Preface

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embracing of ritual and refusal of reason could not, of course, last
and, with magnificent hindsight, Geertz is able to explain how
Balinese states were unable to stand up to political will and might
of the modern Dutch. What there was was not enough to survive.
(The argument does rather less well at explaining how Bali ran
successful slaving and colonial polities, or withstood the Dutch for
so long.)
Geertz’s conclusion should not be taken to suggest that he is
attempting to transcend the dichotomies of the expressive versus
the instrumental, nor the symbolic versus the real. The book’s
structure moves, as Geertz’s programme makes clear, from ‘the
hard surfaces of life – with the political, economic, stratificatory
realities within which men are everywhere contained’ (1973c: 30)
to what rests on them. The fulcrum by means of which Geertz
proposes to shift our vision of the Balinese polity, the implicit
criterion according to which he contrasts the traditional Balinese
state to modern western polities (as if these shared a common
essence) remains firmly reason. Just as they have literally become
in the tourist trade, Balinese are reduced to waiters at the papal
feast of reason and the flow of soul of what was once their lives.
On at least one Balinese account, ‘ritual’, if one must use the
word, is a very effective means of articulating different and partly
irreconcilable groups, interests and ideas about the nature and
working of power in the world and beyond. The ruler, or better
the court, was not the passive instantiation of a transcendental
ideal, but a complex agent in the continual reworking of the polity
(on complex agency, see Hobart 1990b; Inden 1990: 22-36). Far
from being a timeless ideal world, in which anything that did not
fit their closed vision had to be reinterpreted as part of the pattern,
ignored, ‘mystified’ or drowned out through the voice of endlessly
repeated ceremonial, ritual provided a frame of reference and
action, through which rulers and their polities organized their
lives, and addressed uncertainties and contingencies. I take it
however that there is no single encompassing interpretation, to
which all Balinese subscribed, but different, potentially
contradictory accounts on different occasions. What interests me
particularly is how the past is brought into service to comment on
the present, here the New Order régime of President Soeharto. So
I shall consider in some detail one theatre play, which is
reasonably typical of what was being broadcast on local television
and performed in theatre at the end of the 1980s, in part because