Between Two Breaths: Investigating Selfhood and Resilience through Sama Freediving Practices in Southeast Asia
In my PhD in Psychocultural and Medical Anthropology at UCLA, I aim to investigate the freediving, or breath-hold diving, of Sama communities in Southeast Asia. I am specifically interested in how freediving affects their experiences of selfhood and resilience. I will explore how diving practices are changing in current political, economic, and environmental contexts; and how Sama communities use freediving practices as forms of resistance and refusal against harmful boundaries, logics, and processes of othering that fragment their ecologies and communities, and perpetuate their lives – and breaths – as marginal. I explore these questions through ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, in-depth interviewing, and photoethnography.
I am grateful for the SPA/RLF Fellowship because it enabled me to conduct important exploratory fieldwork in Southeast Asia in order to connect with, and begin getting to know, several different Sama communities and their current contexts. I spent one month in the Philippines with three Sama communities in Panglao, Davao City, and Samal Island respectively. I then spent one month in Indonesia, with two Sama communities in Sulawesi. This fieldwork allowed me to contextualize each community’s freediving practices, gain a more nuanced understanding of the forms the practice is currently taking, and how socio-political, economic, and environmental conditions are influencing freediving livelihoods and experiences. I was able to start building important relationships, became a freediving and spearfishing apprentice in each community, and started collaborating with community members to ensure that the community’s ideas, interests, and circumstances guide my future research. Excitingly, I was able to choose one site out of the five I visited this summer – a community in southeastern Sulawesi, Indonesia – that will become the main fieldsite for my PhD research, and arguably, for my career.
This SPA/RLF funded fieldwork has allowed me to begin the important work of honing and tailoring my PhD training around my newly chosen fieldsite and its contexts. I have begun taking language courses in Bahasa Indonesia at UCLA, and have ample linguistic material that I collected over the summer to continue self-studying Bahasa Sama. I plan to take an independent study this winter on the history, geography, ecology, and politics of Sulawesi. I have presented preliminary findings and reflections based upon this fieldwork at the 4S 2023 Honolulu Conference this November, where I gave a paper titled “Submerged Stories: Centering Indigenous Freediving Practices in Oceanic Governance and Knowledge Production.” Thank you for such an enriching and empowering fieldwork experience!