Preface

94
own presuppositions is also a first step away from a pervasive
ethnocentrism which scholarly studies may subtly perpetuate by
searching for an essence, at worst imported outright, at best by
reifying what happens among the people with whom they work.
Despite – or even because of – the amount of research on Bali,
how little we know is becoming clear. The plethora of
unexamined, but relevant, indigenous treatises and the degree of
local variation alone suggest that generalizations are pretty
spurious. Much of the material has reported assertions in
particular situations as fact, and fact as truth. What we have
mostly is a smattering of textual sources, partial dynastic
chronicles and legal codes, the opinions of well-informed
informants (priests, headmen, and marginal men; but rarely
women) taken out of context and mapped onto nebulous
paradigms of Western intellectual history, without regard for
Balinese epistemological criteria. Balinese culture remains largely
an invention of its commentators. There is much in Daniel
Heinsius of Ghent’s motto:
How much there is that we do not know!
Afterthoughts
In taking issue with some of the presuppositions we borrow to
account for other peoples’ doings, I am only hinting at the tip of
an iceberg. When scholars extrapolate a set of symbols, or when
they describe another culture in terms of how people there
‘construct’ or ‘negotiate’ their culture, what precisely are they
doing? Is the implication that the existence of symbols or
evidence of negotiation explains why people do what they do? To
assume this would be to import further presuppositions of our
own, about the relation of collective representations and events,
about the relation of thought and action, and ideas about what
constitutes an explanation which are far from fixed but a matter of
our own cultural fashion. The explanation of action is a
notoriously tricky business (see Anscombe 1957; White 1968).
The sheer difficulties in providing an account of ordinary
everyday behaviour in terms of the available models of intention,
reason, cause and motive, suggests the potential weaknesses of our
own ideas and another good reason not to impose them on others.