Religious education for indigenous religious minorities : the Marapu faith in East Sumba, Indonesia

Abstract

This dissertation examines why, despite formal constitutional recognition and normative commitments to religious pluralism, the provision of religious education for Marapu Faith students remains fragile, partial, and frequently absent within Indonesia's formal education system. While national regulations affirm the right of all students to receive religious education in accordance with their beliefs, indigenous faith communities continue to experience systematic exclusion that is rarely framed as policy failure or rights violation. This study investigates the structural conditions under which such exclusion persists and becomes normalised within educational governance. The research focuses on Marapu Faith Education as an empirical case through which broader dynamics of religious education governance can be analysed. It asks how governance arrangements, institutional practices, and symbolic commitments to inclusion interact to produce sustained non-provision without overt discrimination or regulatory breach. Rather than treating exclusion as an outcome of weak implementation, local prejudice, or administrative incapacity, this dissertation approaches absence as a patterned and stabilised governance outcome. Methodologically, the study employs a qualitative, multi-level research design combining document analysis, policy review, institutional interviews, and in-depth narratives of students, instructors, and education officials. Analytical attention is directed across micro-, meso-, and macro-levels to capture lived experiences, institutional mediation, and normative frameworks. The core empirical findings demonstrate that the exclusion of Marapu education is not accidental. At the macro level, religious education governance is structured around confessional and mandatory models that presuppose religion as institutionalised, doctrinal, and administratively legible. At the meso level, decentralisation without enforceable obligations displaces responsibility to local authorities while diffusing accountability, generating stable patterns of non-implementation. At the school level, risk-averse institutional behaviour leads to selective and episodic provision, dependent on external intervention rather than systemic commitment. Marapu faith instructors occupy precarious intermediary positions, lacking formal recognition, professional security, and institutional integration, resulting in high attrition and epistemic dilution. At the micro level, students respond through adaptive strategies, including concealment, administrative conformity, and strategic identity negotiation under conditions of stigma and vulnerability. From these findings, the dissertation advances the concept of institutionalised non-implementation to theorise how governance systems can simultaneously affirm rights symbolically while ensuring their material non-realisation. In this configuration, non-provision functions not as policy failure but as a stabilised outcome of governance design. Indonesia's promotion of religious moderation operates primarily at the level of symbolic governance, facilitating national consensus and identity without guaranteeing equitable access to religious education for indigenous faith communities.