Transmitting Values Through Maudu’ Lompoa: Vernacular Ritual and Character Education in Pluralistic Indonesia

Abstract

This study investigates Maudu’ Lompoa, an annual Islamic-vernacular ritual in Cikoang Village, South Sulawesi, to examine how local ritual structures transmit socio-cultural and moral values in a pluralistic society. Employing an ethnographic qualitative-descriptive design, data were collected through participant observation across the 18-day ritual cycle, documentary analysis, and in-depth interviews with 12 purposively selected informants (customary leaders, ritual committee organizers, female craft artisans, youth representatives, and lay villagers) to ensure empirical adequacy and saturation. Data were analyzed using Miles and Huberman's interactive model and interpreted through a novel tripartite theoretical synthesis combining Peircean triadic semiotics, Lévi-Straussian structuralism, and Lickona's character education framework. The findings reveal that the ritual's preparatory and implementation stages encode recurring binary oppositions (sacred/profane, raw/cooked, individual/collective, land/sea) and operate as an informal, experiential curriculum. Moral values—discipline, patience, gratitude, sincerity, collective responsibility (gotong royong), and respect—are habituated through embodied communal labor rather than formal instruction. By bridging vernacular religious practice and moral education, this study demonstrates how local rituals cultivate shared character values without erasing cultural distinctiveness, offering an analytical framework for value transmission in multicultural contexts while addressing challenges of modernization and commercialization.