Preface

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transcendental agent – wobbled along merrily until it not so much collapsed
in the face of superior Dutch firepower as it was finally liberated from the
vulgarities of power to attain its apotheosis as pure simulacrum. Such a
representation of people as passive subjects of their own collective
representations is not peculiar to Bali of course. It underpins orientalism
and anthropology as the study of collective representations or culture
equally. Bali’s task in the grand world division of the Other is to exemplify
a particular aesthetic cul-de-sac of the human condition.
Should you think I exaggerate, consider this quotation from Clifford
Geertz’s Negara:
The stupendous cremations, tooth filings, temple dedications,
pilgrimages, and blood sacrifices, mobilizing hundreds and even
thousands of people and great quantities of wealth, were not means to
political ends: they were the ends themselves, they were what the state
was for. Court ceremonialism was the driving force of court politics;
and mass ritual was not a device to shore up the state, but rather the
state, even in its final gasp, was a device for the enactment of mass
ritual. Power served pomp, not pomp power (1980: 13).
Nor was this depiction of a brief, if gloriously self-absorbed, moment.
Geertz continues:
The scale of things varied, and their brilliance, as well as the details of
their immediate expression. But not, as far as I can see, between, say,
1343 [the conquest by Majapahit] and 1906 [the conquest by the Dutch],
what they were all about (1980: 134, my parentheses) 162
The drawback of this beguiling image is that it bears precious little
relationship to Balinese, their neighbours’, travellers’ and, later, Dutch
accounts of what was going on. It is hard to square, for instance, with the
scope of Balinese military activities at different times, both within the
island in the depredations of Gusti Panji Sakti of Bulèlèng, and beyond in
the Balinese involvement in the slave trade and conquest.
What is involved in Geertz’s grand, if idiosyncratic, vision of
Balinese history as a series of tableaux vivants? For a start he chose to
eschew the dreary business of investigating the sources which exist and
critically evaluating them, a task he left to later intellectual under-labourers
162 Unless stated otherwise, all italics and parentheses are in the original quotations. I am
grateful to Ron Inden, Margaret Wiener and Linda Connor who was the reader for RIMA,
where this chapter first appeared, for very helpful critical comments on the draft of this
chapter.