The Representation of Ethnic Diversity in the Southeast Sulawesi in the Collected Poems “Kesaksian Bumi Anoa”

Diversity is an inevitable fact that exist in Indonesia’s society. It then uses to become a pride instead of the problems in Indonesia’s societal life. Literary works documented the ethnics’ otherness either to persuade readers to maintain the diversity to raise a mutual respect and tolerance towards differences and similarities in life, or to construct the identity to resist or to sustain racism. Kesaksian Bumi Anoa is one of the literary works that expose the ethnic diversity in the Southeast Sulawesi as one province in Indonesia. It is a collected poems consisted of five poems written by local writers and published in 2018. The study incorporated representation theory and semiotic analysis. It found that each piece of the collected poems reflected the ethnic identity in the Southeast Sulawesi through the the specific cultural symbols and problematic life perceived by the fiction-characters displayed in the poems.It depicted Muna, Buton, Bajau, and Moronene’s ethnic identities. Those are pictured through the excerpt of history, social system, local language, and local wisdoms that enable us to see and understand the philosophy of their lifes and differences and similarities among them. These poems have been a document that displayed the sprit of the given era.