FROM SUNRISE OF JAVA TO SANTET OF JAVA: RECENT URBAN SYMBOLISM OF BANYUWANGI, INDONESIA 1 st Arif Subekti History Department State University of Malang) Malang, Indonesia arif.subekti.fis@um.ac.id 2 nd Latif Kusairi State Institute of Islamic Religion of Surakarta Surakarta, Indonesia Abstract—Some of Indonesian people believe that misfortunes such as illness, death, crop failure, the death of livestock, and divorce is caused by individuals with certain magical power and knowledge—what then called “santet”. Together with Lombok and Banten, Banyuwangi is among the areas believed to be the warehouse of witchcraft. Those evil and cheaty trick attached to banyuwanginese talent born, something that supposedly rooted in the myth from the past. Islam as majority religion on contemporary Banyuwangi, condemn those sorcery and witchcraft practices, but rather than disappearing under the mass influence of Islam, Banyuwanginese people pick “santet” as their identit ies, as shown on their city’s tagline “Banyuwangi Kota Santet”. Keywords—santet, urban symbolism I. INTRODUCTION The study of urban history in Indonesia has been transformed its paradigm from "all-events" nature, conversed into "socio-economic", then still pursuing the nature into the shape of history that focused on “mentality” aspects. [1] and [2] have periodized the development of Indonesian cities marked mostly by the colonial penetration and the independence of Indonesia. Those trends then changed dramatically into social aspect, as often encountered in recent Indonesian historiography. Historian began to abandoned big events and political discusses and pay more attention into local dynamics, such as the opus of [3], [4], [5], and [6]. Unlike both previous paradigms, mentality history not enough to be explored among Indonesian scholars. Yet, [7] should be prominent savant who broke the limit: highlight the meaning of guardhouse as part of urban society in Java during the colonial and postcolonial eras. On the other hand, history of non-rural area encouraged a new perspective as the interdisciplinary amalgamation between history, memory, and urban planning. [8] entitled it as urban symbolism, an appropriate idiom to represent cultural aspects, despite morphologic, demographic, economic, socio-cultural, administrative, and planning dimension. Indonesian city identities, such as cemeteries [9], street name, and statue [9] store specific but full of contention and meaning. Hence, in the past, those sites encountered important role as representation or landmark of a city, on contrary, contemporary people treat them as an ordinary monument, vice versa. The focus of this essay is on the symbolic spectrum of Banyuwangi, particularly on reconstructing identities aspect of the city. After the Reformasi 1998 (the relatively smooth transfer of Indonesia's political power and economic structure), the massive change occurred on reinventing identities, including on city's identities. Solo as one of popular city in Java, for example, has modified its city's tagline, from Solo Berseri (abbreviation of “bersih sehat rapi indah/clean healthy neat lovely”) in New Order era into Solo Kota Budaya (Solo the City of Culture), Solo the Spirit of Java, and Solo Future is Solo the Past [10]. Unlike Saleem, Massachusetts, which is nicknamed as "the city of witch", the labeling of Banyuwangi as the city of black magic related to myth on Blambangan Kingdom (biggest kingdom on ancient Banyuwangi). People believe that Blambangan corps were digdaya (invulnerable), and some of their indigenous inhabitants are talented with witchcraft expertise. If there were witch trials in Saleem at the end of 17th century, in 1998, Banyuwangi encouraged the massacre of over a hundred of dukun santet (black magic expert) or people accused to be the black magic practitioner. However, the tagline to acquaint and promote both city is nearly the same: city of witch and kota santet (city of witchcraft). The initial part of this paper illustrates the terminology of santet and the way banyuwanginese judge it. Hereafter, the mass violence of people accused to be santet practitioner will be depicted concisely, including various data such as statistic, chronology and several theories about motives and actors. Those elucidations disembogue onto modifying and revision of the new meaning of “santet”. Instead of smothering us with past burial, history allows us to look toward and start to choose more options to solve our actual problems. At this point, the slogan "Banyuwangi Kota Santet" is positioned as a field of meaning negotiation, which instead of being considered as a pejorative title, the new brand and meaning of “santet” used as a marketable identity, particularly on the industry of tourism issue. 1st International Conference on Social Knowledge Sciences and Education (ICSKSE 2018) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 320 144