The island of megalithic tombs and living animism — clan tombs the size of small buildings, ikat textiles dyed with tree bark and beetles, and the Marapu ancestor religion untouched by the 20th century
Sumba is an Indonesian island in the eastern Lesser Sunda Islands, east of Sumbawa and south of Flores, largely bypassed by mainstream Indonesian tourism because it lacks the beach resorts of Bali and the diving infrastructure of Komodo. What Sumba has instead is one of the most intact indigenous cultural landscapes in Southeast Asia: the Marapu animist religion (ancestor worship centered on the belief that the spirits of the dead continue to inhabit the world and influence the living) is still practised by approximately 30% of the Sumba population, making Sumba one of the few places in Asia…
Sumba's history of relative isolation from the Javanese Hindu and later Islamic sultanates (the island's interior uplands were never effectively controlled by the Majapahit empire or the later Javanese trading sultanates) allowed the Marapu religion and the megalithic burial tradition to survive intact while similar practices were absorbed or suppressed on Java, Bali, and the Lombok-Sumbawa chain. Dutch colonial rule (the Netherlands East Indies controlled Sumba from the late 19th century until 1949) was administered through indirect rule via Sumba's hereditary raja system, which preserved th…