ABSTRACT
The 1971 Census of the Republic of Indonesia classified 7.34 million persons, or 6.4 per cent of the national population, as migrants. Superficially these figures would appear to confirm the conventional stereotyping of most Indonesians (particularly the inhabitants of Java) as immobile peasants who are born, live and die in the same house, scarcely travelling beyond the confines of their village. The failure of any more than a trickle of Javans to move to the Outer Islands of Indonesia under resettlement schemes has reinforced this image. 1 However the moves made by the persons defined for census purposes as migrants represent only one highly selective sub-set of the complex totality of population mobility in Indonesia. The aim here is to demonstrate the nature and importance of temporary population movements, the bulk of which are not detected by conventional census and survey questions, by examining such mobility in one of the provinces of Indonesia.
