The wooden gate bears a sign – Kawasan Hutan Keramat Kampung Adat Kuta – but no guard. Beyond it, the first rule asserts itself silently: shoes must be removed. Bare soles meet stone, root and fallen branch, each step slowed to a deliberate, careful pace. The forest, known as Leuweung Gede, demands this of every visitor, just as it did of the ancestors who never entered with covered feet. The sensation is immediate and humbling, a physical reminder that here, humans are not separate from the earth but part of it.

Inside, the prohibitions multiply. No clothing of pure black. No spitting. No relieving oneself. Women who are menstruating may not enter. No object, not even a fallen twig, may be carried out. Uniforms and gold jewellery must be left behind. These are not regulations posted on a noticeboard; they are pamali – unwritten ancestral taboos that, if broken, are believed to invite misfortune or disaster. “If you rely on a forester, the forest can disappear,” explains Maman Sarno, who has served as the forest’s juru kunci, or key keeper, for the past seven years. “Here we use trust. Pamali is enough. The forest must not be disturbed – it is the oxygen, the life of humans.”

The forest’s sanctity is one expression of a wider adat system that governs life in Kampung Adat Kuta, a village in Ciamis regency where houses are built only as simple rectangles on stilts, their doors never facing a neighbour’s, lest competition breed discord. A ritual involving palm sugar and bitter gourd determines whether a building site has ancestral blessing: if ants swarm the sugar or the gourd scatters, construction is forbidden. Every three months, a day-long prohibition on all purchasing – even a single nail – is observed. The village also bars its residents from holding rank: no civil servant, soldier or police officer may live within its boundaries while in active service. Those who attain such positions must leave; only retirees may return and submit to adat.

Three pillars sustain Leuweung Gede: pamali, the key keeper, and the adat community itself. The result is a forest floor entirely free of litter, where trees felled by natural causes are left to decay undisturbed. There has been no illegal logging, no commercial encroachment, and, as a consequence, almost no natural disasters. The silence is not empty but full – of birdsong, of the loamy scent of undisturbed soil, of a social contract that has outlasted the written laws of the state.

At the forest’s heart, the absence of human imposition is the loudest presence. Fallen trunks lie where they fell, slowly returning to the soil. The only path is the one made by bare feet, and the only authority is a trust passed down through generations, as intangible and enduring as the canopy overhead.