From Kabuyutan to Keramat: Actor-networks and palimpsest in the river basins of West Java

Abstract

The conventional view of the Islamization of Java has long been dominated by the perspective of coastal sultanates or port cities. This study explores how pre-Islamic sacred landscapes in the hinterlands of Karawang and Indramayu were transformed into Islamic sacred spaces through the interaction of human and nonhuman actors. This study combines archaeological survey data with ethnographic interviews and is grounded in Actor-Network Theory (ANT). ANT opens the possibility of analyzing relationships between humans, objects, the environment, and oral narratives. Here, rivers are examined not merely as geographical settings but as actants within the network. The findings suggest that the pre-Islamic sites were not destroyed or removed but reinterpreted as Islamic holy places called Keramat. The process was accomplished through three mechanisms: the role of material objects such as tombstones and menhirs in the construction of sacred space; the river as an ecological agent that connected inland communities to Islamic maritime networks; and oral narratives that often legitimated local authority by connecting it to trans-regional Islamic networks. Thus, this research proposes a framework of the “relational production of the sacred” as an alternative to traditional acculturation models, positioning the sacred landscape as the product of dynamic interactions between humans, material objects, the environment, and the narratives that evolve with them.