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Afterword I stopped in at Pura Désa Batuan in July 2000 to check a few last details, and I met the latest bendésa. A young man, he was yet another art shop owner, a relative of I Regug. He said he remembered watching me taking notes in the temple and talking with his uncle when he was a schoolboy. He readily gave me permission to take some more photos and then asked me to help him make a brochure in English to hand out to tourists. He had read an article I had published in 1986 in the Bali Post about the way Pura Désa Batuan had been in 1022 b.c. in a scrapbook that I Regug had made in 1986.1 When he asked me to write the brochure, I remembered how various Batuan people had remarked to me that my publications would make good promotion material for the tourists, and the thought reminded me that tourists’ eyes must have been much on the minds of the makers, at least in the 1980s, if not in the 1930s. On that day in July 2000 the temple was sparkling with new bright colors and gilt paint and busy with people , even though no ceremony was in the offing. It seemed to me to be a triumphant vanquishing of the devastations of time—earthquakes, fungus, mold, tropical storms, and searing sun. Groups of tourists wandered through, dressed in sarongs and sashes rented to them by the temple committee, brought in by buses on their way to the big art shops on Batuan’s main road. Pura Désa Batuan had become in two decades a major tourist destination. At the time I began this research on the temple in 1983, tourists were brought to Pura Désa Batuan only during ritual festivals to watch the preparations, worship , and dances. There were none there at other times, and the temple itself was not yet painted up, looking in its quiet dustiness like most other temples in Bali. I stressed in the first part of this book that the carvings and architectural forms were made for the pleasuring of the niskala beings of Batuan, but the events recounted in its second part show clearly that other, human, eyes were also played to. From the early 1920s, when the whole spatial orientation of the temple was shifted toward the main road where traffic from other villages passed daily, to the 1980s, when monumental statues were erected straddling that road, the makers themselves were thinking also of viewers coming along it to Batuan from neighboring villages and court centers , of political leaders and even perhaps of foreign tourists. Niskala beings remain, of course, the main audience for most of the makers. In the absence of institutions for the explicit expression of critical opinions—either theological or secular—the makers of the temple have had to rely on their own imaginations and convictions to decide what would appeal to these various human and nonhuman populations. Without such critical apparatuses , the audience responses of the tourists or neighboring villagers, no more than the deities, could not be known. The makers of the temple, as before, have to rely on their own conceptions of the desires and pleasures of the viewers. What their imagined viewers might want is still, potentially , a subject for difference or even controversy. Indications are that grounds for argument of the sort that surfaced in the 1950s and 1960s between the commoners and the Triwangsa continue to exist. Newspaper reports in late 2001 showed that the hegemony of the Brahmana priests at the provincial level was now being challenged in the name of “democracy.”2 A layman , rather than a Brahmana priest, was chosen as head of the executive body of the Parisada Hindu Darma council, the quasi-governmental director of all theological schools. Recommendations to the new council included one that asked for provision of services to all elements of the Hindu community regardless of sect, caste, or school of thought, implying that certain elements have been in the past undemocratically excluded. Another one asked for an elimination of the “caste system ,” which here meant giving up various privileges of the Brahmana priests, notably their authority over local rituals, and allowing certain commoner heads of sects a measure of temple authority. The Hindu Dharma doctrines of cosmic harmony and of stone images as metaphoric of rather than direct stand-ins for niskala beings, which never were...

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