Purpose of This Site: Storytelling Culture and Indonesian Legends of the Heavenly Nymph
1.1 Humans and Storytelling
Humans are known as “storytelling animals”: Since ancient times, we have constantly confirmed our existence by telling stories about the past, present, and future. Storytelling is thus the infinite imagination given to humans, weaving the relationship between the self and the world through threads of words.
It could be said that a story is like a cloth in which to wrap ourselves within this ambiguous world. Humans therefore developed a variety of techniques and tools to fill the world with rich textiles of words. Performing arts and literature constitute great cultural heritage produced by human intelligence, having transmitted our cultural memories through the aesthetics of orality and literacy. Humans have also created “spaces of stories,” such as sacred sites and religious facilities, in order to inscribe their narratives in the natural world. Humans’ strong desire for storytelling has consequently formed the circulation of stories on a global scale in conjunction with the development of reproduction technologies such as printed books, photographs, and films, as well as communication and transportation technologies brought about by modernity. Furthermore, in the search for places of “Being-in-the-World,” we continue telling stories within the web of imagination and reality in today’s highly information-driven society, where one sees countless sympathies and conflicts around “stories” across borders. Given such an overflow of storytelling practices, this website was created to connect people through new perspectives on nymph tales in Asia as part of the research project described below.
[Author] Akiko NOZAWA (Pd.D. of Letters)
Academic Affiliation: Center for Cultural Heritage and Texts at Nagoya University, Anthropological Institute at Nanzan University, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Japan
[Sponsor] Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) : KAKENHI/Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), Grant Number 23K00235 “Constructing Integrated Archive of Hindu-Javanese Cultural Heritage: Visualizing Correlations of Representations of Heavenly Nymph Tales"（Principal Investigator: Akiko NOZAWA）
[Academic Collaborators]
1. Collaborative Research on Bidadari Folktales
Nasution, M.Hum., M.Ed., Ph.D. (Universitas Negeri Surabaya)
Septina Alrianingrum, S.S., M.Pd.
Aditya Indrawan, S.S., M.Pd.
2. Collaborative Project of Sri Tanjung Manuscript
I Made Agus Tisnu, S. Pd. H. and Sekolah Bali Q_ta
I Kadek Widnyana, S. Si., M. Si (ISI Denpasar)
Ni Komang Sekar Marhaeni, SSP., M.Si (ISI Denpasar)
[Website Production Collaborators] Tomoki Ueda & PT Tesna Indo Laut
[English Text Supervision] Cambridge English Correction Service
[Indonesian Text Supervision] Fahrizal Basanto Ramadhan, S.I.P.
1.2 Background: Diversity of Media in Transmitting the Sri Tanjung tale
This website was created as a digital platform to promote new understandings of contemporary narrative culture. It mainly takes up the case of the Sri Tanjung tale, as explored by the webmaster. This story is said to have spread in Indonesia, particularly in East Java and Bali, between the 11th and 14th centuries as one of the nymph legends prevalent throughout Asia. The Sri Tanjung was originally inscribed as metrical poetry on traditional palm leaf manuscripts called lontar, and people have transmitted the tale in the form of ritual song, kidung. One can also find the inscribed image on some reliefs in the medieval temple ruins (candi) in East Java. The human-nymph marriage tale, which tells the philosophy of sacred and profane, good and evil, and life and death, is thought to have had significance in local communities of the time. Javanese people have represented this story in the style of traditional drama (ketoprak); furthermore, it has been popularized through printed books and picture books during the last century. In this way, the Sri Tanjung tale has been accepted, forgotten, and revived repeatedly in various forms in Java and Bali. They are connected at the root, but they exist separately in physical forms. This website is therefore an anthropological media praxis inspired by today’s information technology: It aims to promote a global network of cultural memories and representations of heavenly nymph tales, including the Sri Tanjung, by utilizing the multi-layered structure of digital space.
1.3 Objective
The primary objective of this website is to present an example of the transmission network of medieval Hindu-Javanese culture by organizing literary and audiovisual information pertaining to the Sri Tanjung tale within a historical perspective. It focuses in particular on three types of media: palm leaf manuscripts (lontar), printed books, and audiovisual devices (video cameras, smartphones, etc.). The Sri Tanjung tale, an inscribed poem on lontar manuscripts, was transcribed into a Romanized printed book by Javanese scholar Prijono in 1938 during the Dutch colonial period. Accordingly, the Sri Tanjung manuscript for reciting ritual songs was transformed into a “book to read (silently).” That is why the project “How to Recite Pupuh Wukir/Adri” (see Chapter 7) explored oral techniques of Sri Tanjung poetry in collaboration with Balinese kidung successors. From the viewpoint of media studies, therefore, this site interweaves vertical and horizontal streams of the human-nymph marriage tale’s transmission in order to exemplify the potential of digital space today.
The second objective is to share a broader network behind the Sri Tanjung tale: the trans-regional distribution of similar folktales. While this story is included in traditional tales about heavenly nymphs in Indonesia, it also shares many similarities with folktales in other regions of Asia, including Japan. In fact, many people would be unaware of the global network in which their old tales are included. One of the reasons for this is the issue of “media.” Although many academic books on folktales have been published, the distribution has been inevitably limited within certain areas due to language boundaries. Accordingly, in order to overcome the language barrier that confines traditional media, namely printed books, this site was created in three languages: Japanese, Indonesian, and English. It aims to promote intercultural empathy and world peace, centering on Hagoromo/heavenly nymph legends and highlighting the power of “global folktale communities” in the internet era.