Ethnicity on the Net

Everything you need to know about online resources

John A. MacDougall

When finding internet sources on ethnicity in Indonesia remember six points. There is no majority ethnic group – Javanese number only 42 per cent. Nearly all the countless others (except Sundanese, 15 per cent) comprise very small minorities. Size statistics are usually best estimates. No group is culturally uniform. Many groups use multiple names Online sources only complement more copious offline ones.

Search postings on the book Indonesia’s Population at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indonesian-studies/ messages to get insights into these issues. Then consider buying the book from the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) so you have a numerical framework.

Then explore SIL International’s Ethnologue to see Indonesia’s ethno-linguistic diversity categorized. A good start page in the site is http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=Indonesia. To get depth, use ethnic group names to search citations, abstracts, and previews of the two most recent years of mainly North American dissertations at ProQuest Digital Dissertations (http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations). For all years’ dissertations, search titles at Dissertation Express (http://tls.il.proquest.com/hp/Products/DisExpress.html). Any dissertation found in these sources may be ordered online by anyone anywhere with a credit card.

For an even richer experience, travel to Amazon (http://www.amazon.com). Amazon is no longer just a bookshop, it’s a virtual mall. To search, just type the name of any of Indonesia’s ethnic groups, using variant spellings (like Malay/Melayu, Bugis/Buginese) to pick up resources in more than English. Place names also often work well. A natural language search phrase like ‘ethnic groups in Indonesia’ will really expand your horizons. Use Amazon’s innovative Search-Inside-the-Book feature. If your main interest is books, also check AddALL (http://www.addall. com) to find best buys (new, used, out-of-print).

Don’t forget libraries (make bibliographies, see accessions lists, find rare books, explore inter-library loan services). For world libraries online, try LibWeb (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Libweb), LibDex (http://www.libdex.com), or Gabriel, the gateway to European national libraries (http://www.kb.nl/gabriel). The first two sites even take you to some libraries in Indonesia. The third quickly brings up under-utilized Dutch, French, and British collections.

If you prefer digital libraries made by librarians, try the Portal to Asian Internet Services (PAIR) (http://pair.library.wisc.edu), Digital Librarian (http://www.digital-librarian. com), and Librarians Index to the Internet (http://lii.org).

For public policy, studies of ethnic conflicts in Indonesia may usually be viewed gratis on sites like Human Rights Watch (1993 onward) (http://www.hrw.org/asia/indonesia.php), Amnesty International (1996 onward) (http://web.amnesty.org/library/eng-idn/index), and International Crisis Group (1999 onward) (http://www.crisisweb.org/home/index.cfm?id=1258&l=1). For many relevant field work reports, try papers by Australian Consortium for In Country Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) participants (1995 onward) at http://www.acicis.murdoch.edu.au/hi/fieldrep.html. Or peruse Indonesia Publications’ quasi-central paper repository (2002 onward) at http://www.indopubs.com/ inco.html. A joint Indonesian (PMB-LIPI) — French (LASEMA-CNRS) communal conflict project (http://www.communalconflict.com) focuses specifically on Aceh and Kalimantan.

Overlooked exploratory resources are directories on Indonesia accompanying many search engines. For Google, try http://directory.google.com/Top/Regional/Asia/Indonesia/ (English) or, for even more sites, http://directory.google.com/Top/World/Indonesia (Indonesian). Look under Regions and Daerah headings respectively for a quick start. Yahoo and Open Directory also offer twin directories for sites in English and Indonesian.

For directories made by Indonesians for Indonesians, SearchIndonesia may be the best. There is now an English interface at http://www.searchindonesia.com/cgi-bin/links/lang.cgi?t=en. Start with the Regions heading, but try others, too.

For current news and feature articles on ethnicity in Indonesia, Google News advanced search at http://news.google.com/advanced_news_search?hl=en&edition=us lets you see quickly which ethnic groups get covered in many English-language sources. Again, use relevant ethnic group names and places as your search keywords. MSN Newsbot (http://uk.newsbot.msn.com) is a new site covering many British sources Google misses. AllTheWeb is the rarity among news engines in allowing for some searching of Indonesian-language sources. Going to this address — http://www.alltheweb.com/?cat=news&cs=utf-8&q=&_sb_lang=any — gives you that option.

Article links on current news sites expire quickly. News databases may be helpful for longer perspectives. Two relevant ones are free. Gordon Bishop’s news database (1999 onward) is searchable at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/berita-bhinneka/messages. My ‘apakabar’ news and opinion database (1990-2002) is now housed at http://www.library.ohiou.edu/indopubs/search/search.html. See http://www.indopubs.com/db.html for related links.

It’s almost invidious to single out the many helpful general and specific sites on Indonesian ethnic groups, but here’s a selective tour. Walter Vaerewijck’s Indonesia Start Tips at http://www.indonesia.starttips.com is a virtual base camp. So is Wolfgang Zehnter’s more text-oriented Info-Indo at http://www.info-indo.com. Visit Peggy Reeves’ Sanday’s Eggi’s Village at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~psanday/eggi2.html for the Minangkabau. For Dayaks, don’t miss Institut Dayakologi at http://www.dayakology.com/id/eng/index.htm. Kalimantan Review is here. For the Minahasa region, see http://www.minahasa.net/en/default.asp. ExploreShao Center resources on Overseas Chinese at http://www.library.ohiou.edu/subjects/shao/resources.htm. Like Indonesia’s incredible ethnic diversity, the list could go on forever.

John A. MacDougall (johnmacdougall@comcast.net) is editor of Indonesia Publications (http://www.indopubs.com).