Bujangga Manik is a fifteenth-century story from Sundanese-speaking West Java about an ascetic who travels around Java and Bali before ascending to heaven. Its central narrative trope, of narrating...Show moreBujangga Manik is a fifteenth-century story from Sundanese-speaking West Java about an ascetic who travels around Java and Bali before ascending to heaven. Its central narrative trope, of narrating the ascetic's journey through a recitation of place names, has no clear parallels in South Asian literature, and I argue that it derives from an ancient Malayo-Polynesian tradition, similar to what the anthropologist J. J. Fox named the 'topogeny'. I attempt to show this through a dissection of Bujangga Manik and detailed comparison with ethnographic data from the Malayo-Polynesian-(Austronesian-)speaking world.Show less
