Preface

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meaningful integration’ ([1957] 1973h: 145; on the pervasiveness
of this dichotomy in Geertz’s writings on Bali, see Guermonprez
1990). More fundamentally, the narrative genre within which he
is writing is secular. Geertz does not and cannot recognize, still
less take seriously, the possibility that those he writes about do not
treat power and its management as ultimately purely secular
matters (nor for that matter, ultimately religious or ‘mystical’
either, the mistake which Anderson makes). As Margaret Wiener
has cogently argued (1995a), Balinese distinguish the world for
purposes of action into what is manifest, sakala, and so, in
principle, more or less knowable, and what is not manifest,
niskala. What one can know with any certainty about events
which are niskala is limited. So, from the point of view of
humans, what is niskala commonly appears as contingent, in the
sense that it irrupts in the manifest world at times in unexpected,
unpredictable and partly uncontrollable ways. To the extent that
religion provides a way of conceiving of powers and processes
which humans incompletely understand (Burridge 1969), one way
in which you can consider rites is as practices aimed at engaging
such powers and processes. 206 There is precious little in common
between Geertz’s rendition of that timeless and imaginary unitary
entity ‘the traditional Balinese state’ and Balinese understandings
of their own past and present practices. Just how far must the
analyst’s interpretation directly contradict the understandings of
the people in question before the interpretation becomes suspect?
Imagined communication
Let me briefly dispense with the notion of ritual as it is usually
understood by anthropologists. Another distinguished
anthropologist, Stanley Tambiah, some years ago invoked a notion
of ritual (1985) which, whatever the disagreement over details,
shares much in common with Clifford Geertz (1966) and yet
another distinguished anthropologist, Maurice Bloch (1989). In
the finest traditions of academic essentializing and hegemony,
they all presume to give us a universal account of what ritual is
and what it does, independent of all cultural or historically
206 I avoid the word ‘control’ here, both for reasons discussed in Hobart (1990a), and
because in this context it falls into the trap of seeing contingencies as something
exclusively negative and dangerous to be contained, limited, bound, rather than as
opportunities to achieve the otherwise impossible, something new, something different.