Heritage Without Original Actors: Symbolic Inflation, Declarations of Epistemological Sovereignty, and System Reclamation in Post-Majapahit Nusantara (11th–17th Centuries CE)

This paper is the third part of a research programme on the formation and persistence of civilisation in Nusantara. Whereas the two preceding studies examined the phase of symbolic-institutional domination by Indian networks (4th–6th centuries CE) and the phase of internalisation by Austronesian actors (7th–11th centuries CE), this paper investigates the third phase: how the system, having become autonomous, came under pressure from symbolic inflation, yet endured—in a transformed form—beyond the collapse of the political apparatus that sustained it. Three principal analytical claims are advanced. First, the Shiva-Buddha syncretism in 11th-century East Java, most clearly articulated in the Pucangan Inscription (1041 CE), is read as a declaration of epistemological sovereignty: local actors no longer merely copied Indian codes, but claimed the authority to recombine and redefine the rules of power representa- tion. Second, the Majapahit crisis of the 14th–15th centuries is interpreted as a dissonance between the escalation of cosmological claims and the institutional-material capacity of the state—a symbolic capital inflation that rendered the central legitimising apparatus increasingly burdensome to sustain materially. Third, the post-Majapahit Babad tradition is treated as system traces: not linear historical documents, but arenas of legitimacy competition that reveal how the grammar of Majapahit power was renego- tiated by Islamic, Balinese, and Sundanese actors. Methodologically, this paper applies three symmetrical principles of source criticism: genre criticism, functional criticism, and temporal criticism. Its theoretical framework combines Bourdieu’s symbolic capital and doxa concepts, North’s institutional transaction costs, and Braudel’s longue durée temporality. The main philosophical contribution of this paper is the historical mechanism that allows the paradox “political server collapses, legitimacy protocol endures” to occur—and the conditions that determine whether the system persists or undergoes total dissolution.