‘Si Palui’: depicting the Banjarese’s cultures and daily life through digital platform

The Banjarese community is known to be a group of people residing in both Indonesia and Malaysia. Despite having existed for a long time, the Banjarese community is still not widely known by many. The advancement of digitalization has opened new avenues for this community to promote their culture, one of which is through a series of short stories known as Si Palui. In fact, promoting local culture through digital platforms has been undertaken by many groups around the world. Hence, this paper aims to identify the cultural aspects depicted in these short stories and to compare them with real-life situations. All the short stories were posted on the Banjarmasin Post, an online platform that serves as a source for news in South Kalimantan. A corpus linguistics project known as the “Si Palui Corpus” was created for this study, consisting of hundreds of these short stories revolving around a character named Palui. By implementing Bierstedt’s interpretation of culture, this study found that these Banjarese short stories indeed depict the real life of the Banjarese people. Bierstedt presents three main interpretations of culture: ideas, norms, and things. Each short story appears to be embedded with at least one of these cultural interpretations, demonstrating that they were written based on the real lives of the Banjarese people. This study hopes to introduce aspects of Banjarese culture to a wider audience and serve as a foundation for future studies