Sailors and Sailing Traditions in Indonesia and Beyond: Socio-Cultural Dynamics, Challenges and Future Pathways
Convener: Dedi Supriadi Adhuri
Co-Convener: Horst Liebner
Indonesia’s maritime traditions—embodied in perahu, sailors, and sailing knowledge—offer a critical lens for understanding how pluriversal futures are imagined and enacted in the Global South. Long before the rise of modern nation-states and industrial shipping, Indonesian coastal and island societies developed sophisticated systems of boatbuilding, navigation, mobility, and maritime social organization that enabled trade, subsistence, and cultural exchange across the archipelago and beyond. These traditions continue today not merely as heritage artifacts, but as living socio-cultural systems embedded in cosmology, moral relations with the sea, intergenerational knowledge transmission, and more-than-human ecologies.
This panel aims to examine Indonesian sailing traditions as situated responses to contemporary global transformations, particularly the emergence of a multipolar world marked by shifting political–economic alliances, environmental pressures, and competing development paradigms. Rather than treating maritime traditions as residues of the past, the panel foregrounds them as active arenas where communities negotiate alternative futures, often in tension with state-centered governance, technocratic maritime policies, industrialization, conservation regimes, and dominant blue economy narratives.
The panel welcomes ethnographic, historical, and interdisciplinary contributions on boatbuilding, navigation, seafaring communities, and maritime heritage across Indonesia, including but not limited to Bugis–Makassar, Mandar, Bajau, Maluku, Nusa Tenggara, Java, and Sumatra. Papers may explore how maritime knowledge is produced, maintained, transformed, or contested under contemporary conditions such as climate change, tourism expansion, heritage commodification, regulatory marginalization, and infrastructural change.
Guiding questions include: How do perahu and sailing practices operate as socio-cultural systems integrating technical knowledge, cosmology, ethics, and ecological relations? In what ways do sailors and boatbuilders embody alternative forms of expertise, mobility, and moral engagement with the sea that challenge dominant development and governance models? How are maritime traditions reworked through heritage-making, festivals, and tourism, and with what social and political consequences? What frictions arise between community-based maritime practices and state or global regimes of conservation, regulation, and modernization? How can traditional seafaring knowledge contribute to more equitable, culturally grounded, and sustainable maritime futures, often articulated through notions of blue justice?
In relation to the symposium theme, this panel positions Indonesian maritime societies as active participants in shaping pluriversal futures within a multipolar global landscape. It highlights how Global South communities do not merely absorb geopolitical and ecological transformations but actively produce alternative world-making projects rooted in local histories, ontologies, and relations with the sea. By treating maritime heritage as living and adaptive, the panel contributes ethnographically grounded insights into how plural futures are negotiated through everyday engagements with winds, currents, materials, nonhuman beings, and moral obligations in a rapidly changing world. This panel also accommodates cases beyond Indonesia.