Music, myth, and ritual : among the Moken sea nomads : on the contiguity of aesthetic and religious experience in the life-world of a maritime hunter-gatherer people

In contrast to the law-governed, mechanical world of matter, “[m]an finds himself living in an aleatory world” (Dewey). Hence, all human societies through all ages appear to have developed imaginative, expressive, and creative means to confront the unpredictable whims of fate and the primal ur-fact of mortal existence itself. Historically evolved and culturally acknowledged forms of reflection and affirmation of communal life and individual being. Expressions of the extraordinary ideational powers of man that allow us to affirm our place within reality, to develop the belief in an afterlife, and to reconcile the finite existence of the individual with the continuing existence of the community (Bruner); an elementary Daseinskritik: those manifestations that in Western modernity became subsumed under the terms 'religion' and 'art'. The Moken sea nomads produce sounding expressions that we would readily and without much hesitation label as music. The Moken themselves, however, do not have a word for ‘music’ in our sense of the term; no generic conceptual category; no linguistic expression that takes as its referent a coherent, autonomous domain of 'Tonkunst' (or something to that effect). In the world of the Moken sea nomads what we call ‘music’ is tightly interwoven with, and in a sense subordinate to, those cultural spheres that we would refer to as ‘myth’ (i.e. something like ‘foundational, meaning-endowing traditional narratives’) and ‘ritual’ (i.e. something akin to ‘the communal symbolic enactment of collective beliefs’). How the interrelationships between these domains present themselves to the outside observer will be described, using the example of the Moken's annual ancestor worship ceremony, né'èn lᴐbo:ŋ.