Preface

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Along with this detemporalizing goes a pervasive
essentializing. In a few broad brush strokes Boon encapsulates the
entire range of Balinese textual practices, past and present in all
their diversity, and evaluates the lot as not involving exegesis
‘proper’ or ‘in the strict sense’. As very little has been written on
his one example, text-reading groups – and what has recently (e.g.
Rubinstein 1992) undermines his argument – Boon is on shaky
ground here. It is doubly insecure in that Balinese read and
comment on a whole range of kinds of work for different purposes
on different occasions (Hobart 1990b; Wiener 1995a, 1995b).
Anyway, in my experience works are performed in theatre far
more often than they are read. Are we to narrow the definition of
text to exclude these? If not, what is Boon’s evidence for his
assertion? There are less than a handful of translations of
performances and no detailed account of Balinese commentaries,
whether by the actors or audiences. Instead of evidence, we are
offered another familiar preinterpretation, with a long genealogy:
Balinese are ritualistic and, if not incapable of, quite uninterested
in ‘neutralized’, let alone critical, commentary. Were they to, not
only would Boon have to take account of them, but his variety of
exegesis would be dead in the water. Therefore Balinese do not.
To succeed in ignoring so much of what is evidently happening
suggests quite how important preinterpretation is to much
anthropological analysis.
Keeping distance
For all its claim to a radical new insight into Bali,
anthropological hermeneutics reproduces earlier approaches to a
surprising extent. For instance, Geertz reiterates and even makes
central to his whole vision the increasingly rancid old chestnut that
Balinese avoid climax (Bateson and Mead 1942; Bateson 1949).
As Jensen and Suryani have pointed out (1992: 93-104), the whole
argument is implausible and rests on all sorts of preconceptions. 145
We all preinterpret in varying degree. But this implies neither that
our preinterpretations are of the same kind, nor that we cannot
criticize them or learn better. For this reason, the excuse that all
145 When Balinese are permitted to speak for themselves a quite different picture emerges.
For instance, the Gaguritan Padem Warak (the song of killing of the rhinoceros, translated
by Vickers 1991) depicts a ‘ritual’ in terms we would by most accounts consider to be
sustained and repeated climaxes.