School of Geography - Research Publications
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ItemWho Wears the Hijab? Predictors of Veiling in Greater Jakarta(Springer Verlag, 2018-12-01)Indonesia is home to the world’s largest Muslim population. In contrast to much of the Middle East, veiling in Indonesia is neither a deeply rooted cultural practice, nor it is universally practised among Muslim women. Just 30 years ago it was rare to see an Indonesian woman wearing a hijab or veil. Today, veiling has become a relatively common practice, particularly among middle-class Muslim women living in urban areas. Although statistics on the prevalence of veiling are scant, the fact of growing use of headscarves is widely accepted in the literature. This paper examines sociodemographic correlates of veiling among young women in the capital region of Indonesia. We analyse a representative sample of 1443 Muslim women aged 20–34 in Greater Jakarta in 2010. About 26% of the women surveyed wore the veil. We found a moderately strong association between veiling and other measures of religiosity, including self-reported subjective religiosity and frequency of reading religious texts. Our multivariate analysis suggests a positive association between educational attainment and the likelihood of veiling among young Muslim women. In discussing these findings, we draw upon the qualitative component of our study and the literature on Islam, gender, and modernity in Indonesia. The paper highlights the difficulty encountered examining the practice of veiling as a binary choice, and as a measure of religiosity.
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ItemInterreligious Marriage in Indonesia(Brill, 2019-05-06)Indonesia – home to the world’s largest Muslim population – is an ethnically diverse archipelago with sizeable non-Muslim communities. There is a dearth of demographic study on how religions shape patterns of marriage partnerships in Indonesia. We use full enumeration data from the 2010 Indonesian Population Census to examine the incidence, regional variation, pairing patterns, and socio-demographic correlates of interreligious marriage (IRM). We derived a subset of over 47 million co-resident heads of household and their spouses from the 2010 Census. About 228,778 couples (0.5%) were enumerated as having different faiths at the time of the Census. Rates of IRM are higher in ethnically diverse provinces. Such findings are likely to underestimate the prevalence of interreligious marriage due to existing regulations and norms that effectively discourage IRM, and the associated practice of pre-marital conversions. Our multivariate analysis focused on three provinces with the highest rates of IRM: Jakarta, North Sumatra, and West Kalimantan. In Jakarta and North Sumatra, the likelihood of IRM is higher among non-Muslims and among those at the higher end of the education spectrum. In these provinces, the likelihood of IRM is lower among younger birth cohorts, supporting speculation about stronger institutional barriers against IRM over time. This is the first study attempting to derive national and regional estimates of patterns of IRM in Indonesia. Given the increasing polemics related to IRM and the Indonesian Marriage Law, setting out this research is an important initial step for further study of this issue.
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ItemSocial engagement and the elderly in rural Indonesia(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2019-05)Rural areas in Indonesia are older relative to urban areas. This paper questions how levels of social engagement vary across among the elderly in rural Indonesia. A sample of 2750 respondents aged 60 and over was drawn from 10 purposely-selected relatively "old" villages. Our three measures of social engagement are: participation in income-generating activities, in communal activities, and in care work. While there are notable village-level differences in patterns of social engagement, the majority of our respondents are actively engaged in productive activities in their old age until they can no longer be so. A negative educational gradient in the likelihood of work participation suggests that needs for income security is a driver of the elderly's work participation. The notion of promoting active ageing, as typically understood in the Western and/or urban contexts, is of secondary importance to health care provision and managing old-age disability in these ageing rural communities.