From the Ritual Arena to the Political Arena: Reog Ponorogo, the Paguron Network, and Ideological Contestation, 1945–1966
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29408/fhs.v10i2.36370Keywords:
Barisan Reog Ponorogo, collective memory, cultural politics, oral history, Reog PonorogoAbstract
This article examines the transformation of Reog Ponorogo from a village ritual arena into a contested instrument of political mobilization between 1945 and 1966. Unlike Wilson's (1999) study, which centers on spirituality and power relations within the warok-gemblak tradition, this article explicitly traces how the paguron structure, the personal teacher-student bond within the warok community was repurposed as an infrastructure for party political mobilization, spanning Barisan Reog Ponorogo (BRP/PKI), Barisan Reog Nasional (BREN), and Cabang Kesenian Reog Agama (Cakra/NU). Employing a critical historical method that combines oral history with archival triangulation including video footage from the National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia and contemporary colonial and national press the article finds that the politicization of Reog reached its peak at the 1965 National Congress of Barisan Reog Ponorogo in Madiun, before undergoing selective depoliticization following the G30S/PKI events. The color-coding of the penadon costume accessory and the performance's musical repertoire are shown as markers of invented tradition in Hobsbawm's sense, while tensions between conflicting oral testimonies are read through Halbwachs's framework of collective memory and Portelli's account of the subjectivity of oral sources. The article contributes to broadening the historiographical understanding of Reog Ponorogo beyond a spiritual-performative tradition into a concrete arena of ideological contestation during the Guided Democracy period, while affirming that the impact of G30S/PKI on local tradition operated selectively rather than as total suppression.
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