Epistemic Multiplicity and Semantic Warfare: Kidung Rumekso Ing Wengi as Heterotopic Text in Contemporary Javanese-Islamic Practice

This study examines Kidung Rumekso Ing Wengi [Song of Protection for the Night] as “heterotopic text”—a discursive space where competing epistemologies coexist without synthesis, challenging dominant paradigms in religious studies. Employing integrated deconstructive analysis, critical discourse analysis, and phenomenological ethnography across three interpretive communities in contemporary Indonesia, this research demonstrates how the kidung operates through “epistemic multiplicity”—generating irreducible semantic contradictions while maintaining operative efficacy through logical incoherence. Textual analysis reveals “escalating impossibility”in protective claims that exceed empirical verification yet remain collectively meaningful. Discourse analysis exposes “semantic warfare" where pesantren authorities accomplish “theological colonization,” rural practitioners maintain “semantic insurgency,”and urban communities employ“therapeutic appropriation”to advance exclusive authority claims. Despite interpretive violence, phenomenological in vestigation reveals remarkable consistency in embodied spiritual effects across communities (92% temporal distortion, 96% respiratory modification, 78% somatic energy sensations), indicating “embodied universality within interpretive particularity.” Statistical analysis of 89 interviews documents how spiritual meaning emerges through “agonistic hermeneutics”where authority develops through conflict rather than consensus, challenging hermeneutical approaches that assume religious communities achieve mutual understanding through dialogue. This investigation contributes to postcolonial Islamic studies by demonstrating how local spiritual languages function as contested sites where normative Islam negotiates with indigenous expressions, while advancing“postdisciplinary”religious studies methodology that operates through productive tensions between analytical approaches. The findings reveal Kidung Rumekso Ing Wengi as exemplifying contemporary spiritual authority that transcends conventional binaries between orthodox and popular Islam.