Page - 23 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Birgit Abels | Musical Atmospheres and Sea-Nomadic Movement Among the Sama Dilaut 23 Everyone I spoke with1 agreed that the gong music played on the boats, tagunggu’, is central to the festival (cf. Fernando 2002, 22). As for the festival itself, they described it as exuding an “atmosphere of [being] Sama Dilaut.” Most were quick to add that this Sama Dilautness of the festival came about through the overall sonic experience, which consists of, among other things, all the gong music being played on all of the boats – not only the decorated lepas tied to the shore, but also a considerable number of other boats that keep roaming the festival area throughout the celebrations. Music during the Regatta Lepa, they suggested, is a deeply holistic and inclusive experience. To many Sama Dilaut, embracing the festival’s overwhelming sonic complexity and allowing themselves to be swept away by it are what makes the experience so worthwhile. Clearly, this sonic “whole” that is so much more than the sum of its parts is what makes Semporna theirs, and at the same time makes them Semporna’s Sama Dilaut – but only until the sound of the Regatta Lepa fades. Within the social fabric of Semporna, this fleeting instance of “nomadic aesthetics is [a] counterpart of the politics of peripheral resistance to new hegemonic formations” (Braidotti 1994, 16), a performative enactment of a cultural geography that is different from the dominant one: a counter-geography. Accordingly, each year, the mo- ment the festival ends, the everyday social hierarchies relegating the Sama Dilaut to the lowest rank within the community that had been suspended for three days by the Regatta Lepa are restored. Thus, to a significant extent, the Sama Dilaut’s Semporna realm comes into existence merely through the sensual experience of tagunggu’, only to vanish when the music stops. For the other communities in the area, Semporna may be readily there on a map, but for the Sama Dilaut, traditionally, Semporna is neither a material place, nor an immaterial idea. During the Regatta Lepa, to the Sama Dilaut, Semporna is, instead, an experience in sound, one that will last for the duration of the sonic event. In the terminology of new phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz, the meaningfulness of the Regatta Lepa for the Sama Dilaut I worked with resides in the signi- ficant, shared situation (Schmitz, Müller & Slaby 2011, 244) brought about centrally through the thick sound envelope that wraps Semporna’s shoreline in the sounds of tagunggu’. For the other shoreline communities in and around Semporna, Hetherington’s definition of place may apply to Semporna perfectly: a place that forms an immaterial entity resulting from the placing, ordering, and representing of material objects (1997, 192). If to the sea-nomadic Sama Dilaut, by contrast, Semporna is mostly an experience, and if music-making is the primary means of evoking this experience, then music holds analytical potential vis-à-vis the community’s alter- native spatiality and, since theirs is a deeply nomadic spatiality, their alter native mobility. But at the same time, their alternative spatiality and mobility may provide important clues that lead to a deeper understanding of their music-making practices – clues that promise to be relevant beyond understanding the particularities of the experiential mobility node2 that is the Regatta Lepa, the sleepy little town of Semporna, and the Sama Dilaut. In this article, I will follow the- se clues, trying to get closer to some of the meaningful dynamics arising between movement, 1 My research is based on field work in and around Semporna between 2007 and 2010. 2 By “mobility nodes”, Sheller & Urry (2006, 213) mean the social spaces around which mobile forms of social life, full of multiple and dynamic connections, are orchestrated, often across long distances. They are (physical) spaces of intermittent movement. By “experiential mobility node”, I mean a space with similar qualities. This space, however, is not so much a physical space as it enables, and comes about through, an encompassing sensory experience.