The Bugis

Christian Pelras's The Bugis is a major scholarly ethnographic and historical study of the Bugis people of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, examining their maritime culture, social structure and the syncretic blending of Islamic practice with older indigenous religious elements, written by a French anthropologist with decades of fieldwork among Bugis communities. Its authority rests on that sustained direct ethnographic engagement combined with historical archival research, and it remains the standard English-language academic reference on Bugis society. As a broad synthesizing study covering an entire ethnic group's history and social structure, it necessarily treats some regional and doctrinal variation within Bugis Islamic practice more briefly than a study focused on a single community would, a limitation Pelras's own bibliography points beyond toward more localized studies.