This seminar is part of the Indonesia Study Group, ANU Indonesia Project

How individuals partner to form a family – a fundamental unit of society - reveals a great deal about social openness, mobility, gender relations, and future patterns of social stratification and inequality. All the more so in Indonesia; as a new democracy where modernisation competes with ethno-religious conservatism, marriage pairing is a prime but understudied measure of tolerance and inter-group boundaries. In this presentation, I outline results from my research on marriage pairing patterns in Indonesia.  I use both qualitative data collected from preliminary fieldwork in 2015 on attitudes and practices to interethnic relationships in Jakarta, and marriage pairing data from over 47 million couples in prevailing marriages from the full enumeration of the 2010 Population Census. What are the ethno-regional dimensions of coupling trends? How can patterns in ethnic assortative mating provide insights on the coterminous nature of ethnicity and religion in Indonesia? What are the socio-demographic correlates of interethnic marriage? In what ways does pairing behaviour reflect societal attitudes towards class, ethnicity, religion, and identity in post-New Order Indonesia? These questions serve as the outline of my presentation.