This work offers a comprehensive description of the lives of the Sama-Bajau people based on ongoing ethnographic research conducted by the author in Davao City, the Philippines, for over two decades. The Sama-Bajau have suffered stigmatization in Philippine society, even though the true picture of their lives, both as a community and as individuals, has been largely unknown to the outside world.

An Intimate Journey objectively portrays various aspects of the lives of six Sama-Bajau families, including economics, politics and religion, and at the same time reveals their inner worlds to the reader through the abundant inclusion of first-person narratives. Each chapter takes the form of a letter addressed to “absent others” – the dead and the unborn in the study field – as a story retold by the author to be passed down to future generations. 

The author hopes that this book will be read by not only those interested in Southeast Asia or the Sama-Bajau, but also those concerned with the question of the relationship between economics and ethics or care, as well as the question of the future direction of humanity and society. More specifically, this relates to the risks facing the communities and individuals who tend to be considered “bottommost” according to the efficiency standards of the contemporary neo-liberal market economy, bringing to the fore the wisdom they use in surviving the challenges they face, how they should be understood and what actions should be taken to intervene in their circumstances.

Reviews

I do not think that "An Intimate Journey: Finding Myself amongst the Sama-Bajau" was either Waka Aoyama trying to write about the other or trying to write for them; it was her attempt to hear them with much sincerity and honesty. Having auditory hypersensitivity and a tenuous "self-other" boundary as she admits, at the end of her charming journey Waka Aoyama has arrived at a place no one has yet explored. This work is a gem of fieldwork of "response-ability", and a song in response to Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. ------- Hiromu Shimizu, Ph.D., President of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology, and Professor Emeritus of Kyoto University

 

About Editors and Authors

AOYAMA Waka is Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo, and Visiting Researcher at the Joint Ateneo Institute for Mindanao Economics, Ateneo de Davao University. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Tokyo. As an ethnographer specializing in Southeast Asian studies focusing on the Southern Philippines, her research interests include human wellbeing, care and resilience in the context of the ever changing, globalized world. Since 1997, she has continuously visited and conducted ethnographic research with the Sama-Bajau communities in Davao City, Mindanao, the Philippines. Her book, “An Ethnography of Poverty: Socioeconomic Life of Five Sama Families in Davao City, the Philippines” (trans.), published by the University of Tokyo Press (2006), has received multiple awards, including the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Prize in 2012, the most prestigious academic prize given to outstanding scholars under the age of 45.

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