Preface

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great deal of what had happened in the village and assessing its
reliability. 158
History for what?
The second example was about a dispute over who owned a
temple with extensive rice lands (see Hobart 1990). A senior
prince of a powerful dynasty had been invited to repair two
ancient masks in the temple in question. On learning that there
was a dispute over who should take care of the temple, he said that
his family chronicle had details on how the temple was founded.
A meeting of senior people in the village decided it would be
useful to know what was written there to see if it were relevant.
(There was a conflict of vested interests, but that is not directly
germane to what follows.) The prince agreed to witness the
reading and, on the appointed day, arrived with a large entourage,
including the island’s most famous writer of such dynastic
chronicles (babad). A local man was enlisted to read the relevant
part of the manuscript, which was in kawi, while the writer
translated it (ngartiang) into high Balinese. My concern here
though is not with what was read, but with its purpose. It had
nothing to do with being ‘another ingredient of ritual
celebrations’, nor with any ‘play of affinities, analogies, and
contradictions across social forms, performance genres, and ritual
registers’. That is not to say that there was no much of interest to
local intellectuals. However, according to the meeting which
arranged it, the prince, the reader and translator, and the members
of the audience I spoke to afterwards, the purpose was to
determine the relevance of what was written to arguments about
158
In subsequent talk around the village, the key issues were that the
medium had not been tested with fire (kapintonin) to see if he was
conscious (éling) and so play-acting (ngaé-ngaé); and whether anyone
might have leaked details of the past history of the temple. Popular
opinion was that it was unlikely (but unprovable), because it did not
seem to be in the interests of the few who did know.
My diary entry for that day is interesting. The relevant passage
reads: ‘It kept running through my head that this was a good case against
Sperber and Wilson: whether it is mutual knowledge, shared context or
whatever, it certainly isn’t couched in a propositional form which
permits the kind of inference they draw’ (referring to Sperber & Wilson
1982).