Table of Contents
“Ka luhur moal pucukan, ka handap moal akaran” (Ajengan Endang, custodian of Pamijahan, 1997).
“New green leaves will never grow at the top of the tree, nor will new roots ever grow at the bottom.”
As mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3, the major meaning of the ancestor narratives is to signify a transformation given to the land: the space of the wild forest transformed into 'hindu land', and later into 'muslim land'. Written narratives in the form of the babad have preserved the villagers’ imagination of the past. There is a clear indication that the babad functions to freeze the genealogy of the ancestors, the karuhun genealogy. However, we see a different focus in narratives of the oral tradition. The Babad does not recite clearly how the protagonist, Shaykh Abdul Muhyi, found a cave, converted Batara Karang, and made shelters in the southern part of the Sunda region. Contrasting with the Babad Pamijahan, oral narratives retell the Wali’s itinerary in this area in a very lively way. If the Babad chronicle tries to draw the importance of Pamijahan in a framework of the Javanese and Sundanese realms, oral narratives tend to focus on the existence of Shaykh Abdul Muhyi in his own time. Oral narratives have implications for the way that villagers imagine their ancestry and territory.
The notion of origin in Austronesian societies has been an important issue for anthropology (Fox 1996 and 1997; Bellwood 1996), history and semiotics. (Parmentier 1986) Fox, for instance proposes two useful concepts related to the tracing of origins. The first is the succession of personal names, and the second is ''topogeny''. Topogeny is a metaphorical form where people use a structure of metaphor in order to designate the line of origins in terms of 'a succession of place names'. (Fox, 1997:8)
In addition, a similar framework, also suggested by Parmentier, is important in the case of Pamijahan. Parmentier focuses on the meaning of ‘path’ in traditional society. The path is a ‘sediment trace of activity’ and a ‘trajectory’ device. (Tilley 1994; Parmentier 1987) In his semiotic perspective, Parmentier argues that the path relates to three dimensions of semantics. First, the path is recognised as a sign that has an effect on social consciousness. It is able to provide a ‘sign in history’ as seen in narratives that trace the ancestors’ itinerary. Second, the path provides people with a framework or metaphor of hierarchy (cf. Fox 1996:132) where precedence in social rank is linked to the path. Third, the path has a structure which ‘influences’ a walker. To modify the path is to have a certain power to modify cultural strategy, or local affairs. Arguing along the same lines, Tilley (1994: 31) proposes the concept of ‘a serial trajectory’ in which ‘the best way to go’ is written in the path. The path can then be used as hierarchical mnemonic device related to the founders of the village. A criss-crossing of the path and texts creates a space which is also open to interpretation. (cf. Eco 1999) Thus, precedence and contestation are important issues. (Fox 1996:146)
While the Babad Pamijahan focuses more on the description of the ancestors of Muhyi, the oral traditions, which are used by the custodians as a pivotal source for their history of the Shaykh, tend to focus on the contemporaries of the Wali and his descendants. For instance, oral tradition retells the story of his journey to Aceh and Mecca to acquire the teachings of Islam, his mystical journey to the southern part of Priangan in search of a cave for meditation, or his conversion of the villagers to Islam. The custodians classify these narratives as the speech of ancestors, or kasauran karuhun, sometimes is called pitutur karuhun. This chapter then aims to explain the relationship between spatial concepts and genealogy as well as the mystical journey of the founder of the village.