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Indonesia SOURCES OF LOCAL IDENTIFICATION
Tradition and Multiethnicity
In the early 1990s, Indonesia's society was divided
into
numerous ethnic groups and minorities (see
table 8,
Appendix). The
largest group were the Javanese at 45 percent of the total
population. Sundanese made up 14 percent, followed by
Madurese, 7.5
percent, and coastal Malays, 7.5 percent. As a sign of its
diverse
population, fully 26 percent of the population in 1992
consisted of
numerous small ethnic groups or minorities. The extent of
this
diversity is unknown, however, since Indonesian censuses
do not
collect data on ethnicity.
As this increasingly mobile, multiethnic nation moved
into its
fifth decade of independence, Indonesians were made
aware--through
education, television, cinema, print media, and national
parks--of
the diversity of their own society. When Indonesians talk
about
their cultural differences with one another, one of the
first words
they use is adat (custom or tradition). This term
adat is roughly translated as "custom" or
"tradition," but
its meaning has undergone a number of transformations in
Indonesia.
In some circumstances, for instance, adat has a
kind of
legal status--certain adat laws (hukum adat)
are
recognized by the government as legitimate. These
ancestral customs
may pertain to a wide range of activities: agricultural
production,
religious practices, marriage arrangements, legal
practices,
political succession, or artistic expressions.
Despite the fact that the vast majority of Indonesians
are
Muslim, they maintain very different social
identifications. For
example, when Javanese try to explain the behavior of a
Sundanese
or a Balinese counterpart, they might say "because it is
his
adat." Differences in the ways ethnic groups
practice Islam
are often ascribed to adat. Each group may have
slightly
different patterns of observing religious holidays,
attending the
mosque, expressing respect, or burying the dead.
Although adat in the sense of "custom" is often
viewed
as one of the deepest--even sacred--sources of consensus
within an
ethnic group, the word itself is actually of foreign
derivation--
originally from the Arabic. Through centuries of contact
with
outsiders, Indonesians have a long history of contrasting
themselves and their traditions with those of others, and
their
notions of who they are as a people have been shaped in
integral
ways by these encounters. On the more isolated islands in
eastern
Indonesia, for instance, one finds ethnic groups that have
no word
for adat because they have had very little contact
with
outsiders.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the notion of adat came
to take
on a national significance in touristic settings such as
Balinese
artistic performances and in museum displays. Taman Mini,
a kind of
ethnographic theme park located on the outskirts of
Jakarta, seeks
to display and interpret the cultural variation of
Indonesia. From
its groundbreaking in 1971 and continuing after its
completion in
1975, the park was surrounded in controversy, not least
because its
construction displaced hundreds of villagers whose land
was seized
in order to finish the job. Nonetheless, a 100-hectare
park was
landscaped to look like the archipelago of Indonesia in
miniature
when viewed from an overhead tramway. There was a house
for each
province to represent the vernacular architecture of the
region.
Distinctive local hand weapons, textiles, and books
explaining the
customs of the region were sold. The powerful message of
the park
was that adat is contained in objective, material
culture,
that it is aesthetically pleasing and indeed marketable,
but that
it is more or less distinct from everyday social life.
Furthermore,
the exhibits conveyed the impression that ethnicity is a
relatively
simple aesthetic matter of regional and spatial variations
rather
than a matter of deep emotional or political attachments.
However,
the park provided visitors with a vivid and attractive (if
not
always convincing) model for how the Indonesian national
motto--
Unity in Diversity (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, a Javanese motto
dating
to the fifteenth century Kingdom of Majapahit)--might be
understood.
When Indonesians talk about their society in inclusive
terms,
they are more likely to use a word like budaya
(culture)
than adat. One speaks of kebudayaan
Indonesia, the
"culture of Indonesia," as something grand, and refers to
traditions of refinement and high civilization. The
Hinduized
dances, music, and literature of Java and Bali and the
great
monuments associated with their religion are often
described as
examples of "culture" or "civilization" but not "custom."
However,
as the following descriptions show, the wide variety of
sources of
local identification underscore the diversity rather than
the unity
of the Indonesian population.
Data as of November 1992
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