The Bugis people, also known as Buginese, are an ethnicity—the most numerous of the three major linguistic and ethnic groups of South Sulawesi (the others being Makassar and Toraja), in the south-western province of Sulawesi, third-largest island of Indonesia. The Bugis in 1605 converted to Islam from Animism. The main religion embraced by the Bugis is Islam, with a small minority adhering to Christianity or a pre-Islamic indigenous belief called Tolotang.
Despite the population numbering only around six million and constituting less than 2.5% of the contemporary Indonesian population, the Bugis are influential in the politics in the country; and historically influential on the Malay peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo, Lesser Sunda Islands and other parts of the archipelago where they have migrated, starting in the late seventeenth century. The third president of Indonesia, B. J. Habibie, and a former vice president of Indonesia, Jusuf Kalla, are Bugis. In Malaysia, the eighth prime minister, Muhyiddin Yassin and former deputy prime minister, Ismail Abdul Rahman, have Bugis ancestry.
The Bugis people speak a distinct regional language in addition to Indonesian, called Bugis (), with several different dialects. The Bugis language belongs to the South Sulawesi language group; other members include Makassarese, Toraja, Mandar and Massenrempulu. The name Bugis is an exonym which represents an older form of the name; (To) Ugi is the endonym.
Origins and antecedents
Toalean — Pre-Austronesian South Sulawesi
The earliest inhabitant of South Sulawesi is potentially related to the Wajak Man, of the Proto-Australoid origin. There are a few flake materials found in Walanae River valley and Maros, likely dating between 40,000 and 19,000 BC. The hunter-gatherer culture in South Sulawesi is also known as Toalean culture, and largely based on blade, flake and microlith complex. They are probably of Melanesoid or Australoid stock, hence related to the contemporary population of New Guinea or to Australian aborigines.
In 2015, the remains of Bessé´, a young woman was unearthed Leang Panninge, South Sulawesi. Dated over 7,200 years old, half of her DNA was identified to be connected to the indigenous Australians, the people in New Guinea and the Western Pacific; together with a previously unknown and unique human lineage that diverged approximately 37,000 years ago. Her DNA provided important evidence pertaining to the understanding on ancient human migration.
The arrival of Austronesians
Their Austronesian ancestors settled on Sulawesi around 2500 B.C. There is "historical linguistic evidence of some late Holocene immigration of Austronesian speakers to South Sulawesi from Taiwan"—which means that the Bugis have "possible ultimate ancestry in South China", and that as a result of this immigration, "there was an infusion of an exogenous population from China or Taiwan." Migration from South China by some of the paternal ancestors of the Bugis is also supported by studies of Human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups.
Christian Pelras, an anthropologist, hypothesized that the proto-Bugis were potentially arrived from abroad, possibly from Borneo, to the western seaboard of South Sulawesi. Their arrival was largely drawn to control the mineral and natural resources in the hinterland. As the group began to spread towards the interior of the present-day Bugis heartland, they become increasingly diverged from their neighbouring Makassarese, Mandarese and Torajan brethren; simultaneously, the proto-Bugis too would assimilated the former Austronesian tribes in the sparsely-populated area, a process whereby the native populations would gradually adopt the language of the new arrivals. Hence, a redesigned hybrid-identity through ethnogenesis emerged, binding the original elements derived from the indigenous people together with the introduction of revolutionary techniques, items and ideas bought by the new settlers, including weaving, metal arts and theological doctrine. The society however, remains largely divided between two separate classes, the prevailing nobility and the common people.
Tana Ogi — Land of the Bugis
The homeland of the Bugis is the area around Lake Tempe and Lake Sidenreng in the Walannae Depression in the south-west peninsula of Sulawesi. It was here that the ancestors of the present-day Bugis settled, probably in the mid- to late second millennium B.C. The area is rich in fish and wildlife and the annual fluctuation of Lake Tempe (a reservoir lake for the Bila and Walannae rivers) allows speculative planting of wet rice, while the hills can be farmed by swidden or shifting cultivation, wet rice, hunting and gathering.