9 ms·
I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries Almost
by superconduct123 10mo ago
I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries
Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media
- Froztnova 10mo agoI also did a double take when I learned that they were Muslim-majority too. It flies in the face of a lot of assumptions.
- throwaway290 10mo agoWhy? It's a big religion in the world and I heard it grows at 30% per year
- rar00 10mo agotypo? Rounding it up to 2 billion, 30% means 600 million per year
- throwaway290 10mo agoMaybe. Could be somebody was repeating some sort of misinformation. Quick check says more like 20% in 10 years.
- _DeadFred_ 10mo agoHow much of that is just because people aren't allowed to leave the religion though? My whole family would be considered Catholic if we still had those sorts of old thinking rules that Islam still has. Instead we have lots of people becoming Catholic and lots leaving balancing out.
- cdmckay 10mo agoWhich assumptions are those?
- lordnacho 10mo agoAsk someone in the West what the largest muslim country is.
- Froztnova 10mo agoMostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate. I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got around too.
- lawlessone 10mo agoYeah if i only went by TV news i'd come to the same general conclusion. And if i narrowed it down to just Fox i'd probably think it was the UK.
- flopsamjetsam 10mo ago> Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate. I live in Australia, and when I was growing up I thought the same, even though Indonesia are a very close neighbour of ours. Indonesia is featured quite a bit in our local news these days, and that together with lots of Aussie tourists in Indonesia, plus lots of Indonesian students studying here, has made us a little more knowledgeable about our neighbours.
- bouncycastle 10mo agoAlso, the Indonesia that most Australians only ever visit is Bali, which is mostly Hindu.
- aruggirello 10mo agoIt seems things are improving for Christians in Indonesia in 2025 - or is the data missing? https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/ https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/
- aprilthird2021 10mo agoYou must not have known about Malaysia then either?
- Froztnova 10mo agoCorrect, it was around the time I learned how big Islam was in certain parts of Southeast Asia in general. It's just massively under-represented in news and popular culture and my historical/geographic education never really went into much detail on Asia.
- yieldcrv 10mo agoCheck out the predominant races there, you’ve probably never heard of them!
- nokun7 10mo agoWhat sorts of assumptions?
- lurk2 10mo agoThey don’t have a huge culture industry yet (or at least, not one that appeals to English-speaking audiences), but they’ve become a lot more prominent on the internet in the last 5 years due to better infrastructure and integration into various English speaking social networks (via both social media and people travelling in and out of Indonesia). It’s a Muslim majority country and very conservative, so a lot of the themes you’d find in American film, music, and literature wouldn’t make much sense there, and the media that has commercial potential outside of Indonesia is generally coming from wealthy households that don’t have much to do with how the average Indonesian really lives (Nicole Zefanya being the example that comes to mind). Indonesians (at least the ones who speak English) are quite similar to Latinos in that they have a desire to be accepted into the English-speaking world not only personally but culturally. This can manifest in attempts to whitewash oneself to fit in, adopting whatever seems to be popular on English-speaking social media, leading to comparatively old trends propagating in these countries. You saw the same thing with the Chinese and the Koreans back in the 2000s and both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries, but those were both secular countries already well-integrated into the international system. I wouldn’t expect to see anything quite like that in Indonesia until at least 2030, when more of the digital natives come of age.
- Apocryphon 10mo agoFeels like in the West the only Indonesian movie that got popular is The Raid, which had a Welsh director anyway. And, uh, The Act of Killing which was also made by a Brit.
- CapricornNoble 10mo agoFor anyone else who enjoyed The Raid, the sub-genre of graphic and brutally violent Indonesian action movies is a gem. The Raid 2; The Night Comes For Us; The Shadow Strays....those should get anyone started going down the rabbit hole.
- stickfigure 10mo ago> both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries Korea definitely, but China? Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped. Conventional wisdom is that the Three Body Problem couldn't be published today. I'm curious what (homegrown) Chinese cultural products are internationally competitive today. China seems to be punching far below their weight, considering their population and their economic position.
- elgenie 10mo agoThey're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime. They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.
- veeti 10mo agoThe only time I see Indonesia in the news is when some unfortunate soul gets swallowed by a giant snake: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/python-kills-woman-swallowed-indonesia-second-death-in-month/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/python-kills-woman-swallowed-in... Many such cases.
- fnikacevic 10mo agoThe island of Bali has outsized impact from all the tourism.
- numpad0 10mo agoYeah and... articles like these are reminders that cultural representation as a concept in general is kind of broken. There's no website which topic distribution follows actual distribution of population of the world[1]. 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_percentage.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_per...
- awongh 10mo agoI always thought it was interesting that, I guess due to Arab racism, it's also not very represented in the community of Islam. Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east / north africa because of the the religious link. I could have drawn some parallels between Catholics and South America, but there's already two Popes that have Latin American roots.
- mcmoor 10mo agoAt least in the two holy cities itself, Indonesia has quite significant pull. Because our pilgrims heavily outnumber lots of other nations. To the point where sellers around the city usually knows a least a word or two of Indonesian.
- Squealer2642 10mo agoI think it's just because there aren't large immigrant communities in Western countries besides Australia and the Netherlands.
- yen223 10mo agoI feel the same way about China tbh Like how many of you can name a Chinese movie or pop star or TV show?
- CapricornNoble 10mo agoI dunno, I would think AT LEAST Jackie Chan is a household name due to the Rush Hour movies, and for anyone who grew up watching Hong Kong action flicks, they'd probably also know Jet Li at least, and Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, and maybe Bolo Yeung and Sammo Hung too.
- fragmede 10mo agoDon't forget Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Chow Yun-fat, Maggie Cheung, Leslie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, Wu Jing, Michelle Yeoh, Simu Liu, Donnie Yen, Jason Tobin, Olivia Cheng, Dianne Doan, Lucy Liu isn't famous in China but she is in the US. Not Chinese but recognizable because of HBO's The Warrior: Andrew Koji, Hoon Lee, Joe Taslim (I cheated, my parents are from Hong Kong.)
- yen223 10mo agoNot sure if I'm being whooshed here, but a large chunk of those people are not from China. Michelle Yeoh is Malaysian Bruce Lee is American, baby A lot of the others are Hong Kong celebrities, from before Hong Kong was returned to China (Probably should've specified Chinese as people from China, specifically the mainland)
- fragmede 10mo agoYeah, Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco and had a US passport, but he grew up in Hong Kong. Point is, Chinese diaspora exists and can be seen for those who want to look. Projecting a viewpoint that no one knows about China or Chinese people because you don't want to think they do, so you feel slighted, and can then rage against that; it just seems kind of hollow to me.
- wraptile 10mo agoOpression makes it much harder to export culture. See also China.