Providing local narratives to ‘the world’ within philological projects is an important task that deserves attention. However, in the case of Pamijahan, it is also legitimate to go beyond the role of text provider. We can ask the question how do the villagers or the owners of the texts, or the scribes, relate to the references suggested by particular narratives? What role does a particular narrative have in local history? Who told, and who still tells, the stories? How does the group identity of the narrators affect this history? Which are the most important groups appreciating or listening to the stories? We can also posit other questions in temporal perspective. For example, how did the narratives develop? How have certain stories followed different paths of evolution? What impact do different narratives have on villagers’ daily activities? What do certain narratives have to tell us about historical awareness? Which stories are crucial for villagers and which not? In addition, we might list still other legitimate questions on narratives, depending on our interest.

The ‘Gutenberg’ culture of print, colonialism, and the globalisation of information have penetrated to the level of local culture. Unlike the people of cosmopolitan societies who can easily and conveniently go to fine book stores or libraries or to the internet, the Pamijahanese have to understand their practice, ritual, identity and the past from the only available narrative sources in the village. They have to negotiate with the changing times and the external world, including a capitalistic mass media and often devious and predatory politicians. They have to comprehend all the scattered signs around them. More than that, they have to negotiate diverse signs, religious texts, tali paranti, the management of sacred sites, ziarah and tarekat. Their narratives are one of the media they possess to understand what is happening in and around their village. This volume builds on the various accounts of traditional narratives, popular practices and custom, or tali paranti, to address the following specific questions:

My argument in relation to the first question is that the peoples’ narratives are vastly more complex than is assumed in studies based on literary or philological approaches. In Pamijahan I observed that manuscripts are perceived not only as written materials but also as artefacts and as evidence in various cultural debates. All the important manuscripts preserved in the village are concerned with the founding of the village, Sufism, and pilgrimage, or they are collections of written amulets. Access to these manuscripts is generally only possible through ritual and initiation. Because this access is limited, there is room for manipulating the significance of the artefacts to bolster social precedence within the village. The manuscripts supply people with a cultural category related to the concept of space and place. To be a cultural representamen is to be approved by the tali paranti or ‘grounding’ of village culture. So my first question relates to the first dimension of Peircean semiotics where the properties of signs are questioned.

My argument concerning the second question – the semantic dimension or references of signs in the village - is that most narratives (or signs) in the village appear in three modes: as icon, index, and symbol. For most villagers a manuscript can exist as an iconic sign when it refers to the words of ancestors. In this guise, it is a ‘sign in the past’. Such iconic references are found in the narratives of ancestors, ‘the path’, space, places, Sufism and pilgrimage (ziarah). The arrangement of spatial concepts and social structure carries reference to the ancestors’ itinerary or the metaphors of kinship and the imagined space of the pongpok (sides). In this respect, iconic signs, whether present in narratives or in material artefacts of the culture, are oriented to the past without, to borrow Parmentier’s words, “the actual spatio-temporal existence of the represented object” (Parmentier 1994). It is necessary to add that all narratives concerned with the village founders are also present in ‘contiguity mode’ or as indexical signs. The narratives in indexical modes function as a discourse or experience in the present of the Pamijahanese. They are narratives pertaining to the past but they tell about the references of the past from the point of view of present narrators. The written and oral material collected and broadcast by the guild of custodians are framed in this mode.

Finally, my research in Pamijahan suggests that the signs of the past and the signs in the past are not necessarily coherent and frozen. In fact, it reveals fluid signs where the tali paranti, ritual action and sacred text are continuously negotiated. The regimentation of meanings is often undertaken by the custodians at the sacred sites, but at the same time different groups in society contest this process by focusing on different source narratives. Precedence becomes a crucial topic in the village. More than that, the practice of pilgrimage in Pamijahan invites outsiders such as pilgrims, government functionaries and religious organizations to become involved in village affairs. There is no doubt that tradition and sacred narratives are thereby opened to pragmatic perception.