Otherizing the Badjao: A Spatial Imagery of State Exclusion and Societal Otherization

Mobile populations such as sea nomads and their multi-local sense of belongingness have always presented as a challenge to the normative concepts of citizenship and rights couched in the hegemonic discourse of development and modernity. It is in this context that this study examines the social exclusion confronting the Badjao people, the sea nomads of the Philippines, through discourse analysis, narrative inquiry and participant observation. The study deals with State exclusion and societal otherization by analyzing how State policies establish the otherization and perpetuate the exclusion of the Badjaos and how these discursive and material exclusions are mirrored in society. A case study of the Badjao community in Bohol, Philippines underscores the main argument that both State policy/discourse and societal otherization mutually constitute the exclusion of the Badjaos. The State’s framework of indigeneity and rights is exclusionist by the very fact of its modernist approach thus homogenizing all or invisibilizing some indigenous groups. The study demonstrates the diverse notion of ‘territoriality’ from which lies the difference between that of the hegemonic definition embedded in modernist sense of boundaries and private property and the collective sense of space among indigenous peoples. But an interesting finding in this study is that this notion of ‘territoriality’ is still nuanced between and among the indigenous peoples of the Philippines as the Badjaos do not have such relations with territory. The failure to recognize this nuanced sense of space has ramifications in the citizenship rights of the Badjaos. Power relations is highlighted in the geopolitical imagination behind the term ‘Badjao’ which lies in the fluid dynamics by and between physical, social, and symbolic spaces where State and society reify the Badjaos into a socially excluded position.