Indonesia Ethnic Minorities
Husband and wife in traditional dress, Nusa Tenggara Timur
Province
Courtesy Indonesian Department of Information
Dayak tribe crafts workers, Kalimantan Tengah Province
Courtesy Indonesian Department of Information
In Indonesia the concept of ethnic minorities is often
discussed not in numerical but in religious terms.
Although the
major ethnic groups claimed adherence to one of the major
world
religions (agama) recognized by the Pancasila
ideology--
Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism--there were
millions of
other Indonesians in the early 1980s who engaged in forms
of
religious or cultural practices that fell outside these
categories.
These practices were sometimes labelled animist or
kafir
(pagan). In general, these Indonesians tended to live in
the more
remote, sparsely populated islands of the archipelago.
Following
the massacre of tens of thousands associated with the 1965
coup
attempt, religious affiliation became an even more intense
political issue among minority groups
(see The Coup and its Aftermath
, ch. 1). The groups described below represent
only a
sampling of the many minorities.
Data as of November 1992
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