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Between-the-Wars Bali: Rereading the Relics
- University of Wisconsin Press
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BETWEEN..THE..WARS BALI Rereading the Relics JAMES A. BOON Before beginning, consider scrupulously these scrupulous words of Gregory Bateson: An event occurs, for example, a battle is fought, or a man is born or dies, or writes a book. Then memory of this event centers later around some relic or, lacking a relic, we set up a tablet or memorial to the past event, and either the relic or the memorial becomes an influence which pushes those who come after to perpetuate the sociological effects of the original event. Thus we invest the past with real authority and set it, like a policeman, to the business of governing the present. Sometimes the precepts of the past do not quite suit us or the past event is not dramatic enough for our taste, then we are compelled to emend or to embellish the story woven around the relic. (1937:133) Bateson's words, worth intoning, grace ''An Old Temple and a New Myth," an article about rearranging contemporary concerns to render plausible, and alluring, the past. That article was occasioned by Balinese culture, ritual practice , and speech, meticulously recorded and translated. Identical words could refer also to the book compiled by Jane Belo, in which Bateson's essay was republished over thirty years later. Belds Traditional Balinese Culture (1970) purported to represent an event: "Balinese studies in the 1930s." And Belds book evokes that past by embellishing the story woven round the relic, occasionally investing it with authority, like a policeman. For readers today Bateson 's words become a gift from interwar Bali that illuminates how that very subject (including Bateson's words themselves) would subsequently be comJames A. Boon is Professor of Anthropology, Asian Studies, and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His books include The Anthropological Romance of Bali and Other Tribes, Other Scribes. He is currently completing collections of essays on comparative Indonesian studies and on the inescapable ironies of ethnology. 218 BETWEEN-THE-WARS BALI 219 A typical Balinese split temple gate (candi), this one framing a memorial to wartime, silhouetted. (Photograph by the author.) memorated. In the following pages we accept Bateson's gift and recirculate his words as epigraphs, or perhaps rubrics. I score these fragments with phrases from the cited passage of Bateson. My compositional technique is inspired perhaps by surrealism, perhaps by musical examples that figure in our story. Readers are requested to entertain such possibilities behind this composite text of disparate data, strange interludes, unexpected connections, and undecidable questions woven through fieldwork and remembering it. Like Proust's, our subject is memory, or the writing-construction (the commemoration ) of memories, in this case partly shared ones: semi-social-facts comprising a charmed circle's sense ofentre-deux-guerres. Our "leading motives" include fragments from the prose of several protagonists: Jane Belo, Walter Spies, Margaret Mead. We allude to certain psychoanalytic views of repression and displacement, and consider in passing one case (Culture and Personality ) of the many disciplinary movements whose inevitability has been created through retrospection. Yet, we explore texts of commemoration, not lives presumably "behind" those texts-lives that may elsewhere be the subject of psychologistic investigation. The present essay, then, strives not to become certain familiar things: not an expose of prominent figures; not a cynical revela- [3.94.150.98] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:42 GMT) 220 JAMES A. BOON tion that Balinese studies are about Balinists as well as Bali (this kind of point should no longer be "news"); and not an ode to the good old d'antin days of those oh-so-yester years. To resist the above-mentioned plots, without suppressing evidence of their appeal to other readers, is to offer in their stead ambiguous tonalities-fluid, resonant, charged with specificity. This essay, a prose commemoration ofprose commemorations, seeks to sustain ambiguities with heightened precision and reflexivity. The proper signature of our story is the "key" of Debussy. May these misty fragments be neither obscurist nor subjective, dear reader, but musical.! Fragment 1: "We invest the past with real authority . . ." War is-besides hell, sorrow, and suffering-a "space" (Michel Foucault might have said) around which gather a vaT dem, a nach dem, and, alas, an "inter." Like revolution, "war" betokens the essence of "eventness": the headline, the declared, the won/lost. "War" represents FACT en majuscules; then come the wrenching details. Upon the hinge of "wartime," near-forgottens turn into ordered recollection; the ensuing mode is always commemorative, sometimes elegiac.2 Theories...