The Land and Water Ritual in Toyomarto Singasari Malang: Genealogy and Social Praxis

This article discusses genealogy and social praxis and the possibility of discourse contestation in the water ritual of indigenous people in Toyomarto, Singasari of Malang Regency. This ritual merges previous rituals practiced in each hamlet called the water ritual, then centered in a cultural space at the end of rituals with the procession of the unification of land and water. This article does not intend to describe the ritual procession. However, this study traces the episteme of traditional rituals through discursive phenomenon and its constitution in social life praxis. This study compares Foucault’s and Bourdieu’s ideas about genealogy, discourse, and social praxis. In this context, indigenous peoples’ habitus and cultural capital cause their social praxis, which was initially formed by discursive contestation between ancestors and today’s society. The ritual is a manifestation of indigenous peoples based on their awareness of collecting traditional processes within geographical boundaries, but culturally, these rituals have similarities. The habitus of the Toyomarto people signifies water as the source of life and sustains them. The land becomes a new element philosophically as their life foundation. While discursively, Toyomarto people interpret ‘land’ and ‘water’ as in-between space that brings them as indigenous and village (administrative position) communities. The land and water ritual is a new cultural performance facing social, cultural, and geographical changes: it is a response to cultural changes that tend to be ceremonial (symbolic), the dynamics of village political movements, regional expansion, and the possibility of outside political or cultural penetration.