EKSISTENSI ASTROLOGI JAWA PITUNG WETON DI INTERNET: KAJIAN BERBASIS KORPUS

Abstract

Javanese pitung weton astrology persists among some communities even as modernization and digitalization push Javanese society to abandon traditions perceived as irrational. This netnographic study aims to examine whether the pitung weton tradition remains sustainable in Indonesian- and Javanese-language digital spaces. The study is significant because prior research has mostly relied on small-scale fieldwork, leaving the tradition's broader digital presence largely unmeasured, while offering an empirical basis for local cultural preservation. Data were drawn from the Javanese and Indonesian corpora on CQPweb—containing 8.8 million tokens across 16 subcorpora and 573 million tokens across 43 subcorpora, respectively—together with a corpus transliterated from 117 YouTube videos documenting pitung weton practices, supplemented by in-depth interviews with practitioners to compile a lexicon list. The findings show that the pitung weton tradition is gradually declining in both urban and rural areas, marked by a limited lexicon and increasingly narrow usage confined mainly to matchmaking. These findings fill a literature gap through large-scale, corpus-based digital evidence rarely used in earlier pitung weton studies, while confirming that cultural erosion is invariably accompanied by the erosion of its language. Practically, the findings offer a foundation for stakeholders to design more substantive, educational digital revitalization programs.