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Notes
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Notes Introduction 1. During my major fieldwork stay in Bali, I resided in two communities in the district of Kintamani. Both villages participate in the largest among a number of ritual alliance networks in the highlands, the domain of the Penulisan temple. My first two visits to Bali in 1981 and 1984 were as a culturally interested traveler. 2. Indonesian words, written in italics in this text, are Balinese unless stated otherwise. B.I. stands for Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia. 3. Briefly in advance: I do not deny that status claims tend to be raised and contested in a spirit of competition. As long as participants in the social field concerned cooperate voluntarily rather than simply being coerced into cooperation , however, such claims and counterclaims are likely to rely for their validation on the general acceptance of a shared cultural logic of argumentation and on compliance with regulated social procedures of contestation. Bali Aga alliance networks are of great interest precisely because they are heavily reliant on voluntary association. 4. I define discourse as the cultural practice of communication, through language or other forms of symbolic expression, in speech or in writing. Discourse is more than the sum of the individual speech acts of a set of speakers. It is shaped in both form and content by culture, ethnicity, or other forms of affiliation set in a specific historical context. When I speak of Balinese or Bali Aga discourses, I am thus referring not simply to the common content of the utterances I have listened to but to the cooperative elements I have observed in the way individuals express and support the validity of their views. Unlike a grammar in the more conventional sense, a discourse expects of utterances that they not only are intelligible but contain claims that seem at least reasonable (if not necessarily valid) to other speakers by virtue of their conformity to a cultural standard of argumentation. The specific claims contained in the utterances of participants in a discourse may be shared as well, but this is not necessarily the case. Discourse may serve cooperation by setting a standard of argumentation, but it also allows different individuals or groups to pursue their own and often conflicting strategic interests by raising specific arguments and by contesting those raised by others. However, the strategic intentions of individual speakers and the ideological twist in their utterances alone are not sufficient to lend to a discourse the character of an ideology. Although the distinction may only be one of degree, I prefer to reserve the term “ideology” to designate a body of unverified discursive claims, with a false flair of universal validity underwritten almost exclusively by systematic coercion and institutionalized inequalities. This would be too harsh a term in relation to southern Balinese discourses about the highland people. 5. Intense wet rice cultivation is also impossible in most of the Bali Aga villages situated on the northeastern coast, though the reason for this is lack of water rather than climate. 348 Notes to Pages 16–26 6. The cultivation of coffee for export was initially encouraged by Chinese traders and then expanded significantly and forcibly under Dutch colonial administration . Large clove plantations were later added, with encouragement from the Indonesian government, to supply a growing clove cigarette (B.I. kretek) industry . Many of these plantations have since disappeared, their trees felled in anger by local farmers as clove prices began to plunge. Farmers blame this disaster on a government-supported cartel in the kretek industry that was able to dictate the market price. Reliance on cash crops has generally created a vulnerability to price fluctuations in global markets but also a certain resilience to major downturns in national economic cycles. Highland farmers, for example, were not affected negatively by Indonesia’s recent economic crisis as a steep rise in international coffee prices (especially in rupiah terms) offset cost increases due to local inflation. 7. The national government has made a strong effort to provide basic health care and education to people in the highlands of Bali and elsewhere. Local population growth reflects a declining infant mortality rate and an increasing life expectancy due to better health care, hygiene, and a more steady food supply, where epidemics and famine were once common. Nevertheless, living conditions are still harsh in many mountain villages. Local participation in national family-planning schemes (B.I. keluarga berencana), which promote the idea that “two children are enough,” may eventually lead to a decline...