Reinterpreting Malay Folklore: Cosmology, Identity and the Narratives of Gunung Keriang, Kedah, Malaysia

Abstract

This article examines the folklore of Gunung Keriang in Kedah through its two most prominent narrative strands: the myth of Sang Gedembai and the legend of Mat Raya. Although frequently regarded as simple folk tales or mere entertainment, these narratives in fact reveal deeper registers of cultural memory and symbolic geography within Malay oral tradition. The myth of Sang Gedembai, in which a royal vessel is petrified into a mountain through a curse, exemplifies the mythic mode that encodes cosmological anxieties about authority, marriage, and transgression. The legend of Mat Raya, by contrast, situates Gunung Keriang within a heroic continuum where human agency and divine sanction intersect to produce a natural landmark as a lasting monument of protection and sacrifice. By juxtaposing these two versions of origin, the study argues that Gunung Keriang operates not only as a geological formation but as a cultural text that mediates between myth, legend, and the lived environment of Kedah. Methodologically, this study employs qualitative folkloristic analysis grounded in symbolic anthropology, combining textual interpretation with field-based observations conducted at Gunung Keriang. It explicitly incorporates a structural  approach informed by Lévi-Strauss’s notion of “mythical thought” to examine how binary oppositions, such as nature and culture, and authority and resistance, are encoded within both narratives. Drawing on approaches from folklore studies and symbolic anthropology, the article foregrounds how local narratives transform natural topography into a cosmological map of power, morality, and identity. Such stories constitute what Lévi-Strauss termed “mythical thought,” in which binary oppositions —nature and culture, male and female, power and resistance— are resolved in symbolic form. At the same time, the endurance of these narratives demonstrates the role of oral tradition in shaping cultural identity and communal belonging in postcolonial Malaysia. The contribution of this research lies in repositioning Malay folklore, particularly localised landscape narratives, as a form of cultural sovereignty and symbolic geography. This challenges the marginalisation of oral tradition in mainstream literary studies and offers a new interpretive framework for understanding the interrelation between narrative, landscape and identity in the Malay world. By reinterpreting Gunung Keriang as folklore that oscillates between myth and legend, this article challenges the conventional relegation of Malay folk narratives to the margins of literary studies. Instead, it situates them within a broader discourse of cosmology, symbolic geography, and cultural sovereignty, demonstrating their continued relevance for understanding the intersections of narrative, landscape, and identity in the Malay world.   

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