Deathless after Death: Humanize the Tradition and Celebrate of Death in Java

Department of Communications, Islamic University of Indonesia, Yogyakarta, 55584, Indonesia

^* Corresponding author: sumekar.tanjung@yahoo.com

Abstract

This paper aims to describe important side about death conception in Java, especially Bejikarto’s people as one of Javanese in Yogyakarta. This research located in Yogyakarta city and take the informants purposively. Technique of collecting data doing through participate observation and in-depth interviews, while the data analyzed by ethnographic descriptive. For Javanese, death is not the end of the journey in this temporal world. Death as a manifestation of the body’s extinction and the new life’s genesis that is eternity. In Javanese culture, all of the life and death’s process have concept and control. Death upheld to maintain harmonious relations with others, with nature occult or supernatural with God. To celebrate the death of the bodies considered as an appreciation, respect, and the act of a religious nature. In Javanese, human is the unity with macrocosm. Celebration of death is reflection of Javanese desire in order to reach manunggaling kawula lan gusti (unification with God).