Cosmological Legitimacy and Civic Obedience: Toward a Conceptual Framework of Communal-Religious Citizenship in Kampung Pitu, Nglanggeran, Gunungkidul, Yogyakarta
Keywords:
indigenous citizenship, civic obedience, customary community, cosmological legitimacy, kampung pitu, legal pluralismAbstract
The study of citizenship remains strongly shaped by liberal-individual assumptions and by the idea that rights are the primary basis of citizenship. This orientation often reduces the citizenship practices of indigenous communities to matters of state recognition, legal status, or administrative inclusion. This article offers a conceptual alternative, proposing citizenship as a form of civic obedience grounded in communal, religious, and cosmological legitimacy. The discussion is anchored in the case of Kampung Pitu in Nglanggeran, Gunungkidul, Special Region of Yogyakarta, a community widely associated with the norm of maintaining only seven households (7 KK). Rather than presenting primary fieldwork findings, this article develops a conceptual framework through a critical synthesis of literature on contemporary citizenship studies, legitimacy and authority, communitarian approaches, Javanese cosmology, customary law, and legal pluralism in Indonesia. The article proposes a three-layer analytical model: (1) cosmological legitimacy as the foundation of norms; (2) communal obligation as the moral orientation of citizenship; and (3) civic obedience mechanisms based on moral authority, reputation, and social-symbolic sanctions. These three layers are synthesized into the concept of “communal-religious citizenship,” a mode of citizenship that maintains social order without relying primarily on state legal-rational instruments. The article’s contribution is theoretical: it positions indigenous communities not merely as objects of recognition policy but as important sources for developing citizenship theory from the Global South. The proposed framework requires further validation through future ethnographic research, interviews, observation, and documentation in Kampung Pitu.
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