This page provides online resources to assist users in carrying out web-based research on Indonesia and East Timor. Suggestions for additional links are always welcome!

Edited by Elizabeth Coville (ecoville@gmail.com)

What's Up on the Web:

A fortnightly update on items of special interest to researchers on Indonesia and East Timor and accessible through links on this page.

#15 - A quest for "peoples and cultures"

My quest started while doing errands yesterday and hearing a snippet of All Things Considered on NPR about technology, about wikipedia to be specific.  It was followed by a commentary byphilosopher Alain De Botton entitled "Motives behind a mantra:revise, revise, revise".


The idea of a "cacophony" of information versus a writer's "point of view" got me thinking.  I have a problem:  I need to create a reading assignment that will give students an overview of the cultural diversity of Indonesia.  Like a lot of people, I usually use Hildred Geertz's long chapter "Indonesian Cultures and Communities" in the 1960 reader edited by Ruth McVey.  But it's old, and if I want to keep using it, I need to at least contextualize it.  So either I find something new or I supplement it with something online.

So this morning I did a search. I started on Simplicity.  Went to Our Net on the right sidebar.  Scrolled down alphabetically to Google Country Directories, and clicked on Indonesia, and then on Guides and Directories.


Here we find the familiar standbys: BBC Country Profle, CIA World Factbook, U.S. Department of State Background Notes, and something new to me called NationMaster. Lots of facts, many maps (especially on NationMaster), but these four sources are still not all that I need to give a sense of ethnographic diversity.

There is more to be found back at Google's Guides and Directories. The Library of Congress offers, first, their Portals to the World: Indonesia  and their Country Study: Indonesia. This is an online version of the 1993 edition of Indonesia: A Country Study, edited by William H. Frederick and Robert I. Worden.  Go to chapter 2 ("The Society and its Environment"), which is written by Joel Kuipers.  This section helps fill in the gap between 1960 and the early 1990s.  For something even more up-to-date, there is the December 2004 Country Profile. I notice that the latter helpfully provides a list of ethnolinguistic groups according to regional languages spoken by more than a million speakers.

No search for general information like this would be complete without Wikipedia.  But the format
is different from the previous sites.  There's more here than I can deal with today, such as separate entries for Ethnic Groups in Indonesia, which contains 49 pages.  This I will save for a future search.

Posted on Dec 1, 2006