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Chapter 9 PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS AND PEOPLE FROM THE SEA A Balinese Model of Society Moving beyond the ethnography of highland Bali, I now explore how Bali Aga people and their culture are situated in the representational landscape of Bali as a whole. Insofar as the Bali Aga have been portrayed with a negative bias by other, more powerful Balinese people, I assume that there is a moral responsibility to amplify their counterdiscourses. At the same time, Balinese identities are the product of a historical and intersubjective process in which the Bali Aga have participated with an ambivalent attitude of competition as well as cooperation. In adopting this perspective, I aim to prevent a fetishization of either power or resistance. Balinese Models of Society: From Identity to Representation The Bali Aga are broadly conceived of (and see themselves) as the island’s indigenous people, descendants of the first ancestors who cleared the island’s forests and whose spirits still protect the land. As such they are vested with a sacred duty to appeal to Bali’s founding ancestors on behalf of all its inhabitants so that the land may remain fertile and the vital rains will never fail. As one Bali Aga elder once put it: “We guard the mountain of life, the temples of Bali’s origin; we are the old trunk that supports the fresh tip. If we neglect our [ritual] duty, the world shall rock and all its peoples shall tumble” (Jero Tongkog, Bali Aga elder, 1994). Their conceptual counterparts are now the majority of the island’s population. Most other Balinese regard themselves as the descendants of magically powerful Javanese ancestors from the kingdom of Majapait . These Javanese ancestors are believed to have invaded and con- People of the Mountains and People from the Sea 265 quered Bali in the fourteenth century. Foremost among them are the royal ancestors of Bali’s still powerful aristocracy. As “stranger kings” from across the sea, they became the local representatives and embodiment of a world more powerful than Bali, a world that has always been at its doorstep. Once Bali’s wider nonaristocratic population had embraced and appropriated the narratives of a new and powerful Bali Majapait as well and had claimed a Javanese ancestry as best they could, the Bali Aga remained as a necessary residual category , representatives of an “older,” more “original,” and, in some ways, more sacred Bali. The conceptual, ritual, and political relationship between Bali Aga and Bali Majapait, between indigenous people of the mountains and people from across the sea, has evolved over a period of six centuries. The contemporary position of the Mountain Balinese in the fabric of Balinese identities can only be appreciated by tracing this precolonial history of struggle, negotiation, and compromise. Representations of the Bali Aga were also redefined—both in content and in their idiom—in the wake of a more recent colonial and postcolonial history . The following is thus a contemporary analysis of a postcolonial Bali Aga condition with a long precolonial history. For the Balinese the landscape of their identities is a testimony to a history of encounters among people of different origins. In this sense, it is less a landscape of identities, or bounded cultural universes of sameness (from Latin idem, “the same”), than it is a landscape shaped by representation (from Latin, prae-esse “to be in front of or confronted by [someone else]”). That Balinese concepts of ethnicity so recognize “otherness” as a product of historical encounters or confrontations, as a product of contact rather than isolation, may relate to the specific conditions of their historical experience. Since prehistoric times, Bali has been a site for encounters among different but often related peoples arriving from across the sea in countless waves of migration. Having begun their migrations in southern China and Taiwan some three or four thousand years ago, even the first Austronesian ancestors of the Balinese to land on the island’s shores found the island inhabited already, by people whose name has been forgotten. Whenever they arrived and whoever they were, each group of immigrants had to establish a way of relating to groups who had settled before them and to others who were to arrive later. Some newcomers were perhaps content to be tolerated and left no major impression. Others, however, among them the people from Majapait, were to gain political ascendancy over those whom they encountered upon arrival. Whenever such a takeover occurred, the [3.22.171.136] Project...

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