Legal Pluralism in Jeopardy

The Epistemological Clash Between State Marriage Law, Theological Sovereignty, and Javanese Cosmic Order (Weton)

Abstract

This research examines the epistemological clash between Indonesia's Marriage Law Number 16 of 2019, Islamic theology, and Javanese weton tradition in interior Java through a socio-legal approach combining legal anthropology, sociology of law, and critical legal studies. The study addresses a critical gap in contemporary legal pluralism scholarship, which predominantly views post-2019 marriage dispensation phenomena through reductive lenses of legal positivism or political economy, neglecting the dimension where state law, Islamic jurisprudence, and customary cosmology mutually negate each other's ontological legitimacy. Employing a three-tier theoretical framework integrating Sally Falk Moore's Legal Pluralism, Jasser Auda's Maqashid Systems Approach, and Ewick and Silbey's Legal Consciousness Typology, alongside legal ethnographic methods through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and intertextual analysis of Law Number 16 of 2019, Religious Court decisions, Javanese Primbon manuscripts, and Islamic jurisprudence texts, this research reveals that state legal intervention paradoxically triggers resistance through a surge in mass marriage dispensation applications and the expansion of unregistered marriage practices. The findings generate a new theoretical postulate Subversive Syncretic Legalism describing how grassroots legal subjects creatively synthesize theological and cosmological authorities to create counter-legitimation systems that passively-subversively paralyze the effectiveness of positive state law. This research demonstrates that legal simplification without epistemological negotiation with local cosmological structures only produces legal black holes that nurture underground law.