Page - 25 - 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 25 Kramer, in musical experience, “presence of mind is potentiality of body, presence of body potentiality of mind, and both may exist at the same moment” (Kramer 2016, vxi). The space brought about by music-making, then, is where a specifically sonic and intrinsically musical form of human dwelling in the world is taking place.4 Importantly, though, music-making as dwelling is not primarily a discovery of a world “out there.” To a significant extent, it is part of a dynamic formation of procedural knowledge that “rides on the cusp of the very movement of the world’s coming-into-being” (Ingold [2000] 2011, 245). This is because musical experience accentuates the intense relationship – indeed, the connectedness – between what is commonly referred to separately as mind or body. Both notions refer to parts of the same force that con- stantly imbricates us in Ingold’s world-coming-into-being. Always already tossed into the immediate experience of engaging with music and lever- aging affective, emotional, interpretative, and corporeal frames5, musical experience, therefore, is as much a part of a world coming about as of humans relating to that world-coming-about. It also is a movement – acoustic wave forms traveling through physical space, resonating with the complexity of human interaction with the world. At the same time, this distinctly musical form of relating to the world is always one step ahead of the reflective language that seeks to capture its meaningfulness in full (cf. Kramer 2016, 23-64). It shouldn’t come as a surprise that similar things have been said about movement itself (e.g., Manning & Massumi 2014, 41f.). This, then, is also what has been described as the unsayable and ineffable in music, – that about music which touches you, yet you feel your are not able to describe it. It accounts for the over- whelming feeling of being at a loss for words my interlocutor had when he said, “I don’t know, it’s the whole thing, really. It just gets to you.” In this article, framing this much-mystified capacity of music as atmosphere will enable me to recast a significant part of the presumably ineffable work that music does in terms of suggestions of movement as defined by Schmitz, on whose work on atmospheres my argument builds throughout the article. In the case of Sama Dilaut tagunggu’ during the Regatta Lepa, these suggestions of movement manifest as a shared feeling of Sama Dilautness. But movement here also serves as a double analytic: Being sea-nomads, the Sama Dilaut make sense of their environment not so much by means of a well-ordered set of oppositions and map grids, as Car- tesian space would suggest. Rather, the sites along their journey attain cultural significance only as the Sama Dilaut move through them. Even though many have become more sedentary in the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, the Sama Dilaut’s conception of space itself remains intrinsically mobile. Therefore, the analytical category of movement is central to understanding 4 Vadén and Torvinen (2014) consider this space an in-between space. I’d rather like to think of it as an alternative space. 5 All of these four adjectives refer to contentious and complex concepts that have been defined and used in many different ways. With affect, I here refer to Massumi’s understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of affect (Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari 1987) according to which affect is sheer intensity, presubjective, prelin- guistic and preconscious (Massumi 2002, 24f.; also see Ott 2017, 10ff.). Interpretive discourse, in my usage here, accordingly has a taming effect on affect, “codifying its generative force” (Wetherell 2012, 19). Emotional frames are socially configured and interpretively qualified; corporeal ones involve both the body and the felt body. These are not mutually exclusive categories (for instance, Massumi’s affect has a considerable bodily component), and I follow Ruth Leys (2011) in contending that the clear distinction between them cannot be sustained. As a matter of fact, the concept of atmospheres, I believe, has the analytical potential to sound out important resonances between them. For a more detailed exploration of the relationship of atmospheres, affect and music, see Abels forthcoming.