at the time.
The more critical the illness, the more persons attend the curing ceremony. If
the first ceremony does not remove the illness, succeeding ceremonies become
more elaborate, and, as the gravity of the illness becomes apparent, more persons
become concerned over the patient—particularly, if the patient is an adult. At
such a ceremony, all adult members of the household are usually present, as are
a majority of the neighborhood adults. Also in attendance are those close relatives
of the patient (for example, siblings, siblings-in-law, parents, parents-in-law) who
live in other neighborhoods. One such ceremony I attended for a critically ill man
who later died was attended by all adults from his household, his aged mother
and three married brothers (all from different households and neighborhoods),
and several adults from each of the neighboring households.
Certain of the thanksgiving (selamat) ceremonies rely more heavily upon
exclusive neighborhood participation. The range of invitations depends largely
upon the reasons for the ceremony. While I was in Sitangkai, a group of men
heard that an approaching tidal wave threatened to wipe out the village. When
the wave failed to arrive, a selamat ceremony was held in the mosque by the entire
Muslim Bajau community, since Allah had saved all from the disaster. On an¬
other occasion, the roof of a house was torn off by a freak wind that passed
through a section of Sitangkai. No one was injured in the household, so a selamat
was held, to which the neighborhood and other kinsmen of the household were
invited. These people were those most grateful for the safety of the members of
the household; nonrelatives in other parts of Sitangkai were less concerned and
consequently did not attend.
Persons most intimately involved in the marriage of an individual are, of
course, members of his household. Once the brideprice has been agreed upon,
members of the household of the groom-to-be (never his parents) set about to
collect the money. His parents provide the largest contribution, while the remain-
74 The House-dwelling Bajau

ing amount is collected equally from their siblings, unless some are unusually
poor or unusually wealthy, in which cases they may be expected to contribute less
or more than others. Siblings split by personal quarrels rarely contribute to the
brideprice of one another’s children. Should the groom’s parents have no or few
siblings, first cousins or uncles and aunts may be asked to contribute. Rarely,
however, is the collection extended to this degree. Each contribution is noted by
the groom’s parents, so that equal amounts may be returned when the contribu¬
tors must raise a brideprice for their own sons.
Distribution of the brideprice among the bride's family follows similar lines.
After wedding expenses are deducted, the money is distributed among the bride’s
parents’ siblings, according to what they have contributed to past ceremonies
sponsored by the bride’s parents. What is left is kept by the bride’s parents.
Preparations for the actual wedding celebration are mostly in the
household where it will be held, although some siblings of the parents of both
the bride and groom usually assist. Also, neighbors of the sponsoring
household usually help decorate the house, cook food, or play music. Atten¬
dance at the evening celebration which precedes the ceremony and at the ac¬
tual ceremony always includes a much wider group of kinsmen, nonkinsmen,
and even some non-Bajau. Incision ceremonies and some of the more elabo¬
rate healing ceremonies follow the same pattern. If money is needed, it is col¬
lected from the most immediate kinsmen, who also assist in the planning and
organization. The actual ceremony is attended by less closely related or even
unrelated persons, and sometimes even non-Bajau.
At death, too, members of a household call upon other kinsmen to mourn their
loss. Usually a person, or persons, within the household supervises the funeral
activities, but in a small household, where all members are sorely grieved at the
death, outside persons must sometimes take over making the arrangements.
Household members, other immediate kinsmen, and neighbors are most inti¬
mately involved in the funeral, but all relatives and sometimes nonkinsmen drop
by the house to pay their final respects to the deceased. Mourners leave money
at the household to help defray the funeral expenses; and the household keeps a
record of the money, in the event of a death in the donating household. Again,
the pattern is the same: organization and preparations are in the hands of nuclear
kinsmen, whereas other participation extends to less closely related persons and
even to nonkinsmen. Anyone may attend the ceremonies before and after burial,
but, in the event of succeeding ceremonies, the household extends invitations only
to certain persons.
In some ways the work teams at Sitangkai are simply a solidification of the
fluid, ephemeral alliances characteristic of the boat-dwelling Bajau of Tawi-Tawi.
Differences, however, distinguish the Tawi-Tawi and Sitangkai societies.
The boat-dwellers’ work teams more typically consist of members of a single
nuclear family than do those of the house-dwellers. This is partly due to the more
migratory nature of the boat-dwellers’ lives, which, in turn, is related to ecological
The Neighborhood and Work Teams 75

factors. Fishing grounds are more dispersed in Tawi-Tawi, and to fully exploit
the monthly fishing cycles it is necessary for a family to cover a large area of sea.
On the other hand, Sitangkai is surrounded by a huge reef which can be fished
at all times of the month without traveling great distances from the village. As
a result, a Sitangkai fisherman is usually away from his house for no longer than
a day or two at a stretch, and he consequently leaves his wife and children at
home. But to most profitably exploit the Tawi-Tawi fishing grounds, a Bajau must
sometimes be a week or two, or even longer, away from his home moorage. And,
since his fishing boat is also his home, his wife and children travel with him—
sometimes with other houseboats, but frequently alone. And even if the Tawi-
Tawi Bajau lived in a house his wife and children most likely would accompany
him on extended fishing trips; at any rate, this is what happens among the
Sitangkai Bajau, who always take wives and children with them if they expect to
be away from the village for any length of time. If the boat-dwellers fish the
nearby moorage waters, they usually do so alone or with another male companion
or two in a small boat, while wives and children remain at home. This pattern
has persisted among the Sitangkai Bajau, who not only can conveniently fish
nearby waters daily without their families but also have full access to fishing boats
for such trips, since they no longer serve as the family dwellings. Thus, perhaps,
ecology, which demands a more migratory life in Tawi-Tawi than in Sitangkai,
is more important in determining the structure of Bajau fishing work teams than
is the house-dwelling habit, per se.
Another distinctive feature of the Sitangkai male work teams is their uxorilocal
bias, a bias not found among the boat-dwellers. This is, of course, determined by
the uxorilocal residence practiced in Sitangkai which, as noted several times
previously, has been partially determined by the boat-dwellers’ ideal of residence.
Sitangkai female work teams are even more exclusively uxorilocal and more
permanent than is the case among the Tawi-Tawi Bajau females. This is, of
course, due to the uxorilocal and sedentary nature of the Sitangkai households.
Expecting this uxorilocal bias, the alliances of the two groups are not greatly
different structurally; they tend to be based on sibling-sibling, or child-parent
relationships, or their affinal counterparts. The Sitangkai align for a greater
variety of tasks than do their Tawi-Tawi kinsmen, who are, for the most part,
fishermen. But, when aligning for these other tasks, such as stevedoring or box¬
making, the familiar structure of the boat-dwellers’ alliances prevails.
The fact that ceremonial work teams at Sitangkai consist almost exclusively of
men is definitely an indication of Islamic influence. However, even among the
boat-dwellers, ceremonies are usually led by males who are familiar with bits of
Islamic ritual, with an occasional important female shaman who also participates
actively. Given this bias toward male leadership and Islamic ritual, it is not
surprising to discover that, when more fully exposed to the Islam of the land-
dwellers, the Bajau elaborated this traditional theme, since it was already in
keeping with acceptable Islamic patterns.
76 The House-dwelling Bajau

NOTES

1. It may be necessary to note here that smuggling does not have the illicit or illegal connotations
in Sulu that it has in other parts of the Philippines. In Sulu, it is simply a continuation of age-old
trade relations between the archipelago and Borneo. The national boundary which separates Sulu and
Borneo has tended to make this trade more difficult and considerably more profitable, but has not
detracted from the prestige of the profession. Thus the status of smugglers in Sulu is comparable to
that of successful businessmen elsewhere.
 10. The Localized Kindred

Although it is impossible to draw bold lines around any one kindred in Sitang-
kai, those of the house-dwellers in Sitangkai are easier to discern than those of
the Tawi-Tawi Bajau. This is due mostly to the more sedentary life of the
Sitangkai people. Upon marriage, a young couple chooses the parental household
where they will probably remain most of their lives, the household of the wife.
The child born of the marriage will have two large groups of kinsmen—his
father’s and his mother’s generalized kindreds. However, because of the nature
of his parents’ residence, he will usually be more intimately involved in the affairs
of his mother’s localized kindred than those of his father’s. When the boy reaches
adulthood, if he marries a girl who is not a member of his mother’s localized
kindred he will probably reside in her household, which is likely to be in a
different part of the village. On the other hand, most of the female children will
remain in their mother’s localized kindred upon marriage. The members of one’s
generalized kindred are scattered throughout Sitangkai, but the practice of ux-
orilocal residence has localized solid cores of closely related persons in three
residential areas of the village, and it is one of these three localized kindreds that
a Bajau identifies as his kin group. Keep in mind, however, that just as many, and
possibly more, members of his generalized kindred may be scattered throughout
the other two localized kindreds, as well as the other Bajau villages in Sibutu,
Tawi-Tawi, and Semporna.
Geographically the three localized kindreds are fairly distinct from one an¬
other, although households at the borders sometimes hold allegiances to two
groups. Connected by boardwalks to the heart of town, one localized kindred is
located south of the main canal that runs east-west, while the other two are
located on the northern side of the canal, one almost completely connected by
boardwalks to the main part of town, and the other at sea, unconnected, to the
main part of town. The two localized kindreds connected to the town by board¬
walks are—perhaps not surprisingly—those most acculturated to Islam and fur¬
nish the majority of the mosque congregation. The most seaward one is the least
acculturated, and only a few of its younger members regularly attend the mosque
services. The less acculturated, localized kindred, originally from Omapoi, was
the last to arrive at Sitangkai, apparently only about ten years ago, and is the only
one with some full-time boat-dwellers.
A fourth localized kindred is emerging which possibly will be recognizable as

77
78 The House-dwelling Bajau

distinct from the others within a few years. The acculturated localized kindred
north of the canal originally came from Tandowak; the first arrivals came shortly
before World War II, while other members are still arriving. The later arrivals
are less acculturated to Islam and the urban life of Sitangkai and consequently
have built their houses some distance seaward of the early immigrants. Members
of this less acculturated segment feel uncomfortable around their more sophis¬
ticated kinsmen, who generally view them as country cousins. These differing
degrees of acculturation have tended to split the group, and, although they still
identify as members of a single, localized kindred, their work and ceremonial
alliances indicate a cleavage. Either the less acculturated group will identify more
closely with the other half as they become more acculturated to Islam, or the
separation will continue, and a fourth localized kindred will emerge.
Structurally, each localized kindred can be divided into single nuclear families,
of which the husband acts as head; several nuclear families dwell together, usually
uxorilocally, in one house, with one of the men being recognized as the household
head; in turn, each household is a member of a neighborhood consisting of four
to eight houses connected by various kin ties (usually uxorilineal) and headed by
one of the older men; particular neighborhoods interact through the various
kin-based work and ceremonial alliances and together form localized kindreds,
each of which has a headman. The three localized kindreds form the Bajau
community of Sitangkai.
In addition to geography and structure, certain social activities identify the
individual localized kindreds. Each has a headman who lives in the largest house
with the largest household within the group. He handles any serious disputes and
sometimes solemnizes weddings, and his home serves as the central gathering
place for the localized kindred. The maggambit fish drives are organized by and
are predominantly composed of a single localized kindred. Anyone in the commu¬
nity is welcome to join the drive, but its leaders, as well as most of its members,
come from one localized kindred. Every third lunar month at full moon, the
shamans of each kindred dance at the household of the headman, in order to
capture the supernatural power believed to be flowing through the universe at
such times. Each localized kindred holds its dances at its headman's house on one
of three succeeding nights. Shamans of the three different localized kindreds
dance at each other’s dances, but the majority of each dancing group is from the
sponsoring localized kindred. Persons also reveal their localized-kindred affilia¬
tions at the annual maggomboh, or first-fruits ceremony, held after the dry-rice
harvest. A main ceremony is held at the house of the headman and is attended
by most of the heads of the other localized-kindred households. Following this,
smaller ceremonies are held in other households. Many members who have
married into other localized kindreds return to attend their natal localized kin¬
dred’s ceremonies, but, for the most part, attendance is drawn from the residential
area. Another feature of the maggomboh celebration, the magkanduli, a religious
ceremony held on Siculan Island, also reveals localized-kindred affiliation. The
shamans of the localized kindreds and most other adult members travel to the
The Localized Kindred 79

Members of a localized kindred pull in the catch after one of the large maggambit fish
drives in the Sitangkai waters.

island to honor ancestral spirits at the special ceremony. Each localized kindred
goes to the island on a different day.
The two features, perhaps, which seem to distinguish the Sitangkai localized
kindred from its boat-dwelling counterpart in Tawi-Tawi most sharply, are its
uxorilocal bias and its larger size. Like many apparently new features in Sitangkai
social organization, however, these are innate to the boat-dwelling society.
Concerning the uxorilocality characteristic of the Sitangkai Bajau community,
little need be added at this point to preceding discussions. Suffice it to repeat that
the uxorilocality displayed at Sitangkai is the fulfillment of an only partly realiza¬
ble pattern of residence desired by the Tawi-Tawi boat-dwellers. The larger size
of the Sitangkai kindred is primarily due to the great concentration of Bajau in
that community. As noted, ecological factors allow for a greater concentration
of population in Sitangkai than in Tawi-Tawi. Because of the dispersed nature of
the Bajau community of Tawi-Tawi, members of a single generalized kindred are
scattered over a wider area than they would be in Sitangkai. As a result, any one
family usually identifies with at least two, and sometimes three, localized kindreds
in as many different boat villages. In many respects these several localized kin¬
dreds are subdivisions of what has become a single, large localized kindred in
Sitangkai. If the Tawi-Tawi Bajau were all attracted to a single village, as has
80 The House-dwelling Bajau

happened at Sitangkai, many of the presently identifiable localized kindreds

would merge to form larger localized kindreds. At present, the boat-dwelling
localized kindreds recognize close kin affinities with localized kindreds of other
moorages, which the movements of individual members verify. It is, of course,
the nomadic, boat-dwelling habit that keeps the branches of the localized kindred
separated. Eliminate the need to wander a sea area, eliminate the boat-dwelling
life, and provide an attraction to a central area, and the Tawi-Tawi boat-dwellers
would replicate the Sitangkai pattern, in which, as peripheral kindred members
moved to Sitangkai from other Bajau villages, they tended to become incorpo¬
rated into an existing localized kindred rather than to form their own.
The Sitangkai headman has jurisdiction not unlike that of his boat-dwelling
counterpart, except that he tends to be more specialized as an arbitrator. This
greater specialization seems related to the greater size of the Sitangkai localized
kindred and the general trend toward occupational specialization among the
Sitangkai Bajau. The boat-dwelling headman always has duties beyond his judi¬
cial role as headman; he frequently solemnizes weddings, acts as shaman, and
officiates at incision ceremonies, and he sometimes leads fishing groups. However,
in Sitangkai, he serves almost full-time as an arbitrator and leaves other duties
to other specialists, primarily because the larger population generates more dis¬
putes which he must settle. And, since his chief function, even among the boat-
dwellers, is that of arbitration, it may be expected that, as the need for arbitration
increases, his role in other activities decreases. This has happened at Sitangkai.
Most household quarrels in Sitangkai are handled by the members themselves,
though sometimes neighbors may be called in to arbitrate. Should the members
be unable to reach agreement, or if the matter is serious or extends beyond the
household or neighborhood, it is taken to the headman. The disputants present
their sides to the headman, who, after discussion with all present, gives his
decision. When the case is especially difficult, the headman calls in several older
men of the localized kindred to hear the case and offer advice. If a fine is levied,
one half goes to the offended person and the other half to the headman.
Ideally, the headmanship passes from father to eldest son, but, like most ideals,
this does not always reflect reality. In fact, only one of the three major headmen
in Sitangkai inherited his position this way. In one case the position went to the
youngest of seven brothers, partly because the older brothers were not interested
in the position or had married outside the residential area of the localized kindred,
and partly because the youngest had attended school and was exceptionally
bright. In the other case, the old headman had only one son who, although he
lived in the residential area of the localized kindred, was not at all qualified for
the position. Consequently, the position passed on to the eldest son-in-law of the
headman, who was only distantly related to the old man, but had outstanding
leadership qualities.
Although there is much interaction among the localized kindreds, nonetheless
each could be fairly self-sufficient. Each has a headman to arbitrate serious
disputes among its members. Each has shamans to take care of illnesses of a
The Localized Kindred 81

supernatural nature and herbalists to attend to physical illnesses. Excepting the

unacculturated localized kindred, each has an imam to handle Islamic ritual.
Boat-builders are contracted within the localized kindred for new boats and boat
repairs. Members of work and ceremonial alliances are generally drawn from the
localized kindred, and marriage-partners may be taken from the same group.
In no sense, however, are localized kindreds closed social units. Marriages
between the localized kindreds tend to unite them; the shaman cult has members
from all localized kindreds; the fish drives, although sponsored by localized
kindreds, always have some outside participants; large ceremonies like weddings
and incisions always have outside guests; the major Islamic celebrations in the
mosque always cross localized-kindred lines; and the public school classes, of
course, indiscriminately mix the children of the several localized kindreds.
 11. The Village

The three Bajau localized kindreds comprise two-thirds of Sitangkai’s popula¬

tion. And, although each Bajau's activities normally involve only his kindred,
there are occasions when nonkin, or village associations, emerge. In this respect
also, he differs from the Tawi-Tawi Bajau, who rarely—almost never—aligns
with nonkinsmen.
More than anything else in Sitangkai, the mosque most effectively crosses kin
lines. Although the original mosque was built by one localized kindred, the
present mosque was constructed with donations from all three localized kindreds,
especially the two most acculturated ones. Persons from all three localized kin¬
dreds regularly attend the Friday services and other Muslim celebrations, and all
three localized kindreds are represented on the board of directors. Any mosque
repairs are made by work groups which disregard kindred affiliation.
The leading members of the mosque are regularly invited to attend and perform
Islamic ceremonies, even if they are not members of the sponsoring localized
kindred. The less acculturated localized kindred, especially, depends upon the
more learned men of the mosque to officiate at its Islamic ceremonies, which its
members have only recently begun to observe and learn. Although few members
of this less acculturated localized kindred take active part in the mosque services,
many, especially the younger men, regularly attend, sitting on the sides to observe
the ritual. It seems only a matter of a few years before this localized kindred will
be as acculturated to Islam as the other two.
It should be remembered, however, that participation in Islamic ritual is limi¬
ted almost exclusively to males. A few females with fine chanting voices are
sometimes invited to participate in ceremonies, but, for the most part, the ceremo¬
nies are male affairs. Women’s participation is usually limited to preparing re¬
freshments, and most often the women at a single event are from one neighbor¬
hood or are closely related to one another, if from different neighborhoods, and
are kinsmen. Only at community services held in the mosque do unrelated women
prepare refreshments together. Such unrelated women, of course, pray together
during the mosque services, but they usually attend the mosque in small kin
groups, pray in these groups, and leave together with little interaction with other
women. Such is not the case with the men, who range further in the social field
and have many nonkinsmen friends whom they have met in fishing or at the wharf
while stevedoring.

82
The Village 83

The shaman cult also effectively cuts localized kindred lines. Although each
localized kindred has its own shamans, who take care of its supernatural matters,
the shamans themselves, especially the men, identify closely with one another
because of their common interests and the dances they perform together every
four months. The shamans occasionally confer on particularly grave matters.
While I was in Sitangkai, a rash of personal quarrels broke out between members
of the different localized kindreds. Rumors spread that evil spirits were causing
the quarrels, so the leading shamans of the three localized kindreds met to
conduct a ceremony to rid the village of them. The spirit boat described for the
Tawi-Tawi Bajau is also constructed by the Sitangkai shamans for the same
purpose—to rid the village of evil spirits. The leading shamans of all three
localized kindreds organize the construction of the boat. Upon completion, they
pull it throughout the village waters as they dance and chant to attract the
disease-causing spirits. It is then taken to the open sea and set adrift, in hopes
that the disease-causing spirits are aboard and will drift away from the village.
This unifying aspect of religion, both Islam and shamanism, is not unique to
the house-dwelling Bajau. As noted, of the only two activities which effectively
cross kin-lines to unify the boat-dwelling villagers, one is the religious ceremony
held periodically to rid the community of evil spirits. In addition, funeral ceremo¬
nies and certain healing ceremonies among the boat-dwellers are often composed
of nonkinsmen. Religion, then, is important for community organization in both
groups. It reaches its greatest manifestation at Sitangkai because of the more
formal organization of religion, both Islam and the shaman cult, there and
because of the more scheduled and frequent performance of religious ritual, as
in the weekly mosque services and the annual cycle of Islamic ceremonies. Both
Islam and shamanism at Sitangkai are, however, aspects of the boat-dwelling
culture which have been formalized and expanded.
Although the guests for Sitangkai wedding and incision celebrations are drawn
largely from the sponsoring localized kindred, Bajau from other kindred and even
non-Bajau are always present. Also, as noted earlier, the fish drives attract per¬
sons from other localized kindreds, even though they are sponsored by one
localized kindred and most of the fishermen come from that group.
The public schools have also been effective in breaking through kinship walls.
At school, children frequently develop close friendships with nonkinsmen that
extend into adulthood. And, since social stratification among the Bajau is partly
determined by education, and education and Islam tend to go hand-in-hand, a
Bajau may identify more closely with an educated, Muslim nonkinsman than with
an uneducated, non-Muslim kinsman.
The school cliques also have their parallel among the boat-dwellers. Although
because of the nomadic life of the Tawi-Tawi Bajau most children’s play groups
are composed of siblings or first cousins, children of the more sedentary families
who remain in one village for long periods of time often develop friendships with
nonkinsmen who are also sedentary members of the village. I do not have the
time-depth to estimate the duration or strength of these friendships, but, judging
84 The House-dwelling Bajau

from adult patterns of friendship and association, they do not extend too strongly
into adulthood, as many do in Sitangkai. Nonetheless, the basis for such nonkin
associations is found among the boat-dwellers; at Sitangkai they have been elabo¬
rated through a thoroughly sedentary life and the public school system.
Bajau political structure also tends to unite the three localized kindred. Al¬
though each localized kindred has its own headman, when problems cross local-
ized-kindred lines, other political machinery begins to operate. A historical sketch
will explain the evolution of the system:
The old headman, Alari, who built the first Bajau house in Sitangkai was one
of the strongest leaders ever known among the Bajau. Although his localized
kindred originally came from Tanduwak and is not considered the “first family”
of Sitangkai, his own strong personality elevated him to leadership over all the
Sitangkai Bajau. American administrators early recognized this, and all their
dealings with the Bajau were via Alari. During Alari’s time, each headman
handled the disputes of his own localized kindred, except that when these disputes
crossed localized-kindred lines, Alari was called in to arbitrate. Thus, he came
to be recognized by both the American administrators and the Bajau as the
headman of Sitangkai. Upon his death, his position of leadership passed to his
youngest son, Ingguan, who, in addition to having inherited his father’s strong
personality, was also one of the few Bajau at that time who had attended school.
As with Alari, it was through Ingguan that the rest of Sitangkai’s officials com¬
municated to the Bajau community. However, this informal arrangement had to
be formalized during the late 1950s, when Sulu Province elected its first political
officers; before that time, officers had been appointed by representatives of the
national government in Jolo. The existing village political structure of the rest of
the Philippines was, of course, the model after which Sulu was patterned—an
elected village council led by a headman. The first such administrative body in
Sitangkai was appointed in the late forties, and the first elected group took office
in 1959. Whoever appointed the first council wisely appointed Ingguan as one
member; the other four and the headman were non-Bajau. The same men were
elected to office in the first elections, and, as a result, the traditional Bajau political
system has been little altered by the new system. Headmen still handle problems
within their own localized kindreds; if the problems are too grave or if they cross
localized-kindred lines, they are taken to Ingguan; if they are too grave for
Ingguan to handle, or if they involve non-Bajau, they are taken to the village
council. If the village council cannot reach an agreement or needs higher author¬
ity, the mayor of Sitangkai is consulted.
Within Sitangkai, the mayor is the strongest political figure. Theoretically, the
village council governs Sitangkai, and they, like other village councils in Sibutu,
are accountable to the mayor, who governs the Sibutu Islands District. However,
in reality, the mayor heads the Sitangkai village council and rules Sitangkai with
no weak hand. To the Bajau he is the final word and the court of last appeal. And
because in many respects he is a continuation of the datu system that operated
under the sultanate, his autocratic tactics are in keeping with traditional patterns.
The Village 85

Two important features distinguish the Sitangkai Bajau political structure from
that of the boat-dwellers: the greater authority of the leaders and a more formal
structure. As noted, the headman among the boat-dwellers acts primarily as an
adviser or consultant; he hears the case (if the case is even taken to him), offers
a verdict (which may or may not be accepted), and levies a fine (which probably
is never paid). His lack of power seems due primarily to the nomadic life of these
Bajau. The boat-dwellers normally divide their allegiance between two villages
(that of the husband and that of the wife), and should the headman of one of these
villages prove too demanding, the couple can easily move on to another village
and a less demanding headman. Consequently, the headman exerts little author¬
ity. Such is not the case, however, among the house-dwelling Bajau. These Bajau
cannot so easily pick up and leave, so they must follow the decision of the
headman—a decision which usually has the consensus of the group—or suffer the
social ostracism their disobedience might otherwise bring. Because of the larger
size of the Sitangkai localized kindreds and the greater numbers of individuals
under one headman, the Sitangkai headman more commonly calls in other older
men to assist in decision-making than does the Tawi-Tawi headman. This is
especially true in cases involving persons whom the headman does not know
intimately. As a result, the headman’s decision gains even more weight by the
backing of a group of respected elders. And since the Sitangkai headmen are
recognized by the mayor of Sitangkai as the leaders of their localized kindreds,
they can always call in his authority to support their decisions. The decision of
the leading headman of Sitangkai, the one who holds a seat on the village council,
is almost always respected, since he not only represents the highest authority in
the Bajau community, but also has the support of the village council, the mayor,
and, ultimately, the governor of Sulu. Because of these two factors—the sedentary
way of life and the power structure of the political system—the house-dwelling
Bajau tend to heed the decisions of their headman more often than do their
Tawi-Tawi kinsmen.
The boat-dwelling political structure is much more amorphous, although it
contains hazy outlines of the formal structure that has emerged at Sitangkai. Each
localized kindred has a headman. Each boat village with more than one localized
kindred recognizes one of its headmen as head of the entire village, when such
recognition is necessary. Traditionally, the boat-dwellers held some sort of un¬
clear allegiance to local datus, who, in turn, owed allegiance to the Sultan of Sulu.
However, in reality, the Bajau were beyond the pale of the sultanate’s concerns
and were allowed to follow their sea-borne lives with little interference. This same
pattern has continued in Tawi-Tawi through the present political system.
Nonetheless, Sitangkai’s political system has its outlines in the traditional struc¬
ture of the boat-dwelling society and is in no sense original.
Social stratification is more pronounced among the Sitangkai Bajau than
among the Tawi-Tawi Bajau. Class lines are determined by wealth and accultura¬
tion to Islam; frequently the two go hand in hand, but not always. The five Bajau
hadji and their families form the elite of Sitangkai Bajau society. They, or their
86 The House-dwelling Bajau

immediate ancestors, were the first Bajau to build houses and to embrace Islam.
Few of them are fishermen, and most were at one time involved in smuggling,
from which they accumulated considerable wealth. Many of them have attended
school, and all their children presently attend. Below them are the other Muslim
Bajau who regularly attend the mosque services; some of these are still fishermen,
but many are stevedores or are in other nonfishing jobs. Most children of this
group also attend school, but fewer of their parents have attended. The next group
consists of the large number of families who only occasionally or never attend the
mosque; most of these are fishermen who live at the periphery of the physical,
as well as the Islamic, community. At the very bottom of Sitangkai society are
those few fishing families who still dwell in boats. They never attend the mosque,
never send their children to school, and are considered pagans by the acculturated
Bajau as well as by the non-Bajau of Sitangkai. Only about ten such families,
however, still live in boats, and probably within a year or two they will have
abandoned the boat-dwelling habit and thereby will have climbed a rung up the
social ladder.
Bajau relations with the non-Bajau people of Sitangkai are, for the most part,
smooth and friendly, especially compared to some other parts of Sulu, where the
Bajau are considered untouchables by their neighbors. This seems to be partly
because the Bajau comprise the majority of the Sitangkai population and partly
because the Sitangkai Bajau are more acculturated to Islam than any other Bajau
group in Sulu. As noted, the majority of non-Bajau live in the houses and shops
along the main canal, or immediately adjacent, and in the houses that still fringe
Sitangkai Island. A few other non-Bajau houses, especially those of fish-buyers,
are scattered among the Bajau houses at sea.
As a group, the Bajau still suffer social discrimination because of their former,
and in some cases, present, pagan religious beliefs. Even though some Bajau are
more devout Muslims than many land-dwellers, their mosque is sometimes re¬
ferred to by the land-dwellers as the mosque of the pagans. Nonetheless, the most
acculturated Bajau elite are regularly invited to attend ceremonies of the land-
dwellers and a few have married into land-dwelling families. One Bajau woman
is married to a Chinese, an unheard-of situation in other parts of Sulu, and
another is one of the five wives of the mayor—an obviously political marriage.
Intervillage kin ties are fewer and less important among the Sibutu than among
the Tawi-Tawi Bajau. Part of this is because Sitangkai has such a large concentra¬
tion of Bajau and, if one is from there, virtually all his significant kinsmen live
in Sitangkai. If the present trend of migration to Sitangkai from the outer villages
continues, the Bajau villages at Omapoi and Tanduwak will probably disappear
within the next decade. Tungnehat is still a sizable Bajau community and most
likely will remain so unless unforeseeable events cause a movement to Sitangkai.
With the abandonment of boat-dwelling, related persons have become localized
in single villages and their kin ties to other villages have become less significant.
Intervillage marriage is still fairly common, however, and the villages retain kin
ties through the maggomboh ceremony. Nonetheless, one cannot discuss all the
The Village 87

Bajau villages in Sibutu as a single community, as he may all the Tawi-Tawi Bajau
moorages. Each Sibutu Bajau village views itself as unique. Such cannot be said
for the Tawi-Tawi moorages.
Many Sitangkai Bajau have kinsmen in Tawi-Tawi, but they normally are not
close kinsmen, except for those few families who have recently married Tawi-
Tawi people. The greater acculturation to Islam of the Sitangkai people has been
effective in bringing about a cleavage between themselves and the Tawi-Tawi
people. Should the Tawi-Tawi people accept Islam, as they doubtless will within
the next couple of decades or so, their ties to Sitangkai may become closer. As
it is, they are still considered a pagan, almost untouchable, group by the Tawi-
Tawi land-dwellers, and the Sitangkai Bajau are none too eager to claim them as
kinsmen.
On the other hand, the Sitangkai people closely identify with the small Bajau
village of Bangau-Bangau on the outskirts of Semporna, Sabah. Many of the
Bangau-Bangau Bajau have only recently moved to Sabah from Sitangkai and still
regularly visit their Sitangkai kinsmen. They, like the Sitangkai people, are accul-
turated to Islam and are, in general, regarded as sophisticated urbanites by their
Sitangkai relatives.
 Part Three

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

 12. Processes of Change

This study compares and contrasts two groups of Bajau of the Sulu Islands,
namely the boat-dwellers of Tawi-Tawi and the house-dwellers of Sitangkai, in
order to discover what changes have occurred in Bajau society as a result of the
abandonment of the nomadic boat-life and the acceptance of a house-dwelling
way of life. The recurring theme has been that the seemingly new patterns of
social behavior found among the house-dwelling Sitangkai Bajau are actually not
new to Bajau society, but are found, albeit less elaborated, in the traditional
boat-dwelling society. This position makes the fairly obvious assumption that
every society has certain forms of behavior that it regards as preferable and that
may actually dominate in practice, which are based on the jural rules of the
society. As noted, this feature of society has conventionally been called social
structure. But every society also reveals behavioral patterns which deviate from
these preferred forms but which are tolerated as legitimate practices when the
ideals cannot be practiced. The possibility of choosing among alternative patterns
of behavior, or what Firth calls social organization, is the genesis of change in
the dominant behavior patterns and ultimately, possibly, in the structure. When
members of a society find themselves in a new position where the preferred forms
cannot be followed, they turn to those sanctioned alternatives which are most
congruent to the new social milieu. And since the new social milieu is often the
result of contact with a superordinate, imposing society, those patterns of tradi¬
tional behavior which most closely approximate the models of the imposing group
will be those chosen by the changing society. Only if the traditionally preferred
patterns and all the traditionally sanctioned patterns can no longer be practiced
does the society look elsewhere to perhaps borrow from other societies. I contend,
however, that borrowing of this sort is not common.
This view of society—that is, that it has dominant as well as alternative patterns
of behavior—is preferable to more traditional notions, which assume that only
one pattern of behavior can arise from a given social structure, since this view
can better illustrate the ways in which structural change occurs. The majority of
anthropological studies purporting to deal with social change give little under¬
standing of the processes of change, but, rather, tell only that one social form
became another social form, with little explanation of why the change followed
the particular patterns it did (Barth 1967). Most commonly, acculturation is said
to have occurred—that is, the changing social forms are due to the influence of

91
92 Summary and Conclusions

an intruding society, and the new forms may have, in fact, been borrowed from
the new society. Even if this may be the case, such studies fail to account for the
operating processes underlying the changing behavioral patterns. Firth’s concepts
of structure and of organization, and the presence of what I have called preferred
and alternative patterns of social behavior, overcome this omission. Not only do
the concepts more realistically reveal patterns of social behavior as flexible and
dynamic, but they also offer an explanation of why social change follows the
patterns that it does.
My comparative analysis of the traditional boat-dwelling Bajau society and the
house-dwelling Bajau society has demonstrated the validity of this position, as
will be illustrated by a review of eleven aspects of Bajau society—household
composition, household residence, village residence, marriage, divorce, kinship
terminology, the neighborhood, action groups, the kindred, political structure,
and religion:
1. Household composition. The boat-dwelling Bajau household is typically
a single nuclear family, whereas that of the house-dwelling Bajau is more typically
an extended uxorilocal household. Some few boat-dwellers live in extended-
family households if the houseboat is large enough or if a newly married couple
has not yet acquired its own houseboat, but the size of the houseboat generally
limits the size of the household to a single nuclear family. It is, nonetheless, a
commonly voiced ideal among the boat-dwellers that it is best to live intimately
with one’s kinsmen—ideally one’s uxorilateral kinsmen—even though these
ideals, for the most part, cannot be practiced. Given these ideals, it would seem
likely that if the boat-people had larger dwellings and if circumstances altered so
that they could practice uxorilocal residence, they would live in uxorilocal ex¬
tended-family households. Such is precisely what has happened at Sitangkai. This
form of extended family is not a case of acculturation to the Islamic neighbors,
for they, in contrast to the Bajau, tend to live in single, nuclear-family households.
2. Uxorilocal residence. Among the house-dwelling Bajau, the patterns of
residence of individual couples also tend to reflect a preference of uxorilocality.
As my data have revealed, this preference has its genesis in the boat-dwelling
society, as an ideal where it cannot be practiced; in Sitangkai, however, the ideal
pattern has been realized. Because the Muslim land-dwellers more commonly
reside virilocally, uxorilocal residence among the Bajau cannot be considered
acculturation, but is more empirically demonstrated as the realization of a preex¬
isting Bajau ideal.
3. Natolocal village residence. The greater percentage of natolocal
village residence at Sitangkai is in great contrast to the varied moorage residence
found among the boat-dwellers. The Sitangkai pattern is primarily the result of
having the large concentration of Bajau in a single village. Such a concentration
allows the house-dwelling youth to find a marriage-partner easily in his home
village, whereas the smaller populations of the moorages of the boat-dwellers
make it less easy for a youth to find a bride in his home moorage, much as he
would prefer it, and he consequently must commonly marry outside. Although
Processes of Change 93

the land-dwelling Muslims more often reside in their natolocal villages than do
the boat-dwelling Bajau, the high percentage of such residence among the Shang¬
hai Bajau cannot be convincingly explained as acculturation to the Muslims. It
is more understandable as the result of the larger village size which enables more
of these Bajau to follow a preferred pattern.
4. First-cousin marriage. The boat-dwelling Bajau are free to marry any
first cousins except patrilateral parallel cousins or those with whom they have
been reared intimately. Among the Sitangkai house-dwelling Bajau, a general
disapproval of all first-cousin marriage is emerging. The Sitangkai pattern is
mostly an intensification of the traditional patterns. Since most Sitangkai Bajau
live in uxorilocal households, first cousins of the household are raised together
intimately and are thereby improper marriage-partners by traditional mores. In
addition, the traditional prohibition against marriage of patrilateral parallel cous¬
ins has been retained at Sitangkai. As a result, a good share of one’s first cousins
are improper marriage-partners—more so than among the boat-dwellers, because
of their smaller households and nomadic movements. The strong disapproval of
all first-cousin marriage by land-dwelling Muslims has, no doubt, also been a
factor in the Sitangkai extension of the prohibition to all first cousins. Nonethe¬
less, acculturation alone does not explain the emergence of the prohibition. The
Muslims presented to the Sitangkai Bajau a model partly in keeping with their
traditional preferences, with the result that they reworked their traditional pat¬
terns of cousin-marriage to more closely approximate the Muslim model.
5. Divorce. The house-dwelling Bajau have a much higher divorce-rate than
do the boat-dwelling Bajau. However, the sentiments which lead to divorce
among the house-dwellers can be found in the boat-dwelling society—namely,
that one’s loyalty belongs first and primarily to kinsmen. This loyalty is more
often threatened by house-dwelling than by boat-dwelling. The house-dwelling
Bajau groom usually goes to live in his bride’s extended uxorilocal household; he
frequently does not know his bride or her kinsmen well and is consequently a
stranger in the household. Thus, when conflicts arise between him and his bride
or between him and his bride's kinsmen, the household unites against him, and
he commonly leaves in frustration to seek a divorce. On the other hand, the
boat-dwelling couple lives alone in its own boat and does not have a large group
of kinsmen to meddle in the early marital quarrels. Partly because of this, their
marriages tend to be more stable than those of the house-dwellers. Nonetheless,
in both societies one’s loyalties are expected to remain with one’s kinsmen, and
such is usually the case in the early days of marriage before loyalties have been
transferred to spouses. But because of the differences in household composition
and kin relationships, loyalties conflict differently in the two societies. The in¬
crease in divorce at Sitangkai cannot be explained as an acculturation to Muslim
society because the Muslims divorce even less than the boat-dwelling Bajau and
often criticize the frequent divorce of the Sitangkai Bajau.
6. Kinship terminology. Kinship terminology among the house-dwellers
tends to be more classificatory than that of the boat-dwellers. Only on rare
94 Summary and Conclusions

occasions do the boat-dwellers extend kin terms of the nuclear family to more
distantly related kinsmen or even to nonkinsmen, to indicate intimate relation¬
ships. Among the house-dwellers, on the other hand, nuclear-family kin terms are
commonly extended collaterally to household mates. The principle involved is
that both groups extend nuclear-family terms to reflect intimacy, and, since
among the house-dwellers several nuclear families live intimately in a single
household, it should come as no surprise that they more commonly extend the
terms beyond the nuclear family. This extension of kin terms by the house-
dwellers has not been borrowed from the Muslims, who employ a descriptive
kinship terminology and who, in fact, often express astonishment at the casual
manner in which the Bajau extend nuclear-family terms.
7. The neighborhood. The kin-based neighborhood is much more important
as a social group among the house-dwellers than among the boat-dwellers.
Nonetheless, shades of the concept of the neighborhood are found among the
boat-dwellers. In their society, the most important social unit above the nuclear
family is the family-alliance unit; they have no important social group between
this unit and the localized kindred. However, within the moorages, the family
alliances tend to moor their houseboats near other family alliances whom they
recognize as kinsmen. Essentially, the same pattern was followed when the Si-
tangkai Bajau moved to houses; in general, the family alliances moved to a single
house which was built near other, related households to form an uxorilocal,
kin-based neighborhood. Because of the sedentary life of the Sitangkai Bajau the
neighborhood has become a permanent social group—unlike the boat-dwelling
counterpart of a few boats moored near each other, which is extremely ephemeral.
As a result, the Sitangkai neighborhood units cannot be considered the result of
acculturation to land-dwelling Muslim practices; in fact, because many of the
Muslim families have only recently arrived in Sitangkai as immigrants, they do
not have many kinsmen near whom they could dwell, even if they wanted to do
so.
8. Work groups. The Tawi-Tawi and Sitangkai Bajau reveal differences in
both their work groups and their ceremonial groups. Among the boat-dwellers,
the most common work group is the fishing unit, which normally consists of a
man, his wife, and possibly their children. Their less common work groups for
wood-working or boat-building consist of a man and his brothers or brothers-in-
law. Among the house-dwellers, women less often fish with their husbands, who
usually prefer brothers or brothers-in-law in their stead—as they do for other
work alliances. The elimination of women from the fishing groups seems demon¬
strably related to three factors—ecology, house-dwelling, and acculturation. The
sea environment of Tawi-Tawi demands that the boat-dwellers follow a monthly
cycle that covers a fairly extensive area; consequently, it is necessary for most
families who fish commercially to be away from their home villages for a couple
of weeks each month. Rather than leaving his wife and family at home for such
a long period (which would be almost impossible, anyway, since their home is also
the fishing boat), a man usually prefers to take them with him—even though he
Processes of Change 95

may have other male companions to assist him in fishing. In Sitangkai, the major
fishing grounds are easily accessible to the village and so it is unnecessary to be
away from the village for more than a day or so at a time. Consequently, a man
is never separated from his family for long periods. Also, since the fishing boat
is no longer the living quarters at Sitangkai, the wife and children may remain
in the house while the husband uses the boat for fishing. An important factor that
discourages the more acculturated women from fishing is the land-dwellers’
notion that such work is unsuitable for them; not surprisingly, the most accul¬
turated women are those who fish least with their husbands. The uxorilocal bias
of the male work groups reflects this same bias, which permeates much of Sitang¬
kai social organization. Ceremonial groups at Sitangkai are more exclusively male
than are those in Tawi-Tawi. This seems due largely to the influence of Islam,
in which ritual is almost exclusively in male hands. However, the Muslim model
simply tends to intensify the traditional Bajau practice whereby males hold the
leadership positions in ritual but permit females to participate actively. Thus, the
changes in the Sitangkai work and ceremonial groups can be attributed in part
to acculturation to the land-dwelling Muslim society, in the course of which the
traditional Bajau dominant pattern has been reemphasized.
9. The localized kindred. Two features distinguish the house-dwelling
Sitangkai localized kindreds from those found among the boat-dwelling Tawi-
Tawi Bajau—their larger size and their uxorilocality. The greater size is related
both to the Sitangkai abandonment of the traditional nomadic boat-life and to the
ecology of the Sibutu Islands, their present habitat. As noted, the fishing reefs in
Tawi-Tawi are more dispersed than are those in Sibutu, and so in order to
profitably exploit the fishing grounds it is necessary for the boat-dwelling Bajau
to move throughout the month. Consequently, their numbers are always scattered
among several moorages throughout the area where localized kindreds congre¬
gate. However, in Sitangkai, because of the greater accessibility and concentration
of fishing grounds and the sedentary way of life, these Bajau are able to congregate
in a central area. As a result, the formerly dispersed but related localized kindreds
have combined to form fewer and larger localized kindreds. The uxorilocal nature
of the Sitangkai localized kindreds cannot be attributed to acculturation to the
Muslim peoples, since such large uxorilocal groupings of kinsmen are not charac¬
teristic of the land-dwelling Muslims of Sitangkai.
10. Political structure. The outlines of the Sitangkai political structure are
evident in the traditional boat-dwelling society of Tawi-Tawi. The chief difference
between the two groups is that the Sitangkai pattern has become more formal and
has been incorporated into the political system of Sulu Province, which essentially
follows the lines of the old sultanate. But even this is not truly unique to Sitangkai
Bajau social organization, since even in traditional society the boat-dwelling
Bajau owed an ill-defined allegiance to local datus, and ultimately to the sultan.
In Sitangkai, Bajau have been more completely incorporated into the dominant
political system, but nonetheless their present participation is simply an intensifi¬
cation of a less elaborated, traditional pattern.
96 Summary and Conclusions

11. Islam.Although I have not separately discussed religion per se, it should
be fairly obvious that many of the changes which have occurred at Sitangkai are
variously related to Islamic influence. But to say that the Bajau have borrowed
Islam from the land-dwellers is misleading. Before Islam was introduced to Sulu,
the religious beliefs and practices of both the Bajau and the non-Bajau land-
dwellers were probably not significantly different. When the land-dwellers of Sulu
accepted Islam, they interpreted most of it to fit existing patterns of religious
belief, and their present system represents a syncretism of their traditional beliefs
and those of Islam. This folk Islam then became the model which was presented
to those Bajau who moved to houses in Sitangkai near the Muslim land-dwellers.
Because the Bajau share the same indigenous religious beliefs as the Sulu land¬
dwelling Muslims and because the Bajau themselves have for many years been
incorporating bits and pieces of Islam into their own religious system, it could
be predicted that more intimate contact with Sulu's folk Islam would not require
drastic alterations in traditional Bajau beliefs. Such has been the case among the
Sitangkai house-dwelling Bajau. The Bajau there have simply intensified those
aspects of their traditional system which best approximate the acceptable Muslim
model of the land-dwellers. This is true also of the elaborate shaman cult at
Sitangkai. Early reports (for example, Taylor) suggest that long before these
Bajau moved to houses, the shaman cult was central to their religious system.
Today, the Sitangkai cult is still very central and vital to Bajau culture, but it is
being incorporated into Islam. For example, all shaman curing ceremonies I
observed used some Islamic ritual. Some shaman ceremonies were held in the
mosque, and several men served as both shamans and imams. The Bajau see no
conflict in the roles, and, probably, before such conflict has arisen the shamans
will have become fully amalgamated into Sulu Islam.
Changes resulting from Islamization appear to be more in the realm of values
than of structure. Although I made no systematic investigation of changing
values, such changes are noticeable at Sitangkai, where in comparison with the
boat-dwellers the house-dwelling Bajau are more hospitable, cleaner, less shy, and
have stricter premarital and extramarital sex prohibitions. These are only some
of the most obvious values they have learned from their Muslim neighbors. So
far these new values have not had a significant influence on social structure, but
they most likely will have some effect as they are more rigidly followed.
I do not contend that all social change occurs as described in this one society,
that of the Bajau, for each case is obviously somewhat different from all others.
I do contend, however, that, when societies find it impossible to practice their
preferred behavioral patterns, they tend first to resort to their sanctioned alterna¬
tive patterns in their attempts to adapt to the new situation. Only if none of these
can be practiced does a group look elsewhere for models. However, the Bajau case
is somewhat unusual in two respects. First, the society with which they came into
more intimate contact was not alien to them. In fact, most of Bajau history has
been passed at the peripheries of the land-dwelling, non-Bajau peoples; indeed,
they and the land-dwellers probably once lived as a single people (Nimmo 1968).
Processes of Change 97

Such a contact situation is obviously quite different from a situation like that of
the Manus Islanders of New Guinea, who lived in relative isolation until World
War II, when they were suddenly invaded by thousands of American troops.
Secondly, the Bajau were never forced to abandon the nomadic boat-dwelling life
to become sedentary house-dwellers. Because there was little pressure on them
from outside to conform to imposed behavioral patterns, they were able to con¬
tinue to follow those traditional practices that proved congruent to the new,
house-dwelling way of life. Obviously, the processes of change operating in such
a situation are different from those which occur in societies which have been
forced to adopt a particular pattern of living. Nonetheless, even if a society is
invaded by a dominant alien group, or even if it is forced to adopt an alien pattern,
the initial stages of the change will be characterized by those adjustments compat¬
ible with patterns existing in the traditional society.
If the house-dwelling Sitangkai Bajau society continues to follow its new pat¬
terns, some of the present alternatives (which were preferred patterns in the
boat-dwelling society) may no longer be sanctioned. In other words, an actual
change in structure will occur. Indications suggesting this are present in regard
to residence, marriage, and religion. For example, some of the Sitangkai families
still occasionally return to boat-living for fishing trips or for special ceremonies.
Even such temporary boat-living is beginning to meet with disapproval from the
more acculturated members of the community, who relegate such families to the
lowest social positions in the Bajau community, since boat-dwelling has tradition¬
ally identified the Bajau as a pagan, outcast group—a tradition they would like
to forget. Similarly, the growing Sitangkai disapproval of any kind of first-cousin
marriage will probably eventually result in the norm that all first-cousin marriage
is incestuous. This growing disapproval is partly due to the influence of the
land-dwellers’ values and partly to the earlier-mentioned structural features
which make such marriages infeasible even by traditional Bajau norms. Some
traditional religious beliefs which are still practiced even by some of the more
Islamicized Sitangkai Bajau are also beginning to meet with disapproval and
probably will eventually be condemned. Again, this is primarily due to the
acceptance of the land-dwellers’ notions about proper religious behavior. Thus,
former preferred patterns of behavior, which are currently alternatives to new
preferred patterns, will eventually be eliminated as even alternative behavioral
patterns, since new values are evolving which do not condone them.
I do not intend to imply, however, that such a situation is unique to a society
undergoing change as a result of culture contact. Rather, this flexible, dynamic
aspect is always characteristic of societies and is responsible for bringing about
and allowing change. Only when the concept of social structure is viewed as
involving such a flexible, dynamic process can it be adequately used to deal with
change. Otherwise, one must be content to use it to describe static, unreal soci¬
eties, frozen at a moment in time.
The Bajau case has a further feature that is somewhat uncommon in the
anthropological literature, in that it illustrates changes resulting from the meeting
98 Summary and Conclusions

of two non-Western, “simple” societies. The bulk of anthropological literature on

social change deals with the impact of advanced, Western societies on small,
non-Western societies. It would seem, however, that in the long history of man
the Bajau case is the more usual. Until the improvements in transportation during
the past two or three centuries, it was unusual for totally alien societies to
encounter one another. As the culture-area concept illustrated some years ago,
individual societies do not exist as closed, unique units, but rather tend to share
many cultural items with neighboring societies. Societies separated by several
hundred miles may be drastically different from one another, but, because of their
separation, they would rarely have occasion to interact directly. Their usual
interaction would be with neighboring societies which were more like themselves.
Thus, changes resulting from greater interaction between societies would not be
of the dramatic sort of the past few centuries when West met non-West, but the
less revolutionary sort of changes which occur when two very similar societies
begin to interact more intimately than before, as the Bajau and their land-dwelling
neighbors are now.
It is perhaps legitimate to ask whether the society of the Sitangkai Bajau indeed
has undergone structural change as a result of the move from boats to houses,
a question which may appear a bit delayed at the conclusion of a study claiming
to deal with structural change. But the question is nonetheless relevant, and the
answer largely depends on one’s view of social structure. If social structure is
defined as a model constructed from the preferred patterns of behavior within a
society then, clearly, there has been a change in social structure among the
Sitangkai Bajau—the composition of household and work groups, patterns of
residence and marriage, and kinship terminology have all changed. On the other
hand, if social structure is a model that attempts to describe the rules which apply
to the total range of social behavior within a society, then one may hesitate in
calling the change at Sitangkai a structural change. Essentially, the structural
patterns which are found in the boat-dwelling society are still operating to pro¬
duce the behavioral patterns of the house-dwelling society; in fact, it is for this
very reason that the alterations at Sitangkai have taken the particular direction
they have. The seemingly new behavior at Sitangkai has always been sanctioned
in traditional Bajau society. Thus, there have been few additions of new social
behavior, but, rather, simply a reorientation of behavior. But, with the reorienta¬
tion, the resulting behavioral patterns among the house-dwellers have brought
about a system of interpersonal relations considerably different from the system
that has been operative among the boat-dwellers. Whether or not there has been
a change in structure, there has been a change in behavioral patterns.
Perhaps the more important problem rests in the types of models that an¬
thropologists construct to describe societies, rather than in which of these models
is to be called social structure. The crucial matter is that models be constructed
which can be used to explore social change by revealing the dynamics of social
life. It would seem that, unless such models be used for describing social struc¬
ture, the anthropologist will find the concept inapplicable to the dynamics of
Processes of Change 99

social life. Only such models reveal the variety of behavior which may serve as
alternatives to the preferred patterns—that is, the varied and dynamic aspects of
societies. Without revealing both these preferred and alternative patterns, the
social anthropologist cannot hope to describe and understand social change.
Furthermore, it would seem that by building models which reveal the gamut
of variation in social life, the anthropologist can indicate the general direction of
change, once he has an understanding of the catalyst of change. If the model
statistically displays both the preferred and alternative patterns of social behavior,
it should be possible to indicate within a finite number of possibilities the direction
which social behavior will take when its preferred patterns have been blocked or
condemned. Prediction of this sort cannot be precise, but, at least such prediction
is removed from the realm of complete guesswork and impression.
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101
 INDEX

Acculturation, 3-5, 91-92 Imam:

Boat-dwelling Bajau, 37
Boat-dwelling Bajau, 9-43 House-dwelling Bajau, 81
Bride price: Incision ceremony:
Boat-dwelling Bajau, 30-31 Boat-dwelling Bajau, 30
House-dwelling Bajau, 73-74 House-dwelling Bajau, 63, 74
Innovation, 5
Cemetery islands: Islam, 16, 53-54, 75, 77, 82-83, 96
Boat-dwelling Bajau, 16
House-dwelling Bajau, 54 Kinship terminology, 93-94
Curing ceremonies: Boat-dwelling Bajau, 38-39
Boat-dwelling Bajau, 28-29, 42 House-dwelling Bajau, 65
House-dwelling Bajau, 73
Localized kindred, 95
Divorce, 93 Boat-dwelling Bajau, 34-43, 40
Boat-dwelling Bajau, 23-24 House-dwelling Bajau, 77-81
House-dwelling Bajau, 61-63
Maggomboh ceremony:
Family alliance unit, 25-33, 67, 69 Boat-dwelling Bajau, 34-35
Fishing: House-dwelling Bajau, 78-79
crews, 28, 69-71 Marriage ceremony:
communal, 42^13, 78 Boat-dwelling Bajau, 30-31
cycles, 15, 41, 54, 74-75 House-dwelling Bajau, 73-74
Funerals: Marriage patterns, 93
Boat-dwelling Bajau, 16, 31-32 Boat-dwelling Bajau, 21-22
House-dwelling Bajau, 74 House-dwelling Bajau, 60-61
Mosque, 50, 82
Generalized kindred:
Boat-dwelling Bajau, 34 Neighborhoods, 67-75, 94
House-dwelling Bajau, 77 Nomadic territory:
Boat-dwelling Bajau, 16
Headmen, 95 House-dwelling Bajau, 54—55
Boat-dwelling Bajau, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40-41, 85 Nuclear family:
House-dwelling Bajau, 64, 78, 80, 84-86 Boat-dwelling Bajau, 17-24
House-dwelling Bajau, 47-87 House-dwelling Bajau, 61, 63, 64, 66
Houseboat moorages:
Sibutu Islands, 49, 51 Political organization: see Headmen.
Tawi-Tawi Islands, 12-14, 40-43 Public school, 51, 83-84
Household composition, 92
Boat-dwelling Bajau, 17-19 Residence patterns, 92
House-dwelling Bajau, 57-59 Boat-dwelling Bajau, 19-21

103
104 Index

House-dwelling Bajau, 59-60 history, 48-49

Social stratification:
Shamans: Boat-dwelling Bajau, 43
Boat-dwelling Bajau, 37 House-dwelling Bajau, 85-86
House-dwelling Bajau, 78-79, 83 Social structure, 1-6, 91-92, 97, 98-99
Sitangkai: Sulu Islands:
ecology, 74—75 ethnic composition, 9
economy, 52 geography, 9
ethnic composition, 53
history, 49-50 Tawi-Tawi Islands:
population, 50 ethnic composition, 11
Sibutu Islands: geography, 11
ethnic composition, 47^48
geography, 47 Work teams, 63-64, 68-72, 94
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