Custodians of the Sacred Mountains: Culture and Society in the Highlands of Bali

Introduction

INTRODUCTION This book offers a journey into the world of the Bali Aga, or Mountain Balinese. It tells of a people whose culture for centuries has been shrouded in the shadow of the more celebrated lowland kingdoms of southern Bali. In this interlocal ethnographic account of the elaborate alliance systems of the Bali Aga, highland Balinese culture and society is explored for the first time in all its regional complexity. I hope in this book to convey a deeper appreciation of the Bali Aga people and their place in the fabric of Balinese identities and to contribute to a radical reassessment of prevailing assumptions about the political history, society, and culture of this island. The story of the Bali Aga people further raises important issues about the process and politics of cross-cultural representation in the social sciences and in the world at large. Bali is renowned as a magical window on Indonesia’s classical history , when Hindu empires still dominated what is now the world’s most populous Muslim nation. In anthropology, Bali has become a test case for new methods of research and theoretical approaches, and to a wider public the island is familiar as a major international tourist destination. Although tiny compared to some of its neighbors, the island of Bali stands out like a beacon of singular significance from the vastness of the Indonesian archipelago (Map 1). Balinese culture has been subject to ethnographic scrutiny and reflection like few other cultures in the world. Well-known anthropologists of every generation have contributed to a deeper understanding of Balinese society and thus of human societies in general. From the culture and personality studies of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson to the hermeneutics of Clifford Geertz, shifting currents in Balinese studies have provided an excellent indication of shifting currents in anthropological theory. With the case study of Bali at the focus of Western attention for so long, one could be excused for assuming Map 1. Indonesia Introduction 3 that further ethnographic research is unlikely to produce major surprises or new discoveries. There is one fundamental reason why such an assumption would be incorrect. Tall and brightly lit beacons of culture tend to cast particularly long and impenetrable shadows. As it captured ever more attention from outside observers, the courtly society of southern Bali became synonymous with Bali as a whole. At the same time, the world of highland Balinese culture became almost invisible, like a distant planet concealed by the brightness of its star. In popular and ethnographic representations alike, Bali’s mountainous center marks the margins of understanding. “Representation” is fundamental to the enterprise of writing ethnography and also highly problematic for the epistemology of social science. A recent debate in anthropology has focused on the question of whether ethnographers as particular “subjects” are capable of producing reliable, let alone objective, portrayals of cultural others. Many critics have suggested that ethnographic representations written by positioned researchers are subject to bias and not to be trusted. In response to the fact that the Bali Aga are indeed misrepresented or ignored in most of the academic literature on Bali and in recognition of this general crisis of representation in anthropology and other branches of cross-cultural studies, I have made representation a central theme in this book. My conjecture is that cross-cultural representation is a necessary and legitimate enterprise after all, under certain conditions. In support of this argument, I have taken a significant departure from the rather gloomy perspective on representational knowledge systems that has become a characteristic of postcolonial and postmodernist approaches by challenging some of the basic assumptions informing the current debate and crisis of representation in the social sciences. Most important, I argue that resource competition is not the defining force in social or cross-cultural encounters among human subjects and, hence, that the subjectivity of individual representers is neither a foundation nor an insurmountable obstacle to the accomplishment of genuine cross-cultural understanding. The problem of representation became the focus of a perpetual debate in the social sciences as Western scholars engaged in the study of other cultures began to acknowledge that their academic disciplines had originated in a period of European history marked by rapid colonial expansion and that the knowledge generated within these disciplines had served as a motor to the mechanics of Western domination from the beginning. In the course of my research in the 4 Introduction highlands...