Jemberang and Alam Melayu: crossing the Straits of Melaka, Singapore and Riau
Abstract
In this paper, I deal with different modes of population movement, as well as the ethnic ramifications of such movement. The discussion is set in the Straits of Melaka, Singapore and Riau, the waterways separating Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Prior to the formation of these nation-states, the three straits, which flow into one another, provided a unifying focus for successive Malay kingdoms. International boundaries now run through them, but the populations form part of an Alam Melayu, Malay world, that transcends national borders. These indigenous populations may be land or sea oriented, sedentary or nomadic, with varying social and economic circumstances.
Summary
The article examines how indigenous populations in the Riau Archipelago conceptualize movement across the Straits of Melaka, Singapore, and Riau, and how this conceptualization relates to the broader Malay world (Alam Melayu). Wee’s central argument is that the Riau colloquial term jemberang (to cross a body of water) reflects a pre-national, sea-centred spatial logic that predates and transcends the modern nation-state boundaries drawn by the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty. The article contrasts this with menyeludup (to sneak across without a passport), a term that carries no colloquial pronunciation and thus signals a formal, legal framework foreign to the vernacular. Together, these two terms encapsulate the tension between an unbounded Malay world and the bounded nation-states that colonialism carved out of it.
Wee draws on Geertz’s typology of the pasisir (coastal) state to situate Alam Melayu within a wider maritime political ecology, then narrows the focus to what specifically differentiated Alam Melayu from other pasisir areas: a shared genealogical tree of kingship that constituted a network of kin-related political allies rather than a geographically or ecologically defined region. The ecological conditions of the Riau Archipelago—thousands of small islands, sparse populations, and inherent centrifugal tendencies—meant that political centralization could never become strongly institutionalized; the state “merely floated on top of the local currents and eddies of an open sea” (p. 127).
The article then develops a typology of indigenous habitation modes (sedentary/nomadic × land/sea-oriented) and argues that the civilizing process in Riau is fundamentally a process of increasing sedentism, whereby permanent settlement becomes a marker of social superiority and nomadic origins become a source of stigma requiring genealogical amnesia. This framework allows Wee to reframe the modern nation-state’s boundary-making as one of two competing worldviews: an unbounded world where movement is the norm and sedentism the problematique, and a bounded world where the reverse holds true.
Key Findings
- The Riau colloquial term jemberang (a local pronunciation of menyeberang) is used for crossing any of the three straits by sea and is not applied to air travel, indicating a sea-specific spatial logic (p. 125).
- The term menyeludup (to sneak across without a passport) carries no colloquial pronunciation, marking it as belonging to a formal legal rather than vernacular framework (p. 125).
- The Riau Archipelago comprises approximately 3,214 islands, described by inhabitants as “a measure of black peppercorns” (segantang lada hitam) (p. 127).
- The Malay word pulau in indigenous Riau usage refers only to small, directly experienceable patches of land; larger landmasses are called tanah or bahagian, a distinction confirmed by Wilkinson’s dictionary (p. 128).
- The people of Karas Island, of known Orang Laut origin, describe themselves as Orang Berniaga (People who Trade) and maintain active trading routes from Singapore to Jambi via Sungai Jodoh in Batam (p. 130).
- Communities with known Orang Laut origins develop marriage taboos and genealogical amnesia to expunge memory of nomadic ancestors, a mechanism through which they claim civilizational superiority over those with visible nomadic lineages (p. 129).
Conclusion
Wee’s definitive historical takeaway is that the modern nation-state’s apparatus of boundary-making—passports, visas, citizenship—represents one of two fundamentally incompatible spatial logics imposed upon a region whose indigenous populations have historically organized themselves around sea-centred movement and genealogical kinship rather than territorial sovereignty. The linguistic contrast between jemberang and menyeludup is not merely semantic but ontological: it reveals that for Riau indigenes, the very act of crossing water remains a natural, unproblematic gesture, while the legal fiction of the national border transforms that same gesture into an act of transgression.
Context
- Wee’s argument is grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Riau Archipelago conducted since 1979, supplemented by her 1985 PhD thesis at the Australian National University on Malay hierarchies in Riau.
- Historiographically, the article contributes to the study of pre-modern maritime political formations by linking Geertz’s pasisir typology with indigenous spatial cognition, and by reframing the civilizing process as a process of increasing sedentism rather than a linear progression toward fixed territoriality.