To document the Burdah Lexicon related to the ritual of Ngelenggang, unique to the Loloan community, Udayana University researcher I Gusti Ayu Gde Sosiowati leads her team of Ni Luh Nyoman Seri Malini, Nissa Puspitaning Adni and Putu Wahyu Widiatmika to visit the Loloan Timur village. The Moslem Loloan Timur community live in the Jemberana Regency, Bali, Indonesia some 90 km from Denpasar, home of the Udayana University. It is an easy journey and the research team visited the community several times from February – June 2024. Udayana researchers first went to meet with the Burdah team, the elderly practitioner of the Ngelenggang, and the Loloan community.
Meeting the head of Loloan Timur Moslem Community
Meeting the Burdah team
Meeting and interviewing the elderly practitioners of Burdah
The village of Loloan consists of Loloan Timur (East Loloan) and Loloan Barat (West Loloan). Both villages are prominent with their Moslem Malay activities with some of the elderly living in the area of west Loloan, while the youngsters and most pioneers in preserving the culture and the Loloan community itself, live in the area of East Loloan. Udayana University researchers focused more in the area of the Loloan Timur, as both rituals can only be found in the Loloan community. Burdah is the performance of music and singing prayers, which is rarely performed nowadays. This performance carries the moral and religious messages and is in relation to Ngelenggang ritual that is performed at the 7-months pregnancy of a woman.
Then several visits took place to see and record the Burdah performance and preparations for the Ngelenggang ritual and to record word lists with later crosschecking.
Burdah performance
Ngelenggang ritual
Meeting and interviewing Loloan community during the preparation of Ngelenggang
People of Loloan community are very eager to preserve their inheritance without making themselves exclusive. There is daily mingle with the surrounding Balinese communities with respect in each other’s social and religious activities. It is notable how the Loloan peacefully preserve their identity as Moslem community in the middle of Balinese communities. The young generations of Loloan are very active, not only in persevering their culture and identity but also introducing their culture to others. At a glance, it can be seen that some of their rituals resemble the Hindu/Balinese rituals. Doc Sosiowati's team would like to do further research into this.
The results of the fieldwork are the word list, video of Ngelenggang and Burdah verses in Arabic which are translated into Indonesian and Malay. The team will work on the collected data in the Linguistics sessions of data curation and analyses of OCSEAN Summer School Tartu 2024.
Working on the collecting and translating the Burdah and Ngelenggang word list
Loloan Community led by the Head of East Loloan working on collecting and translating word list from Loloan Malay to Indonesian
Recording the word list of Burdah and Ngelenggang
Double checking the word list with the informants
Interviewing the informants of Ngelenggang Ritual
Book cover of Burdah Ngelenggang verse collections (one of the outputs of the research)
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 873207.
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