Ethnicity In Indonesia Research Articles

Chinese language as an identity viewed by the younger Chinese ethnics in Indonesia

The political environtment of Indonesia’s New Order regime and the reformation period has brought various views amoung Chinese community in Indonesia on how use Chinese language. The aim of the study is to examine the importance of using Chinese language as an identity among Chinese community in Indonesia as perceived by the younger generation of the community. This study uses both quantitative and qualitative research method. The findings reveal that there are ethnic Chinese respondents who are not able to speak Chinese, conceive Chinese language not as an ethnic Chinese identity. However, the results show that not all respondents that are able to speak Chienese agree that Chinese language to be viewed as an ethnic Chinese identity.

A whole-school approach: A proposal for education for tolerance in Indonesia

Education is a primary way to equip children with the knowledge, skills, and competences necessary to live a life of harmonious relationships with diverse human beings. The escalating violence in the name of religion and ethnicity in Indonesia and other parts of the world is worrying, and one potential long-term solution is to educate school students in tolerance values. In the literature on tolerance education, proposed solutions have been mainly restricted to the analysis of curriculum content and instructional textbooks. This article argues that tolerance education should be approached holistically. This means that research and practices in this area should be directed to looking at the whole school, not just particular parts of the teaching and learning in a school. What is meant by a whole-school approach includes the school’s policies and vision, the quality of the curriculum and teaching, leadership and management, culture, student activities, and collaboration with the wider community, which all together contribute to the promotion and nurturance of tolerance within the school community. This article proposes a whole-school approach to education for tolerance in Indonesia, a country with rich ethnic and religious diversity.

Indahnya Betawi

Frequently the uniqueness of Betawi with its superiority and shortage performance attracts many people. This article clarifies beauty in Betawi’s modest ethnic which concerns on history, artefact, culture, art, cloth and clothes’ motif, food, and ceremony relates to people’s life, by using cultural study method and structuralism theory. It is concluded that Betawi culture has been created through a long process, even though in fact they have been removed now, but the assimilation process with various ethnics in Indonesia makes Betawi ethnic is exist and recognized. Various arts together with cultural acculturation, language, and people arise multiple perceptions toward Betawi ethnic. The modesty factor causes Betawi ethnic can be accepted by all social levels in Indonesia. With cultural richness of Betawi, so that preservation on this culture is needed, considering on the Betawi’s characteristic which is less aware of their existence.

Language, class, and ethnicity in Indonesia

This paper focuses on the role of institutions and everyday talk in the building of associations between language, region, ethnicity and class in Indonesia. In particular, I am interested in exploring how institutions have contributed to the reproduction of language ideologies that link ethnicity and class with language variety. While I argue that institutional activities have helped – often unintentionally – to associate region with language to the extent that both are equated with ethnicity or ethnic identity, these associations do not fully account for the patterns of language use at the local level.

Defining Indonesian Chineseness under the New Order

The idea that “the Chinese constitute only 3% of the population but control more than 70% of the Indonesian economy,” is a widely spread and accepted prejudice against Indonesians labelled as Chinese. This 70%-myth, which effectively combined Chinese tycoons and the rest of the “Chinese” minority, was an integral part of the New Order rule (1966–1998). It provided the politico-bureaucratic powerholders with the possibility to depict the constantly intensifying economic conflict in Indonesia as an ethnic one between the “indigenous” and the Chinese. To ethnicise the economic discourse, coherent and purposive minority policies towards the ethnic Chinese were needed. This article argues that the New Order redefined, perpetuated, and instrumentalised the “Chinese problem” by depicting the entire Chinese minority as an economically rich group. It achieved this by taking three essential steps: 1) the Chinese were marginalised by the so-called assimilation programme that, indeed, was not meant to assimilate them; 2) they were kept visible by discriminating against them; 3) they were finally stigmatised as wealthy expropriators. An analysis of these three folded policies of the state towards the Chinese will shed light on how ethnicity can be redefined and used by and for the state. By revealing the constructedness of Indonesian Chineseness and the active role of the state therein, this perspective challenges traditional, culturalist concepts of Chinese ethnicity in Indonesia and offers an interpretation of seemingly incoherent and at first sight contradictory minority politics of the New Order.

Resettlement and the politicization of ethnicity in Indonesia

Bu Sri and Pak Yatno are from the province of North Sumatra. In 1991 the couple paid an agent Rp. 400,000. (approximately US$ 194.00)1 to assist them in illicitly obtaining land in a transmigration site in Sumatra intended by the state for resettlement of Javanese transmigrants. For this sum the agent escorted them to Jakarta where he helped them to obtain false ID cards and other documents required to pose as Javanese and as eligible candidates for the transmigration program. Just two weeks after their departure from Sumatra, Bu Sri and Pak Yatno joined hundreds of settlers on board one of the ships used to transport transmigrants from Java to Sumatra. According to informants, of the sixty families on board who were settled in the transmigration site where I conducted field research only two were Javanese; the remaining fifty-eight were Sumatrans who had gone through the same process as Bu Sri and Pak Yatno in order to transmigrate. This story illustrates one of several strategies used by Sumatrans hoping to obtain land in one of the government's resettlement sites in Sumatra. Indonesia's transmigration program is one of the largest state-directed resettlement programs in the world. Under its last Five-Year Development Plan (Repelita V, 1989/90 1993/94) the government targeted approx imately two and a half million people to be relocated from the archipe lago's densely populated inner islands Java, Bali, and Madura to the more sparsely populated outer islands (Departemen Penerangan Republik Indo nesia 1994:19-29). In this paper I would like to focus on the implications of this large-scale resettlement for the negotiation of identity, difference, and political locality. In particular, I will examine the role of state allocation of resources in politicizing categories of ethnic identity. Research findings are based on two years of field research conducted between December, 1991 and April, 1994.2 This was a dual-site project

National Integration and Ethnicity in Indonesia

National Integration and Ethnicity in Indonesia