Maritime Culture
The author Philip Bowring makes some interesting observations regarding identity in Southeast Asia. He suggests that over the past century or so, associations with the sea and river have faded in how societies see themselves and their history:
Despite its illustrious past, the region’s sense of identity is not what it was even in the 1880s when mariner and novelist Joseph Conrad was sailing its seas and José Rizal was awakening the nationalist aspirations of a wider Malay world. Steamships, airplanes and, above all, new nation states created from maps drawn haphazardly by western empires have eroded its sense of itself.
Many books of ‘South East Asian’ history are written with scant, if any, acknowledgment of the separate identity of the Austronesian linguistic and cultural heritage of the islands and coasts. For their different reasons, Indian, western and Chinese writers tend to generalize about ‘South East Asia’ mainly by reference to the mainland. Although the populations of states of the archipelago and Malay peninsula outnumber by 40 per cent those of the mainland they receive far less attention, partly because of a shortage of early documentary history. But nothing can obliterate the common history and shared culture of the maritime region.
Looking across Southeast Asia the degree to which societies hold a maritime identity differs dramatically. Singapore is arguably one of the countries with the most developed maritime cultures in the region. This has been enhanced through government initiatives that emphasise the strategic importance of regional trade networks to the country, and why the island country’s military and economic security is linked to the ocean.
In contrast, in Cambodia there is little sense of a maritime identity shared among the population. In the aftermath of war and the intense violence of the Khmer Rouge, the Royal Government set about reviving the glorious and pride of the Khmer kingdom, as embodied in the temples of Angkor. This land-based view of national history remains the situation today, and significant investments are required if the country is going to foster a maritime identity that permeates popular culture.
Indonesia offers a good example of a country that is now tackling this issue, by investing in the development of a national maritime culture. The government approaches this for both domestic and international purposes, an issue Dr. Arif Havas Oegroseno explained back in 2016, in his capacity as Deputy Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs, as this video shows.
As Dr. Oegroseno notes, fostering a maritime culture among a population is far from easy. In addition to the school textbooks that he discusses here, museums and the conservation of maritime heritage more broadly can play a critical role. In this regard, Indonesia’s investments into the promotion of spice histories is a fascinating project that opens up important new ways of thinking about heritage and maritime culture in Southeast Asia.
The cultivation and production of spices sheds light on complex human and environmental relations, where growing, harvesting and storing conditions can be presented in relation to knowledge of climatic and environmental dynamics that link land, river and ocean. Spices tell us about the flows and currents of cuisines and the histories of food preparation that shared across islands and regions.
Like culinary traditions, the gradual acquisition of medical knowledge using spices has flowed across seas and oceans. And of course, the economic history of Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia are deeply connected to the trading of spices across the region and across bodies of water that link continents.
Indonesia’s pivotal role in the global spice market was in part dependent on the nature of its geography as an archipelagic nation. Spice histories can thus tell us about histories of seafaring and navigation, and the ways in which spice production and trading fostered led to the settlement of communities along coastlines and thus cultural practices linked to river and sea.
In bringing these different elements together, the government and a number of NGOs, notably Negeri Rempah, have developed a range of projects that use spice as the means to promote a maritime consciousness in the country.
With strong cultural and historical significance across Southeast Asia, spice offers a good example of a thematically constructed heritage that can promote new forms of people-people dialogue across the region.
