<![CDATA[The symbolic and ritual dimensions of the Barong Kucingan mask within the Javanese Jaranan tradition remain critically underexplored, particularly from an integrated ethnographic-semiotic perspective a gap that limits the development of performance studies, cultural ethnography, and symbolic semiotics, which have tended to treat symbolic structure and social function as separate objects of analysis. This study analyses the symbolic structures embedded in the visual, kinetic, and performative dimensions of the Barong Kucingan mask, the cultural functions it serves, and the way these elements articulate to form a systemic meaning within the Jaranan performance of Blitar, East Java, Indonesia. Employing an interpretivist qualitative design combining cultural ethnography and performance ethnography, data were collected over six months across multiple Jaranan communities through participant observation, in-depth interviews with fifteen informants across four categories, and audio-visual documentation, then triangulated and interpreted through symbolic semiotics, ritual process theory, and performance studies. The findings are organised across three dimensions. First, at the level of symbolic structure, the mask, movement, music, and costume operate as an integrated presentative symbol encoding a dualistic cosmology of wild and tame. Second, at the level of cultural function, the performance simultaneously serves entertainment, liminal, social-critical, and spiritual functions that operate as a single continuous movement. Third, at the level of interpretive meaning, these structures and functions converge to produce cosmological dualism, ancestral mediation, and collective identity. The study’s principal contribution is the threshold symbol system a new conceptual model that integrates symbolic structure, cultural function, and interpretive meaning within a single analytical framework, thereby extending performance studies and symbolic anthropology beyond the functionalist–semiotic divide. A limitation is the study’s focus on a single regional tradition, which invites comparative testing elsewhere.]]>
