Chinese Diaspora in the Dutch East Indies during the Eighteenth Century: Religion and Custom as Roots of Identity against Assimilation and the Discrediting of Chineseness

In his article “Creolized Chinese Societies in Southeast Asia,” the anthropologist William Skinner developed the idea of the overseas Chinese diaspora as “the creation through ‘fusion’ of a new sociocultural system that achieved autonomy and stability despite continued contact with both parent societies.” In an anthropological view, Skinner saw Java as one of the examples in which the Chinese community “yielded a wondrous array of adaptive, acculturative, and assimilative phenomena.” 1 The creolization process certainly occurred and created a new group called the Javanese Peranakan, which now has fully evolved into a distinctive ethnic community. However, I disagree on the so-called “acculturative and assimilative