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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 are no simple racial criteria for membership in this group. There are some people who are considered Chinese by themselves and others, despite generations of intermarriage with the local population, resulting in offspring who are less than one-quarter Chinese in ancestry. On the other hand, there are some people who by ancestry could be considered halfChinese or more, but who regard themselves as fully Indonesian. Furthermore, many people who identify themselves as Chinese Indonesians cannot read or write the Chinese language. Alth

The approximately 65,000 Asmat people of the south-central alluvial swamps of Irian Jaya 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 were built along the bends of rivers so that an enemy attack could be seen in advance. Houses in coastal areas in the twentieth century were generally built on pilings two or more meters high, to protect residents from daily flooding by the surging tides of the brackish rivers. In the foothills of the Jayawijaya Mountains, Asmat lived in tree houses that were five to twenty-five meters off the ground. In some areas, they also built watchtowers in trees that rose thirty meters from the ground. The Asmat are primarily hunters and

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 extended dry season, the forests were much less luxuriant than in some of the more northerly Maluku Islands, and the effects of over-intensive swidden cultivation of rice, cassava, and other root crops were visible in the interior. Many Tanimbarese also engaged in reef and deep-sea fishing and wild boar hunting. Unlike the Weyewa, Toraja, or Dayak, the Tanimbarese do not maintain an opposition between their native culture and an officially recognized Christian culture. Following a Dutch military expedition in 1912, Catholic and Protestant missio

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 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 to the Weyewa notions of political and religious identity. Because Sumba is a rather dry and infertile island, located away from the ports of call of the spice trade, it was comparatively insulated from the Hindu, Muslim, and later Dutch influences, each of which helped to shape the character of Indonesia's cultures. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Sumba was periodically raided for slaves by Muslim traders, the local inhabitants responded by building and living in fortified hilltop villa

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 longhouses that served as an important protection against slave raiding and intervillage raids, the people of this region are not communalistic. They have bilateral kinship, and the basic unit of ownership and social organization is the nuclear family. Religiously, they tend to be either Protestant or Kaharingan, a form of native religious practice viewed by the government as Hindu. The Dayak make a living through swidden agriculture and possess relatively elaborate death ceremonies in which the bones are disinterred for

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. Inhabiting the wet, rugged mountains of the interior of Sulawesi, the Toraja grow rice for subsistence and coffee for cash. Traditionally, they live in fortified hilltop villages with from two to forty picturesque houses with large sweeping roofs that resemble buffalo horns. Up until the late 1980s, these villages were politically and economically self-sufficient, partly as protection against the depredations of the slave trade and partly as a result of intervillage feuding associated with headhunting. The Toraja h

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. The groups described below represent only a sampling of the many minorities. [Toraha] [Dayak] [Weyewa] [Tanimbarese

The vast, heavily forested island of Sumatra forms the southern perimeter of the Strait of Malacca. The strait is one of the most important lanes of shipping and commerce in the world, and historically a crossroads of cultural influences from the Middle East, India, China, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia and East Asia. Although nearly all of the approximately twenty ethnolinguistic groups of Sumatra are devout practitioners of Islam, they nonetheless differ strikingly from one another, particularly in their family structures. Acehnese 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

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 and are at least partially based on legend, this characterization is also partly based on events in contemporary Indonesia. Virtually no part of Bali escaped the watchful gaze of tourists who came in increasing numbers each year to enjoy the island's beautiful beaches and stately temples, and to seek out an "authentic" experience of this perceived "traditional" culture. The market for traditional carvings, dance performances, and paintings boomed, and many Balinese successfully reinvested their earnings in further development of thes

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 affiliation. Although the Sundanese language, like Javanese, possesses elaborate speech levels, these forms of respect are infused with Islamic values, such as the traditional notion of hormat (respect--knowing and fulfilling one's proper position in society). Children are taught that the task of behaving with proper hormat is also a religious struggle--the triumph of akal (reason) over nafsu (desire). These dilemmas are spelled out in the pesantren, where children learn to memorize the Quran in Arabic. Through copious

Living Environments The government of Indonesia saw itself in the early 1990s as having a responsibility to advance a national culture, a project that was linked to requirements of national development and political integration. Government mandates aside, however, as more and more of the Indonesian population sought employment in large, poorly integrated cities consisting of diverse ethnic groups, the concept of a national culture had great appeal as a way of regulating these changing urban environments. Although the central government attempted to guide the formation of this culture through education curricula, national holiday celebrations, and careful control of the national media (popular art, television, and print media), this emerging culture came about only partly through central planning. Evidence of an Indonesian national culture also appeared in the far less controlled lay

Religion in Indonesia was a complex and volatile issue in the early 1990s, one not easily analyzed in terms of social class, region, or ethnic group. Although Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions influenced many aspects of life, the government generally discouraged religious groups from playing a political role. The state guaranteed tolerance for certain religions ( agama ) regarded as monotheistic by the government, including Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but only as long as these creeds remained outside of politics. Islam Islam was the dominant religion by far in Indonesia, with the greatest number of religious adherents: around 143 million people or 86.9 percent of the population in 1985, which when adjusted for 1992 estimates represents between 160 million and 170 million adherents. This high percentage of Muslims made Indonesia the largest Islamic

The experiences of population mobility in the archipelago underscore the continuing importance of social stratification in Indonesia. In 1992 the definition and function of social classes in Indonesia, however, was a matter of considerable controversy. Scholars and policy analysts debated the degree to which social classes could be defined in ethnic, economic, religious, or political terms. Although few would dispute that Indonesia was a highly stratified society, it was nonetheless difficult to identify an "upper class." Hereditary ruling classes and traditional elites- -reinforced by their positions in the Dutch colonial bureaucracy-- no longer possessed unchallenged access to political power and wealth. Indeed, they could not even claim to be an elite culture in the late twentieth century. The powerful generals (mostly Javanese) and capitalists (mostly ethnic Chinese capitalists

Although Indonesians--particularly Javanese--are sometimes stereotyped as highly immobile, rarely venturing out beyond the confines of their village environment, this image may be due to a lack of clear data and an extraordinarily complex pattern of movement in the population. By the early 1990s, outmigration had become as common a response to overcrowded conditions caused by rising population as resigned acceptance of impoverishment. Central Javanese, in particular, were leaving their home region in record numbers. The number of all Javanese leaving the island permanently was growing: there was a 73 percent increase in outmigration from 1971 to 1980. Some 6 percent of the population of the other islands was Javanese by 1980. Whereas most Indonesians who moved from one region to another did so on their own, some migration was organized by the government-sponsored Transmigration Progr

One of the most significant trends in Indonesian society in the 1970s and 1980s was urbanization. Although cities in Indonesia were not a new phenomenon, from 1971 to 1990 the percentage of the population living in urban areas rose from 17 percent to nearly 31 percent nationally. Surveys showed that the movement toward urban areas, particularly to West Java, and to southeastern Sulawesi, Kalimantan, and other islands, stemmed not from the innate lure of the cities but from the lack of employment in the countryside. Migrants seemed to view the pollution, crime, anonymity, and grinding poverty of the city as short-term discomforts that would eventually give way to a better life. For high-school and college graduates with no prospects for employment in the rural areas, this may in fact have been a correct assumption. But for those migrants without capital or qualifications, the main hope for