Practice Jawa Barat
Maintained
The Sundanese agricultural year-end ceremony, when the year's rice is handed to the granary and pounded together, held in customary villages such as Cigugur and Ciptagelar on the farming calendar rather than the Gregorian one.
Seren taun — handing over the year — is the Sundanese agricultural year-end ceremony, when the year's rice is handed to the leuit, the granary, and some is pounded together. Its sequence includes a procession of rice from the fields, weighing and recording, communal pounding with pestles in a long mortar producing the gondang rhythm, and distribution.
The rice used is rice harvested with the ani-ani and bound into pocong sheaves, not cut with a sickle and threshed. The difference is not stylistic: rice stored on the stalk in a leuit keeps for years while loose grain does not, and the Sundanese granary is built for the first method.
Rice varieties introduced from the 1970s are short-strawed, short-season and harvested with a sickle; they do not suit binding on the stalk nor storage in a leuit. The change of variety therefore bears directly on the ceremony: without stalked rice, the procession, the storage and the communal pounding lose their material.
In places that still hold a full seren taun — among them Cigugur in Kuningan and several Sundanese customary villages — local stalked rice is still grown for the purpose, sometimes on dedicated plots whose yield is not for sale. This encyclopedia records this because it shows a form of preservation seldom named: what is maintained is not the ceremony but the material that makes the ceremony possible.
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2 sections, 4 sources, one of them primary.
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By an office-holder
Set by each customary village on the farming calendar
Not simultaneous and not computable in advance by outsiders: each customary village sets its own from the harvest, and Cigugur and Ciptagelar do not hold it at the same time.