Between Inclusion and Erasure: Jumat Pahingan as Oral Tradition, Local Identity, and Contested Belonging in Bulak Pepe Buffalo Village

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-624-6_11How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Oral Tradition; Local Identity; Inclusivity; Belonging; Jumat Pahingan; Bulak Pepe

Abstract

Jumat Pahingan, a communal prayer ritual held every time Friday coincides with the Pahing day in the five-day Javanese market week cycle (pasaran), is the heartbeat of local identity in Bulak Pepe Hamlet, Ngawi Regency, East Java, a community widely known as the “Kampung Kerbau” (‘Buffalo Village’), home to 514 buffalo as of 2025. This article analyzes how Jumat Pahingan constructs local identity and communal belonging, while simultaneously exposing the fractures in its inclusivity under the pressures of modernity. Drawing on an ethnographic approach and theoretical frameworks of oral tradition (Vansina; Thompson), cultural identity (Hall; Castells), belonging and inclusivity (Yuval-Davis), and Foucauldian power technology, the study finds that Jumat Pahingan operates as a technology of inclusivity that transcends boundaries of class, age, and belief. However, under the compounding pressures of modernization, formal education, and tourism commodification, the ritual is undergoing erosion: younger generations no longer recognize it. This article argues that the disappearance of Jumat Pahingan represents not merely a cultural loss, but the collapse of a social infrastructure that has for centuries sustained inclusivity, ecological justice, and organic social transformation as the foundational layer of Bulak Pepe community life.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Hanifah Hikmawati
AU  - Wakit Abdullah Rais
AU  - Argyo Demartoto
AU  - Eva Farhah
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/19
TI  - Between Inclusion and Erasure: Jumat Pahingan as Oral Tradition, Local Identity, and Contested Belonging in Bulak Pepe Buffalo Village
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on History, Social Sciences, and Education (ICHSE 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 147
EP  - 160
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-624-6_11
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-624-6_11
ID  - Hikmawati2026
ER  -