The Life of a Balinese Temple: Artistry, Imagination and History in a Peasant Village (review)

In this remarkably original book, simultaneously a work of socio-political, cultural, and art history, Hildred Geertz explores transformations in Bali over time by focusing on a particular architectural object: Batuan Village Temple (Pura Desa Batuan). Although this temple, like most in Bali, appears venerably ancient, an expression of unchanging tradition, Geertz demonstrates how such structures are continually renovated, amended, and re-imagined as well as preserved. Through a study of the production and use of stone carvings — the bas reliefs and statues adorning the temple's myriad altars, walls, and gates — the book addresses fundamental issues as well in the anthropology of art. The result is a brilliant account of processes of cultural production from 1917 to the present, and, to some extent, extending into a more distant, less accessible, past.

As Geertz notes, anthropologists conventionally treat particular things or events as a means to learn about values or social relations, while art historians typically focus on the singular as a manifestation of creative vision. Geertz combines these approaches by attending both to individual works (discussing how, when, and by whom they were made, as well as how local actors speak of and use them) and to the forms of life with which they are entangled.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first, "Work," Geertz introduces the temple and the village, and discusses the fieldwork on which the study is based before tackling the various activities through which villagers engage with the temple, making use of its "spaces and structures." Geertz's main concern here is to highlight multiple forms of relevant work, playing on the Balinese karya, "to work", which encompasses both large rituals (involving the presentation of offerings and prayers) and corporeal and social labour on communal structures such as temples (erecting temporary and permanent structures, serving on committees, performing, and carving statues). Geertz argues that ritual occasions provide crucial "interpretive frames" for understanding the carvings. Focusing on the "work" done at this particular temple also allows Geertz to present contending cosmological and social positions. These include the plural cosmologies relevant to contemporary Balinese, especially those of the Hindu Dharma movement (which treats divinities as abstract and Indic symbols of general cosmic forces) and those of ritual practice (in which they appear as spatially located actors who wreak natural and social havoc if ignored). Socially, work around the temple includes the forging and dissolving of political alliances, through which some residents came to be excluded from temple membership.

In Part Two, "Works," Geertz addresses individual shrines and decorative elements, the material forms Europeans would most identify as art. She traces the emergence of today's temple over time by focusing on the actual carvings one by one, more or less in the order each was made. Geertz not only attends to who commissioned and made each artifact (where discoverable) and the human and economic resources available for such projects, but also presents what people told her about specific pieces. At the same time she embeds her discussion in local, regional, and provincial history: we see the temple taking material shape simultaneously with political, cultural, and economic networks. Thus Geertz tacks between approaches familiar from art history, treating each work as the expression of skilled innovation by its makers, and those familiar from anthropology. Particular acts of modifying the temple speak to conflicts between village factions and between the village and agents such as the princes of Gianyar, colonial administrators, and Indonesian bureaucrats. Thus the temple's modern-day appearance not only derives from its function as a place where human agency is extended through alliances with non-humans, but also indexes struggles within and beyond the village. Five of the chapters in this section address particular historical periods (pre-colonial Bali, the colonial regime, the struggle for Indonesian independence, the New Order nation-state, and contemporary tourism). An important additional chapter elaborates...