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The Bimanese (Bima language: Dou Mbojo; ) are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the eastern part of Sumbawa Island in West Nusa Tenggara province of Indonesia. With a population approaching a million people, they are the second largest ethnic group in West Nusa Tenggara.
Sunni Islam is the predominant religion of the Bimanese. Lowlanders are known as fervent adherents of Islam, while among the mountain communities of the Dou Donggo (meaning mountain people) and Dou Wawo, indigenous folk beliefs still play a strong role in everyday life, since they were able to fend off the Muslim invaders, due to the mountain regions of Bima which they occupied, as well as their being fierce warriors. They were therefore granted a semi-autonomous stats within the Sultanate of Bima. The Dou Donggo were thereby able to avoid their culture from being subverted by Islam, whilst retaining certain political privileges, as well as their indigenous practices. Some Dou Donggo communities converted to Catholicism in the mid-20th century. Although most of the Dou Donggo adopted either Christianity or Islam, this was but for a tacit adoption, for as a Catholic priest put it: "The people are 70% Muslim, 30% Catholic, and 90% kaffirpagan", implying that, in reality, people retained their indigenous religious beliefs.
In the 1980s, the Dou Donggo people's economy was undergoing great change, due to rapid population growth, caused by the introduction medicine, which made swidden farming untenable. This was because swidden farming relied on the ability of the fertility of the land being regenerated, something that required 1-2 years at least. However, with the increasing population density, too much stress has been put on the land, not allowing it to fully regenerate. The Dou Donggo peoples therefore needed to change from relying on the subsistent farming of swidden rice, millet and maize, towards the cultivation of wet rice in terraced paddy fields and the cultivation of cash crops such as peanuts and soybean, which were to be sold in the lowlands of Bima island.
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