Becoming Spiritual: Documenting Osing Rituals and Ritualistic Languages in Banyuwangi, Indonesia

Banyuwangi is a highly unique and dyamic locality. Situated in between several ‘giants’ traditionally known as centres of culture and tourism, that is, Bali to the east, larger Java to the west, Borneo to the north, and Alas Purwo forest to the south, Banyuwangi is a hub for culture and metaphysical attention, but has, over the past few decades, become a focus of poltical disourse, in Indonesia. Its cultural and spiritual practices are renowned throughout both Indonesia and Southeast Asia, yet Banyuwangi seems quite content to conceal many of its cosmological practices, its spirituality and connected cultural and language dynamics. Here, a binary constructed by the national government between institutionalized religions (Hinduism, Islam and at times Chritianity) and the liminalized Animism, Kejawen, Ruwatan and the occult, supposedly leading to ‘witch hunts,’ have increased the cultural significance of Banyuwangi. Yet, the construction of this binary has intensifed the Osing community’s affiliation to religious spiritualistic heritage, ultimately encouraging the Osing community to stylize its religious and cultural symbolisms as an extensive set of sequenced annual rituals. The Osing community has spawned a culture of spirituality and religion, which in Geertz’s terms, is highly syncretic, thus reflexively complexifying the symbolisms of the community, and which continue to propagate their religion and heritage, be in internally. These practices materialize through a complex sequence of (approximately) twelve annual festivals, comprising performance and language in the form of dance, food, mantra, prayer, and song. The study employs a theory of frames (see work by Bateson, Goffman) to locate language and visual symbolisms, and to determine how these symbolisms function in context. This study and presentation draw on a several yaer ethnography of Banyuwangi, to provide an insight into the cultural and lingusitic symbolisms of the Osing people in Banyuwangi. The study first documets these sequenced rituals, to develop a map of the symbolic underpinnings of these annually sequenced highly performative rituals. Employing a symbolic interpretive framework, and including discourse analysis of both language and performance, the study utlimately presents that the Osing community continuously, that is, annually, reinvigorates its comples clustering of religious andn cultural symbols, which are layered and are in flux with overlapping narratives, such as heritage, the national poltical and the transnational.