Mudik: an annual ritual maintaining social equilibrium

Every year, millions of people undertake the same journey: returning to their hometown, including myself and perhaps you. We call it mudik, an annual “ritual” that occurs, particularly ahead of Eid al-Fitr celebrations.

The roads are congested. Terminals, railway stations, ports, and airports are overcrowded. Stories of long traffic jams always emerge. It is exhausting indeed, and costly too. Yet, why are millions of people willing to endure such lengthy and tiresome journeys merely to return to their hometown for a few days?

The liminal phase

In reality, mudik is something far deeper than a mere homecoming journey. Mudik is a unique social experience, when people abandon their daily routines to enter a different social space. In anthropology, such experiences are termed the liminal phase, a concept popularised by Victor Turner (1920–1983), an English cultural anthropologist.

Turner studied various rituals within traditional societies and discovered that many life rites possess three stages: separation, the liminal phase, and reintegration. Liminal is the phase “in between”, a transitional phase, when a person is no longer in their former status, yet has not fully entered a new status.

Here is what that means. If we view mudik from this perspective, the phenomenon resembles a large-scale national ritual. There is a phase of separation, when people leave the city, office, work routines, and their professional identities temporarily.

The mudik journey itself becomes the liminal phase. Within buses, trains, ships, aeroplanes, or private vehicles, homebound travellers exist in transitional space. They have not fully returned to being “village people”, but nor are they entirely within the “city world” anymore.

In this liminal phase, the rigid social hierarchies normally felt often dissolve. On congested motorways, luxury cars and old vehicles are equally stuck in traffic. At railway stations, executives and labourers stand in the same queue. At airports, white-collar workers and ordinary workers experience the same wait. The mudik journey creates temporary social space, where many status differences feel thinner.

Turner termed such experiences communitas, namely the sense of togetherness that emerges when people exist in the liminal phase. Communitas is not formal social relationship governed by position or status, but rather a more spontaneous and egalitarian relationship.

Mudik presents such communitas experiences. People who do not know each other can easily share stories during the journey. Fellow travellers help one another carry luggage at stations. In their hometown, old neighbours who rarely meet reunite in a more relaxed atmosphere. There emerges a sense of togetherness not because of formal social structures, but because of shared experience.

Beyond that, something interesting occurs. The liminal phase also changes how people perceive their own identity. Whilst in the city a person’s identity is quite possibly determined by profession, position, or income level, in their hometown, that identity shifts. A person returns to being a child of their parents, a childhood friend, an old neighbour, or whatever other identity it might be. Ultimately, social relationships become more personal and more emotional.

This identity shift becomes a mirror for reflection. That life is not solely about career or economic competition. Meetings with family, eating together, or simply sitting relaxed conversing can serve as reminders of values often neglected in the fast-paced city life.

Unfortunately, the liminal phase does not last long. After a few days, homebound travellers return to “real life”. Back to the office, to work routines, and to more formal social structures. This is the reintegration phase in Turner’s theory, when a person re-enters their normal life.

Social equilibrium

In this context, mudik should be understood not merely as a homecoming journey. Rather, mudik is a social ritual that helps society maintain equilibrium between two different worlds: the world of formal routine and the world of one’s original community.

Formal routine provides economic opportunity and social mobility. Meanwhile, one’s hometown as original community provides the roots of identity and sense of collectivity.

Without the mudik ritual, the relationship between these two worlds might become strained. Because urbanisation often creates emotional distance between people and their original communities. However, mudik ensures that this distance does not become completely severed.

This is why the mudik tradition endures in the digital technology era today. Even though people can communicate with family every day through phone calls or video calls, virtual communication cannot replace the social experience that occurs when people are physically present.

That is to say, mudik brings something that technology cannot replicate. Mudik creates a liminal experience, temporary space where people can step out of their routine identity and feel again the simpler social closeness.

Mudik is a pause, which allows people to stop briefly from the rapid pace of work, recall where they come from, and realise that human identity is not solely formed by work or the city where they live.

Perhaps this is why mudik always feels important, even for those who must face long and exhausting journeys. Because there is something more fundamental: the human need to occasionally step out of one’s life structure, return to one’s social roots, and experience again simple togetherness.

Ultimately, mudik is not merely about going home. Mudik is a brief journey to space “in between”, where old and new identities meet. Space where humanity remembers that life is not just about where we are going, but also about where we come from.