Indonesia: Cultural Eclecticism and Pragmatic Applications

Abstract

Let us now briefly examine the historical and social background of the largest country within the ASEAN community, namely, Indonesia to be able to evaluate the nature of its development process and a variety of attempted normative-pragmatic balances in its various compartments of life. The population of Indonesia (180m. in 1980) is spread over its 13 600 islands, with a strong tendency to remain self-contained. Its geographical isolation is further reinforced by the diversity of its ethnic groups and their social systems. Moreover, its economy is still predominantly agricultural with different degree of resistance to change. Such constraints meant that it had to take much longer to implement, uniformally, its new policies or carry out course corrections. Added to these were the major political upheavals and structural changes of the 1960s. Despite such disadvantages, the Indonesian development process virtually kept pace with the growth rates and qualitative changes that were being introduced in the economies and societies of most other ASEAN countries. We shall examine those and other related aspects of its development under the following subheadings: i. historical background; ii. the nature of social organisation; iii. political process; iv. changing attitudes; and, v. indigenous perceptions. We shall now examine each of these in some detail.