Preface

239
In depriving Balinese of history, the contributors to the time debate
have denied Balinese the capacity to be active, critical subjects, 193 a theme
borne out by how several of the same commentators have represented
Balinese personhood. In Person, time, and conduct in Bali, Geertz took it
that a description of Balinese personal names as ‘orders of persondefinition’
(1973f: 368) is adequate and sufficient to establish ‘the
meaningful structure of [their] experience’ (1973f: 364). His aim was ‘a
scientific phenomenology of culture’ which would determine ‘the
conceptual structure embodied in the symbolic forms through which
persons are perceived’ (1973f: 364). Geertz’s immanent object of study –
concepts, structures, symbols – is timeless, ahistorical and most unsuited to
the task of articulating changing practices, not least because of the nature of
his transcendent object, culture. Indeed the notion of ‘symbol’ with its fan
of ultimately inexpressible meanings (Todorov 1982: 189-98) is what
hermeneuts do to signs when they wrench them from their situations of use
and let them dissolve gently under the patient scholarly gaze. Geertz set
out with the archaeological, if not indeed forensic, presupposition (see
Chapter 2 above) that an interpretive method could discern through recently
disembodied symbolic forms the underlying conceptual structure of
Balinese personhood independent of actual usage. Apart from shooting
himself in the head by using a western common-sense notion of names and
ignoring rather elegant Balinese epistemological practices (see Hobart
1995), Geertz assumed that ideas of personhood reduce to names. Further,
he, Geertz, knew what the meaning really was. He presumed Balinese to
be incapable of talking about, reflecting on, still less changing their
practices of naming. In other words, to the extent that they are agents or
193 The term ‘subject’ is deeply ambiguous and I use it here merely for simplicity, because
it links with existing academic discourses. The problem is that the term conflates a whole
range of different kinds of usage. At one time or another, it has been used ontologically of
an underlying substance (or substrate) and so of which of which all other entities are
predicated but which is itself not predicated of anything else. So classically, it is the
subject of predication. This easily becomes confused with the logical and grammatical
subject. Apart from that people are political subjects, and partly related to this, they may
also be ethical subjects. These usages are relatively simple however compared to the
complexities surrounding humans as philosophical subjects. For Descartes, the subject
was a thinking thing or substance. For Kant, it was ‘the ground of thought’ and so selfconstituting.
For Hegel, it is what can contain its own contradiction within itself. You
will note that the whole discussion is couched within the terms of a particular European
philosophical debate and pays no attention to other ways of imagining humans. For
instance, Indian Samkhya has elaborated philosophical accounts of the subject, popular
Balinese versions of which I discuss in Chapters 2,3 & 7. (For a discussion of
philosophical Samkhya, see Larson 1987.). For these reasons I prefer to make use of the
notion of agency, which has the additional advantage that some analyses (e.g.
Collingwood 1942; Inden 1990) are reasonably commensurable with how Balinese talk
about such issues.