CULTURE
Indonesia's social and geographical environment
is one of the most complex and varied in the world. By one count,
at least 669 distinct languages and well over 1,100 different
dialects are spoken in the archipelago. The nation encompasses
some 13,667 islands; the landscape ranges from rain forests and
steaming mangrove swamps to arid plains and snowcapped mountains.
Major world religions--Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism--are
described. Political systems vary from the ornate sultans' courts
of Central Java to the egalitarian communities of hunter-gatherers
of Sumatran jungles.Some Indonesian communities rely on orthodox
feasting systems and marriage exchange for economic distribution,
while others act as sophisticated brokers in international trading
networks operating throughout the South China Sea. Indonesians
also have a wide mixture of living arrangements. Some go home
at night to extended families living in isolated bamboo longhouses,
others return to hamlets of tiny houses clustered around a mosque,
whereas still others go home to nuclear families in urban high-rise
apartment complexes.
Over the course of the 1980s, population mobility, educational
achievement, and urbanization increased as Indonesians were exposed
to the varieties of their nation's cultures through television,
newspapers, schools, and cultural activities. Linkages to native
geographic region and sociocultural heritage weakened. Ethnicity
became a means of identification in certain situations but not
in others.In a similar way, isolated hill tribes living in the
interiors of the islands of Sulawesi, Seram, or Timor might express
devotion to ancestral spirits through animal sacrifice at home,
but swear loyalty to the Indonesian state in school and church,
or at the polls. In the early 1990s one's identity as an Indonesian
was still interwoven with one's familial, regional, and ethnic
heritage.
