Abstract In this article, I undertake a conceptual analysis of hukum tata negara, Indonesia’s equivalent of constitutional law. In acknowledging the agency of the target context, I posit that the “deeper and felt meaning” of constitutional law changes, or vernacularizes, as it travels from one context to another. To foreground this vernacularization, this article draws on the concept of positionality so that the process of explication is more perceptible to the Indonesian sensibilities as a target context. This approach rejects the possibility of a neutral, context-independent perspective and is premised on the assumption that linguistic sensibility is critical to conceptual or philosophical interpretation. This article argues that hukum tata negara is grounded in Indonesia’s folk religious sensibility; in other words, human flourishing is influenced by the will and actions of the sacred. This “nonseparation thesis” is Indonesia’s truth-ground, the proposition that gives constitutional validity to other propositions. By contrast, constitutional law is embedded in a modern social imaginary that treats the sacred and the secular as separate and distinct spheres. Given these differing ideological assumptions, hukum tata negara is best viewed as a vernacular constitutional law rather than as a faithful rendition of an “original” constitutional law. On a more ambitious note, this article offers a modest contribution to a preliminary exploration of comparative legal theory, grounded in the premise that vernacular conceptual discourse does not rely on Western or home-context resources of meaning.
Pranoto Iskandar (Thu,) studied this question.