Econarratology and The Outsider/Insider Dynamic in Jajang Agus Sonjaya’s Manusia Langit

Kristiawan Indriyanto; Nova Mawar Hutabarat

doi:10.22452/

Authors

Kristiawan Indriyanto Universitas Prima Indonesia
Nova Mawar Hutabarat Universitas Prima Indonesia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22452/

Keywords:

econarratology, Indonesian literature, Nias culture, postcolonialism, place attachment

Abstract

Jajang Agus Sonjaya's Manusia Langit (2010) mediates Nias Indigenous epistemology through Mahendra, a Javanese archaeology lecturer whose academic formation embodies the center-periphery knowledge hierarchies the novel sets out to interrogate. This article argues that the novel deploys first-person narration to reproduce, and then progressively dismantle, this epistemological hierarchy. Econarratology is the method that makes this formal tension visible. While existing scholarship on the novel has illuminated what it represents about Nias culture, this article examines how narrative form positions readers in relation to that representation. Through close analysis of free indirect discourse, focalization shift, qualia, and spatialization, the article demonstrates how readers are first implicated in Mahendra's extractive epistemological gaze and then gradually estranged from it. The adat critique that emerges from Mahendra's liminal position — formally adopted into the Nias community yet unable to bear adat's full obligatory weight — holds cosmological sophistication and material constraint, sacred landscape and ecological degradation, in the same analytical frame. Manusia Langit demonstrates that the ethical representation of Indigenous knowledge requires not only thematic respect but also formal self-awareness of the mediating gaze through which that knowledge reaches readers.

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