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C H A P T E R O N E A Temple and an Anthropologist The evening of the first full day I spent in Batuan, a large village in south Bali, I was taken to see a dance performance at the temple of the village (Pura Désa) by four girls from the household in which I had rented a room. The temple was on a slight rise on the northern edge of the village, on a dirt road with food-peddlers’ stalls along it, strung with dim, bare-bulbed electric lights and kerosene lanterns. A large cement-floored, tile-roofed, open dance pavilion stood outside the gate of the temple. When we arrived the show had already begun in the pavilion, which was large enough to hold the dancers and musicians and also the audience, standing and sitting around its edges, crowding in along its wall-less sides. There were old women and young matrons with babies, middle-aged men standing on the outside, children darting across the performing floor. The young people, including the teenagers I was with, sauntered around the outside, ogling and giggling and teasing one another, sometimes stopping to watch the performance. The masked kings and warriors and comic servants twirled and posed with grand style. The intricate music wound around us all, alternately clanging and tinkling. There had been rituals all that day in Pura Désa Batuan , but no one had told me about them. I looked curiously across the road at the tall, split gate of the temple looming there in the dark. I did not yet know that I was going to study it. There were a few people going in and out through the gate, some women carrying offerings on their heads, several white-dressed priests, the everpresent roaming dogs. I could also see a row of stone statues in front of the temple, each about the size of a child. The statues were clothed in skirts of checked cloth that concealed much of the carving. No one was paying much attention to the statues, and in fact few were watching the dance itself. I asked who the performers were, and the girls named some of our neighbors, then stopped for a while and followed the show, laughing at the ribald comic routines of the clowns and critically commenting on the technique of the dancers. They turned away from the play again, pulled at by a trio of young men who teased them with a sharp insolence that seemed out of place. There was an underlying tension palpably present among these young people. The boys were commoners, but the girls of my family were gentry—distant relatives of a king who once reigned in Gianyar, now a bustling town some fifteen kilometers from Batuan. I had only that morning, in June 1982, begun to learn about the nasty rupture in the community in the 1960s, when all the gentry families of Batuan had been forcibly evicted from membership in this temple. As nobles , my family were now outsiders to Pura Désa Batuan , never allowed to pray there. While the veneer of civility that is required of all Balinese remained always strong, underneath I could sense powerful angers at work between these commoner boys and noble girls. Several years later, when I finally put together all the details of the controversy, I was surprised to learn that the major divisive events had occurred at least twenty years previously, before the young people I was with were born. Pura Désa Batuan continued to be important in the consciousness of the evicted gentry of the village. They had since built their own pura désa, but, at least in the late 1980s, many still set out offerings within their family temples to the deities of the old Pura Désa, who for them remain the guardians of the gumi or “realm” of Batuan. The girls had gone up to the temple not to worship but to enjoy the show of the top éng dance. Even though we were not actually going to enter the temple, we wore ceremonial dress as carefully attractive as if we were coming to meet the divine beings , for, since it was the time of the temple festival, those deities themselves were there among us, also enjoying the performance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I had chosen to study in Batuan not because of its temple but for its school of painting. In the 1930s, a group of young...

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