Legacy of Colonialism and Indigenous Religious Resilience: A Study of Marapu Belief in East Nusa Tenggara

Abstract

<p class="Abstract"><span lang="EN-GB">Indigenous
 religions encompass spiritual customs originating from the ancestral heritage
 of specific ethnic and geographical groups. These traditional beliefs often
 come into conflict with state-recognised official religions, a consequence of
 modernity's tendency to streamline religion into a mere belief system. In line
 with this, the post-colonial view sees that indigenous religions which are
 repressed by the state are the result of the state's view of showing Western
 superiority. Indonesia bears the enduring legacy of colonialism, manifesting as
 negative perceptions that persistently affect to indigenous religions. One of
 the colonial legacies is sociological, psychological, and moral problems,
 besides physics and material heritance. According to Syeid Hussen Alatas in the
 Myth of Lazy Natives (1989), this is the greatest damage caused by colonialism
 because this problem hinders solutions to other problems. Indonesia, as a
 geographical region, has many indigenous religions, one of which is the Marapu
 belief in Sumba, East Nusa Tenggara. Many adherents of the Marapu faith are
 forced to embrace one religion for the purposes of population administration,
 but at the same time continue to practice their beliefs. This article aims to
 unravel how Marapu followers uphold their ritual practices within the confines
 of their traditional religion and how the enduring colonial legacy shaped local
 religious observances. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method by
 focusing on a literature review with research data sources from journals and
 documentary videos. The research finding of this enquiry is the exploration of
 the intersection between religion and society and how post-colonial
 perspectives have seen this phenomenon. <o:p></o:p></span></p>