Sade, a Sasak village on South Lombok
A visit to a traditional Sasak village is a necessary part of your trip to Lombok. There are two villages like this a few kilometers north of Kuta, called Rembitan and Sade. Even if some of these traditional villages today may have become tourist traps a visit can be an interesting experience. All the guides, [...]
Weyewa identity
The Weyewa inhabit the western highlands of Sumba, Nusa Tenggara Timur Province, where they cultivate rice, corn, and cassava using slash-and-burn farming methods as well as continuous irrigation of padi fields. They supplement this income through the sale of livestock, coffee, and their distinctive brightly colored textiles. Until the 1970s, there had been relatively few challenges [...]
Asmat identity
The approximately 65,000 Asmat people of the south-central alluvial swamps of the Papua Province are descended from a Papuan racial stock. They live in villages with populations that vary from 35 to 2,000. Until the 1950s, when greater numbers of outsiders arrived, warfare, headhunting, and cannibalism were constant features of their social life. Their houses [...]
Chinese identity
Identifying someone in Indonesia as a member of the Chinese (orang Tionghoa) ethnic group is not an easy matter, because physical characteristics, language, name, geographical location, and life-style of Chinese Indonesians are not always distinct from those of the rest of the population. Census figures do not record Chinese as a special group, and there [...]
Minangkabau identity
The Minangkabau–who predominate along the coasts of Sumatera Utara and Sumatera Barat, interior Riau, and northern Bengkulu provinces–in the early 1990s numbered more than 3.5 million. Like the Batak, they have large corporate descent groups, but unlike the Batak, the Minangkabau traditionally reckon descent matrilineally. In this system, a child is regarded as descended from [...]
Javanese identity
There were approximately 70 million Javanese in the early 1990s, the majority of whom lived in East Java and Central Java and the rest of whom lived on Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and other islands. Altogether, some 100 million people lived on Java. Although many Javanese expressed pride at the grand achievements of the illustrious courts [...]
Sundanese identity
Although there are many social, economic, and political similarities between the Javanese and Sundanese, differences abound. The Sundanese live principally in West Java, but their language is not intelligible to the Javanese. The more than 21 million Sundanese in 1992 had stronger ties to Islam than the Javanese, in terms of pesantren enrollment and religious [...]
Tradition and Multiethnicity
This article give some background to the complex traditions and multiethnicity of the young Indonesian nation. In the early 1990s, Indonesia’s society was divided into numerous ethnic groups and minorities (see list of principal ethnic groups). The largest group were the Javanese at 45 percent of the total population. Sundanese made up 14 percent, followed [...]
Acehnese identity
Situated in the Special Region of Aceh the northernmost provincial-level unit of Sumatra, the more than 3.4 million Acehnese are most famous throughout the archipelago for their devotion to Islam and their militant resistance to colonial and republican rule. Renowned throughout the nineteenth century for their pepper plantations, most Acehnese were rice growers in the [...]
The Metu people of West Timor
A couple of years ago West Timor used to see tourists in the range of 3 – 4.000 foreigners a year. Many of these visited the mountainous region of the Gunung Mutis protection forest. Particularly bird watchers showed a great interest to the area. In 2001 tourism dropped to less than a hundred visitors yearly [...]
Principal Ethnic Groups of Indonesia
For centuries the many thousands of islands and mountainous terrain have separated groups of people in the Indonesian archipelago from each other. The result of this is huge variations in culture and languages across the nation. The exact number is not clear, but approximately 300 ethnic groups live here, which speak 365 languages and a [...]
Toraja identity
One minority group that has been successful in gaining national and international attention is the Toraja of central Sulawesi. This group’s prominence, beginning in the 1980s, was due largely to the tourist industry, which was attracted to the region because of its picturesque villages and its spectacular mortuary rites involving the slaughter of water buffalo. [...]
Tanimbarese identity
In the southeastern part of Maluku Province lived more than 60,000 residents of the Tanimbar archipelago in the early 1990s. They resided in villages ranging in size from 150 to 2,500 inhabitants, but most villages numbered from 300 to 1,000. Nearly all residents spoke one of four related, but mutually unintelligible, languages. Because of an [...]
Balinese identity
There is probably no group in Indonesia more aware of its own ethnic identity than the nearly 2.5 million Balinese. Inhabitants of the islands of Bali and Lombok and the western half of Sumbawa, Balinese are often portrayed as a graceful, poised, and aesthetically inclined people. Although such descriptions date back six centuries or more [...]
Dayak identity
Another group of ethnic minorities struggling for recognition in the 1980s were the peoples of southern Kalimantan. Traditionally, most of the scattered ethnolinguistic groups inhabiting the interior of the vast island have been labelled collectively by outsiders as Dayak. Among the Dayak are the Ngaju Dayak, Maanyan, and Lawangan. Although they have traditionally resided in [...]
Batak identity
The term Batak designates any one of several groups inhabiting the interior of Sumatera Utara Province south of Aceh: Angkola, Karo, Mandailing, Pakpak, Simelungen, Toba, and others. The Batak number around 3 million. Culturally, they lack the complex etiquette and social hierarchy of the Hinduized peoples of Indonesia.
