More-than-human resilience in Banten: cultural and religious infrastructures of endurance

Community resilience is often explained through human-centered frameworks that emphasize social cohesion, institutional capacity, and intentional coordination, leaving less attention to forms of endurance sustained through cultural and religious life. This study examines how resilience in Banten, Indonesia, is assembled through more-than-human cultural and religious infrastructures. Drawing on qualitative interview material from 22 informants across Serang, Pandeglang, and Cilegon, it uses thematic analysis, cross-site comparison, and a bounded posthumanist interpretation to examine jawara, debus, pesantren, ngariung , and maulidan . The practices are analyzed in relation to social disconnection, weakened intergenerational moral transmission, industrial mobility, memories of violence, inequality, and the circulation of radical or violent narratives. The findings show that resilience in Banten is sustained through embodied discipline, ritual repetition, moral-spatial formation, affective attachment, shared food, recited sound, and communal rhythms. Jawara and debus connect trained bodies, spiritual instruction, historical memory, and public authority; pesantren organizes ethical formation through texts, routines, and spatial discipline; and ngariung and maulidan maintain proximity through gathering, recitation, food preparation, and shared time. These infrastructures support continuity and collective endurance, but they are also shaped by hierarchy, gendered labor, unequal visibility, and ambivalent forms of authority. This study contributes to resilience scholarship by showing that resilience is not simply a capacity possessed by communities, but an emergent condition produced through relations among people, practices, spaces, sounds, food, texts, and memories. It also contributes to social sustainability debates by demonstrating that durable social relations and moral transmission are sustained through cultural and religious infrastructures, not through formal institutions or policy design alone.

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