Keywords:
Environmental humanities
Human–nonhuman relations
Cultural symbolism
Agrarian lifeworlds
Indonesian performing arts

  • Abstract

    Growing ecological crises have intensified critiques of anthropocentric perspectives that position humans as the primary agents in shaping cultural and environmental relations. These debates have encouraged scholars to reconsider how cultural practices articulate relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. While traditional performances in Indonesia have frequently been examined in terms of cultural preservation and heritage recognition, limited attention has been paid to how these performances express multispecies agency and ecological memory within posthumanist analytical frameworks. This article investigates how such relationships are enacted in the Sandur Manduro performance tradition practiced by the Manduro community in Jombang, East Java. The study employs a qualitative interpretive approach that integrates posthumanist theory with Peircean semiotic analysis. Data were collected through performance observations, interviews with performers and cultural practitioners, and audiovisual documentation. The findings demonstrate that animals, natural materials, and spatial arrangements function as performative actants that shape the dramaturgical structure of the performance. Narrative episodes such as Sapen and Manuk Tengkek illustrate how interactions between human performers and animal characters generate multispecies relational dynamics, while the symbolic use of agricultural materials reflects the transmission of ecological memory embedded in agrarian lifeworlds. By combining posthumanist perspectives with semiotic analysis, this study reinterprets Sandur Manduro as a multispecies cultural network in which human and non-human actors collaboratively produce meaning. This article contributes to expanding performance studies beyond anthropocentric frameworks and highlights the significance of traditional cultural practices as living archives of ecological knowledge and relational ethics.

     

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Mei Diastuti, I., Suyatno, & Indarti, T. (2026). Multispecies Agency and Ecological Memory in Sandur Manduro Performance: A Posthumanist Semiotic Approach. Multidisciplinary Science Journal, (| Accepted Articles). Retrieved from https://malque.pub/ojs/index.php/msj/article/view/17139
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