Buru people
Buru people in national costume, early 1900s.
|
|
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| (35,000) | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Buru (33,000) | |
| Languages | |
| Sula–Buru languages (Buru language), Indonesian language | |
| Religion | |
| Islam, Christianity, Animism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Lisela, Kayeli, Ambelay |
Buru people (Indonesian: Suku Buru) is an ethnic group mostly living on Indonesian island Buru, as well as on some other Maluku Islands. They also call themselves Gebfuka or Gebemliar, which literally means "people of the world" or "people of the land". Buru people are related to the eastern Indonesian anthropological group and from an ethnographic point of view are similar to other indigenous peoples of the island Buru. They speak Buru language.
About 33,000 of 35,000 Buru people live on the island of Buru; they make about a quarter of the island population (about 135,000 as of 2009) and are the most numerous ethnicity of Buru; about 2,000 live on Ambon Island and several hundred are scattered over other islands in the Indonesian province of Maluku and the capital Jakarta. There is a small Buru community in the Netherlands formed by the descendants of the soldiers of Republic of South Moluccas (Indonesian: Republik Maluku Selatan) who moved there after the accession of this self-proclaimed state in Indonesia in 1950.
Buru people are evenly spread over Buru island, except for some parts of the northern coast and the central mountainous part which is sparsely populated. Their relative fraction is somewhat lower in the towns, such as Namrole and Namlea, owing to inflow of people of other Indonesian ethnicities. In the initial period of the Dutch colonization of the island in the middle of the 17th century, much of the tribal nobility of Buru was moved to the eastern part and later became one of the components in the ethnogenesis of ethnic Kayeli people. Several ethnic groups are distinguished within Buru people, which differ in lifestyle and language specifics – Rana (14,258 people mainly in the central part of the island), Masarete (about 9,600 people mainly in the south), Wae Sama (6,622 people mostly in the south-east) and Fogi (about 500 people in the west).
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Wikipedia