Page - 26 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

26 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Birgit Abels | Musical Atmospheres and Sea-Nomadic Movement Among the Sama Dilaut both Sama Dilaut music-making and spatiality, as well as how they engender and reinforce each other through atmosphere. For this reason, I’m not “applying” theories of mobility and atmos- phere to music here; this would not serve any purpose other than to confirm what we think we know about movement. Instead, I’m thinking through these theories through music because music enacts both movement and atmosphere, and it does so in a highly sensual and felt-bodily way. I will argue that Sama Dilaut music-making practices resonate with the community’s alternative spatiality, and vice versa: that their sea-nomadic sense of both space and place is as much mobile as it is sonic, and hence, experiential. This is why tagunggu’ (and its accompanying dances, which are beyond the scope of this article; cf. Santamaria 2012) plays such an impor- tant role in Sama Dilaut cultural life. It’s a key strategy to facilitate the felt-bodily experience of movement, which is their preferred mode of dwelling – or, to refer to Ingold’s phrasing again, which will become a recurrent theme in the course of the article, it is their prime strategy when it comes to riding “on the cusp of the very movement of the world’s coming-into-being.” So movement in space and movement in sound are profoundly enmeshed experiences here, and they yield significant situations that affect people as atmospheres of Sama Dilautness (cf. Santamaria 2012, 82; Abels 2015, 3). This is because “[t]he orders of experience are incom- mensurable. There is always a residue, a holding itself in reserve, each in its own element. At the extreme, each order suspends itself in its own reserve potential […]. In the middle, they splay together in their difference. […] Modally incommensurable, they only relate outside anything in common – most especially outside the logical common of anything that can be attributed a core mental status” (Manning & Massumi 2014, 41). The notion of atmosphere, therefore, allows for an analytical exploration of that experiential entanglement of sound and space and its mobile dynamics: that “splaying together in their difference.” Therefore, investigating tagunggu’ as suggestions of movement contributing to an atmosphere of Sama Dilaut belonging also will point to perspectives on the underlying notions of a distinctly mobile spatiality. I will continue this line of thinking by sharing some basic observations about Sama Dilaut notions about space, place, and music. Following that, I will proceed to analyze musical prac - tices of the Sama Dilaut during the Regatta Lepa as suggestions of movement that enable people to relate to, and make sense of, their surroundings. Against this backdrop, I then will reflect on the experiential dynamics generated by the interplay of mobility and musicality, suggested by atmospheres. How do we carve out the processes that transform structured sound through movement into shared feelings? What does the musical experience of atmosphere tell us about movement and belonging that non-musical modes of attunement do not reveal? The article will close with some preliminary answers to these questions. Sama Dilaut Spatiality Belonging to the Austronesian-speaking Sama, the Sama Dilaut are one of the most geogra- phically dispersed groups in Southeast Asia. But while most Sama groups identify with coastal settlements across the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, for the Sama Dilaut, it is not so much a specific geographic position or a national boundary that marks their space, but the mobility between their various economic and social networks. In spite of the physical distance and national borders separating them, the Sama Dilaut communities in Borneo and the Philip- pines, for instance, are closely related. There’s a constant coming and going between Semporna