Power and Ideology Revealed in The Awig-awig (Customary Law) Text of Tenganan Pegringsingan Village: Critical Ecolinguistic Study

Abstract

Awig-awig ‘customary law’ is a written rule which is used to manage customary village organization in Bali. This customary law has a very important role in maintaining the environment in terms of natural environment (palemahan), social environment (pawongan), and spiritual environment (parhyangan). Therefore, every awig-awig made should be based on Tri Hita Karana (THK) concept. The THK is defined as ‘three causes of happiness and prosperity’. In this study, THK is considered as an ecosophy used to judge the existence of lexical items, grammatical contructs, and other linguistic features used in the awig-awig text. In critical discourse, the exisistence of any texts is considered to bring underlying power and ideology. Thus, the written text of the awig-awig belongs to Tenganan Pegringsingan village reveals the form of power fight and ideology. Therefore, this present study was aimed at finding the influence of the power domination and ideology revealed in the awig-awig text. By applying a critical discourse analysis, it was found the influence of the power domination depicted by the use of modality kawasa and wenang ‘may/can’. Most of the linguistic features used in the awig-awig text bring preservative ideologies that need to be promoted. However, in a small part of the linguistic features used in the text, especially in the social environment, implies destructive ideologies, such as marginalization and patriarchal that need to be resisted.

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