Names for Indonesia
‘Indonesia’ is an artificial name — a nineteenth-century pseudo-Greek coinage meaning, of course, ‘Indian islands’. It was proposed by the British ethnologists George Windsor Earl and James Richardson Logan to solve a tricky problem: how to accurately and unambiguously refer to the huge and heterogeneous area between southern Thailand and New Guinea.
‘Heterogeneous’ is an understatement. If New Guinea is included — and realistically speaking it should be in some sense — then this is one of the most linguistically diverse places on the planet, although that diversity is heavily weighted to the east. The region is renowned for its human phenotypic diversity as well, with darker skin pigmentation, curly hair, and taller stature in the east and lighter skin pigmentation, straighter hair, and shorter stature in the west (i.e., the division between ‘Asian’ genotypes/phenotypes and ‘Australo-Melanesian’ or ‘Papuan’ ones). It’s one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, too, and this is due in large part to the archipelago’s fractured geology, involving interactions between literally dozens of tectonic plates. Diversity is the watchword. It’s not surprising that the motto of Indonesia means roughly ‘unity in diversity’ (bhinneka tunggal ika).
So what are the boundaries of this region and what name should it be given? There’s no simple answer to that; all the proposed names and boundaries have their pros and cons. Here are some of the overlapping terms that can be used for different purposes:
- Indonesia
- Indo-Malaysia
- Indo-Malaysian Archipelago
- Insulinde
- Malay Archipelago
- Nusantara
- Malesia
- Island Southeast Asia (ISEA)
- Maritime Southeast Asia
‘Indonesia’ is prima facie a good term to use, and that’s why I use it fairly frequently. It was initially proposed as a purely ethnological/geographic term by British geographers nearly a century before the founding of the Republic of Indonesia, and although it implies that the archipelago is in some way ‘Indian’, which isn’t really accurate, it would be a reasonably neutral word — were it not for the fact that the Republic of Indonesia has at times been an expansionist nationalist state. It wouldn’t be right to refer to the entire region as ‘Indonesia’ for that reason, in the same way that it wouldn’t be right to refer to the North Atlantic Archipelago as ‘Britain’ (let alone ‘England’). For the purposes of educating the public, though, it’s a useful term and much less alienating than the others.
‘Indo-Malaysia’ and ‘Indo-Malaysian Archipelago’ have been used in academic publications, especially before the independence of Timor Leste in 2000 and especially in books dealing with everything but New Guinea (like Peter Bellwood’s landmark Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago). These terms have drawbacks, though, as there are a number of other islands and polities in the archipelago and if you’ve gone to the trouble of including Malaysia to be politically correct then it seems a bit rude not to include Timor Leste and PNG. Like several of the other terms on the list, the name prioritizes the Indian and Malay strata of cultural heritage in the archipelago as well, and it’s important to be aware that there’s a lot more to Indonesia/Indo-Malaysia than just those bits.
‘Insulinde’ isn’t really used any more, but it was once a popular term in Dutch writing on what was then the Dutch East Indies. Other popular Dutch names for the islands were ambiguous, especially Indië ‘India’. ‘Insulinde’ just means ‘island Indies’, and it would be fairly useful except that it’s no longer popular, it’s confusing for the public, and it comes with all the baggage carried by the awkward and ambiguous word ‘Indies’. So I suppose this one is less useful than the others.
The ‘Malay Archipelago’ is the name of probably the most famous book in English on the region. In Wallace’s 1869 work it refers to the whole stretch from Sumatra to New Guinea, but doesn’t include the Philippines — if I remember correctly this is because Wallace had no experience in the Philippines and couldn’t determine whether it would be appropriate to put the Philippine Islands in with all the rest. Back then the ‘Malay Archipelago’ was divided among the Dutch, British, and Portuguese; European influence in much of eastern Indonesia and New Guinea was weak (to say the least); and Malay was used as a lingua franca almost everywhere, even among Europeans. Wallace was keen to point out the incredible diversity of this Malay Archipelago — not just botanically and zoologically but also ethnologically — but I find the name a little problematic because a) it’s now more the name of a book than of a place, b) it foregrounds the Malay element, which doesn’t make a lot of sense if you’re talking about ancient times (there’s no reason to believe Malay was being spoken in eastern Indonesia before the fifteenth century, for example), and c) most people seem to think it has something to do with modern Malaysia.
‘Nusantara’ is a Javanese name based on an Old Javanese word, and that means it has some baggage. The Javanese are the largest single ethnic group in the archipelago and the Indonesian state is sometimes accused of being little more than a Javanese empire. Transmigration programmes shifting Javanese and Madurese people to the so-called ‘Outer Islands’ have stoked resentment in the past. Old Javanese texts have, moreover, often been used by Indonesian nationalists as a justification for annexing territory or enforcing certain norms. So this term needs to be treated with a little caution, although its more neutral these days than its origins would suggest.
It comes from the Old Javanese nūsāntara ‘the other islands’, but these days it tends to refer to the whole archipelago in a more politically correct manner than ‘Indonesia’. I think it’d be a great name if more people were aware of it, but for now it’s an alienating term for your average Anglophone. It has common currency in Indonesia and Malaysia, however.
‘Malesia’ is a biogeographic term and unlike the terms above it includes the Philippines in addition to the territories of Malaysia, Timor Leste, Brunei, and most of Indonesia (excluding New Guinea). The human history of the Philippines is connected in varying degrees and in various ways to the history of Indonesia/Indo-Malaysia/Nusantara, especially in the mid-Holocene and the fifteenth century. A couple of Old Malay and Old Javanese texts have been found in the Philippines, and the Jawi script and Malay language have found some use among Muslim Filipinos in the southern Philippine islands in the last few centuries. Overall, though, I think the Philippines needs to be treated separately from Indonesia, if only for the purposes of the division of labour. Brunei and Luzon were closely related before Europeans arrived in the Philippines and Borneo in the sixteenth century and of course there was always commerce between the southern Philippines and the neighbouring Indonesian islands, but generally speaking Indo-Malaysia and the Philippines aren’t part of the same historical space. Or maybe they are. It depends on what you’re looking at, I suppose.
I would find it a little problematic to use a biogeographic term to talk about the human history of a region like this, though, because we don’t tend to do that when talking about Europe or China or other parts of the planet like that. Biogeography is important in Indonesia, of course — it is in some sense where the discipline was born — but not much more so than elsewhere. I wouldn’t want anyone to come away from a piece of writing on Indonesia thinking that it is somehow a more ‘natural’ or ‘savage’ region than any other part of the Earth.
Also, ordinary folk generally don’t know what ‘Malesia’ means. So, not such a useful word for historians.
The final two terms, ‘Island Southeast Asia’ (ISEA) and ‘Maritime Southeast Asia’ are relatively unproblematic, the latter explicitly including the Malay Peninsula in addition to the islands. There’s good reason for including the Peninsula, of course — it’s part of the Malay-speaking world and has been for at least ~1400 years, and it has a lot more in common with and impact on the rest of the archipelago than the Southeast Asian mainland — so that’s not a problem. These terms are normally used in articles and books on Southeast Asian prehistory (e.g. on the Austronesian expansion or Hoabinhian tool industries), and because they include the Philippines as well they’re not particularly useful for historians who want to look at more recent events (for the reasons outlined above). New Guinea may or may not be part of the ISEA construct; I’d say that New Guinea is a vital part of the history of the region when looked at long-term, given its importance as a source of foodstuffs, people, and languages, so in terms of delineating my research interests it’s not super useful. Again, it depends on what you’re looking at.
So what’s the ‘right’ term to use? It should be clear that there is no ‘right’ term. There is no unambiguous politically neutral term that accurately refers to a single easily circumscribed part of this huge region, and you have to use the term that makes most sense in context or that will be understood by the greatest number of readers. I use ‘Indonesia’ for most things because it helps to orient non-specialists and because most of the region I’m talking about is in the Republic of Indonesia, but of course it isn’t ‘neutral’ in any sense. Flexibility is the key.
More next time on Indonesian (Indo-Malaysian? Nusantaran? ISEAn?) trade goods — cloves, nutmeg, and the like.
