Symbolic Expression in Folk Songs of Glondangan Art in Jember: An Ethno-poetic and Cultural Semiotic Study

Abstract

This article investigates the folk songs performed within the Glondangan art tradition of Jember, East Java, Indonesia, through an integrated ethnopoetic and cultural semiotic framework. Three analytical dimensions are addressed: the songs' formal poetic structure, their linguistico-rhetorical conventions, and their layered symbolic meanings as expressions of polyethnic community identity. Employing ethnographic methods—participant observation, semi-structured interviews with master practitioner Cak Sid, audio documentation, transcription, and translation—alongside cultural semiotic analysis informed by Eco (1979), the study finds that Glondangan folk songs: (1) adopt free-verse structures inflected by the Osing tonal mode (laras), encoding the polyethnic heritage of Jember’s Javanese, Madurese, and Osing communities; (2) deploy a sophisticated figurative repertoire including hyperbolic metaphor, synecdoche, morphophonological reduplication, and intertextual allusion to the Mahabharata tradition; and (3) articulate politically and spiritually charged symbolic systems centred on colonial resistance, feminine spiritual agency, and agrarian moral philosophy. These findings establish Glondangan songs as a significant yet endangered archive of intangible cultural heritage and propose their integration into Javanese language and literary education at the secondary school level. The study contributes to the fields of ethnopoetics, ethnomusicology, and literary education by demonstrating that endangered oral traditions can function simultaneously as aesthetic objects, cultural archives, and pedagogical resources.