Indonesia The Society and Its Environment
The figure on the right is a cantrik, a
student who is servant to a priest. Here he accompanies a cangik,
a maidservant to a princes, or demoness, who fights on the side
of evil.
INDONESIA'S SOCIAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL ENVIRONMENT is one
of the
most complex and varied in the world. By one count, at
least 669
distinct languages and well over 1,100 different dialects
are
spoken in the archipelago. The nation encompasses some
13,667
islands; the landscape ranges from rain forests and
steaming
mangrove swamps to arid plains and snowcapped mountains.
Major
world religions--Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and
Hinduism--are
represented. Political systems vary from the ornate
sultans' courts
of Central Java to the egalitarian communities of
hunter-gatherers
of Sumatran jungles. A wide variety of economic patterns
also can
be found within Indonesia's borders, from rudimentary
slash-and-
burn agriculture to highly sophisticated computer
microchip
assembly plants. Some Indonesian communities rely on
traditional
feasting systems and marriage exchange for economic
distribution,
while others act as sophisticated brokers in international
trading
networks operating throughout the South China Sea.
Indonesians also
have a wide variety of living arrangements. Some go home
at night
to extended families living in isolated bamboo longhouses,
others
return to hamlets of tiny houses clustered around a
mosque, whereas
still others go home to nuclear families in urban
high-rise
apartment complexes.
There are, however, striking similarities among the
nation's
diverse groups. Besides citizenship in a common
nation-state, the
single most unifying cultural characteristic is a shared
linguistic
heritage. Almost all of the nation's more than 195 million
people
speak one of several Austronesian languages,
which--although not
mutually intelligible--share many vocabulary items and
have similar
sentence patterns. Most important, the vast majority of
the
population can speak
Bahasa Indonesia (see Glossary), the
official
national language. Used in government, schools, print and
electronic media, and in multiethnic cities, this
Malay-derived
language is both an important unifying symbol and a
vehicle of
national integration
(see The Emerging National Culture
, this ch.).
Nearly 70 percent of Indonesians lived outside of
cities,
which, according to the definition used by the
government's Central
Bureau of Statistics (BPS; for this and other acronyms,
see table
A), were areas with population densities greater than
5,000 persons
per square kilometer or where less than 25 percent of the
households were employed in the agricultural sector.
Indeed, most
Indonesians in the early 1990s, as their ancestors before
them,
were closely associated with agriculture, stockbreeding,
or
fishing. Whereas some isolated farming communities were
comprised
essentially of subsistence farmers--living off what they
grew--most
depended to some degree on cash profits earned from
selling their
produce at mercantile centers. Aside from coffee and
rubber
plantations, large-scale, highly capitalized
agribusinesses, such
as industrialized rice farming or chicken farms, remained
the
exception in Indonesia
(see Agriculture
, ch. 3).
This pattern, however, was changing. Describing
Indonesia's
cultural and regional variety, American anthropologist
Hildred
Geertz in 1960 divided the population into three types:
wet rice
growing (padi) peasants of Java, Bali, and parts of
southern
Sumatra; coastal Islamic traders in the harbor regions of
Sumatra,
Kalimantan, and Sulawesi; and isolated inland swidden
farmers
throughout the archipelago. In following decades, however,
a fourth
category emerged. It consisted of a largely urban middle
class--
members of a modern Indonesian national superculture.
Over the course of the 1980s, population mobility,
educational
achievement, and urbanization increased as Indonesians
were exposed
to the varieties of their nation's cultures through
television,
newspapers, schools, and cultural activities. Linkages to
native
geographic region and sociocultural heritage weakened.
Ethnicity
became a means of identification in certain situations but
not in
others. For example, during Ramadan, the Islamic month of
fasting,
peasants from Java might emphasize their Islamic faith and
affiliation, whereas in other settings, they emphasized
their
membership in the national state by attending school,
participating
in family planning programs and belonging to village
cooperatives,
and by invoking the
Pancasila (see Glossary), the state
ideology,
as a moral justification for personal and family choices
(see Islam
, this ch.;
Pancasila: The State Ideology
, ch. 4). In
a
similar way, isolated hill tribes living in the interiors
of the
islands of Sulawesi, Seram, or Timor might express
devotion to
ancestral spirits through animal sacrifice at home, but
swear
loyalty to the Indonesian state in school and church, or
at the
polls. In the early 1990s one's identity as an Indonesian
was still
interwoven with one's familial, regional, and ethnic
heritage.
Data as of November 1992
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