Liminality and Semiotic Meaning in the Brendung Rain Ritual of Sarwodadi Village, Pemalang

Abstract

Rain-invoking ritual performance in the agrarian villages of Java's north coast has been documented largely as an inventory of mystical content, with little attention to how its meanings are produced or why they take the form they do. This article examines Brendung, a ritual performance from Sarwodadi Village, Comal Subdistrict, Pemalang Regency, Central Java, built around a puppet of coconut shell and bamboo dressed as a woman and held to be entered by ancestral spirits while it dances. The study describes the form of the performance and analyses the meaning it carries for the community that sustains it. It combines Victor Turner's account of ritual process and liminality with Roland Barthes's semiotics of denotation, connotation, and myth, drawing on participant observation in Sarwodadi, interviews conducted in November 2020 with the fourth-generation ritual leader, two village officials, and a spectator from outside the village, and study of the village archive and photographic documentation. The performance is found to follow a threefold temporal structure: the lengthy preparation and purification of the puppet constitute separation, the trance dance constitutes liminality, and the closing invocation and the return of the puppet to storage constitute reaggregation. Read semiotically, the beliefs attached to the ritual, above all the rule restricting ritual leadership to one founding lineage, function less as supernatural claims than as the mechanism through which the community restores an ordinary social order that liminality had briefly suspended. Myth and ritual phase are therefore shown to be structurally interdependent rather than separable objects of study.