Page - 32 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

32 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Birgit Abels | Musical Atmospheres and Sea-Nomadic Movement Among the Sama Dilaut Returning to the work of Hermann Schmitz, for such musical suggestions on movement, as described above, to invoke a meaningful atmosphere of Sama Dilautness, they must modulate people’s vital drive. The vital drive is characterized by a continuous oscillation between con- traction and expansion that responds to a stimulus beyond affect and perception. Paraphrasing anthropologist Charles Hirschkind, suggestions of movement continuously stir up “latent ten- dencies of [...] response sedimented within the mnemonic regions of the flesh” (Hirschkind 2006, 82f). Here, the mnemonic regions of the felt body are enveloped by the sonic environ- ment of the Regatta Lepa resonating with mobile notions of space that are specific to the Sama Dilaut within the ethnic fabric of their life-world. By modulating the felt body’s rhythm of contraction and expansion, the suggestions of motion identified above cause the felt body’s knowledge about the particularities of that spatiality to resonate in a diffuse way with the musi- cal experience of tagunggu’. Hirschkind’s “latent tendencies […] of response” are culturally formed. Tagunggu’, in the case of the Regatta Lepa, is both a model and an object of that cultural discourse. At the same time, it acts on this cultural disposition. To play tagunggu’ during the Regatta Lepa, therefore, is to exercise Sama Dilaut spatial understanding. To embrace the shared feeling arising from that musical exercise is to continue and transform Sama Dilautness (cf. Kramer 2016, 16ff). This is one instance of a specifically Sama Dilaut way to ride “on the cusp of the very movement of the world’s coming-into-being,” again, as Ingold puts it. The meaningfulness of the Regatta Lepa’s atmosphere of Sama Dilautness, then, resonates in bodies that have encorporated the musical suggestions of movement. There, resonating in the body, it interacts with culturally framed discourses. The repertoire played is not specific to the Regatta Lepa, and melodic bits and pieces you’re overhearing may belong to a specific, pos- sibly holy place, thereby evoking the deity who owns the place in question. Certain rhythmic patterns may allude to a dance that carries a well-known narrative about the value of family. Such discursive dimensions add a gestalt to the emerging sense of belonging, to the sharing of a significant situation, and to an imagination of one’s own shared history. Crucial to the emergence of a meaningful atmosphere, the encorporation occurring through sequences of alternating movements of expansion and relaxation must be a solidary one. In this way, musically suggested movements act on a gathering of individual felt bodies at the same time, starting the process in which many “I’s” become a “we,” i.e., a social entity. In other words, the coming about of a solitary felt body experientially creates shared situations and, thus, an experiential sense of community. The boundaries separating people from their environments, including the people within these environments, become pervious. The sensation of how one’s felt body merges with others in following sonically mediated suggestions of movement is pre- cisely what lies behind the power of the Regatta Lepa. It’s how Sama Dilautness comes about musically here – as an atmosphere, forever transforming as it keeps moving through space. Like sea-nomads. Conclusion: Mobile Practice, Musical Practice – Atmospheres in Double Motion The workings of musical atmospheres are unpredictable to a significant extent. Similar musical suggestions of movement may yield disparate effects on the felt body. This is in part be cause musical atmospheres cannot sensibly be analyzed while isolated from the cultural, historical, so-