Preface

266
complex, differentiated agent. It is not the prince alone who is the
agent that organizes the dedication of the temple. As the play
makes clear, it is never even conceived that the prince could do
this without the dedicated activity of his wife, his close retainers
and lesser local functionaries, here represented by a village head
and an old villager. This last is from a lineage whose hereditary
job it is to oversee and take on key tasks (ngukuhin, to make the
work firm, solid). Similarly, in this play as in others, the servants
are not mere mouthpieces of the prince, but are partly agents in
their own right in elaborating and developing statements made by
the prince. The puzzle is less about the strange nature of Balinese
(and, by extension, other South East Asian and ‘oriental’ ideas) of
leadership and power than it is about why anthropologists are so
determined to foist a strange and distinctly ethnocentric idea of
agency upon their subjects of study. 224
Just before the extract begins, the two servants asked the prince
what they should do in order that their lives should not be wasted.
He replied that they should praise God. Wijil took this as referring
to two things. First, one should not to be dilatory when taking part
in the work for religious festivals. Second, one should not listen
to the sort of people who say that making a living is more
important than performing rites. (From what I can judge, this is
less a reference to any organized contemporary secularism in Bali
than it is to the recognized danger of peoples’ effort going
increasingly into making money with the massive growth of the
tourist and art industries.) The centrality of God is absolute and
the success of all activities hinges upon this. Besides devotion to
Divinity, humans should perform acts of offering. 225 The prince
referred to rites to demons or the elements, and to the dead. The
Panasar and Wijil specified what this was using immediate
examples, which had taken place during the previous week. The
most important was Panca Wali Krama, a very large set of rites
held in the ‘central temple’ of Besakih as a preamble to
224
The vision of the individual-as-agent has, of course, a long history of (ritual?)
celebration, exemplified nicely by that most American of culture industries, Hollywood,
where complex historical and social processes are reduced to, and identified with, the
actions of heroes. The extraordinary closure and narrative simplification necessary to
credit a single individual with agency over world-historical processes continues to
permeate supposedly impartial academic judgement.
225 Of the five kinds of yadnya, apart from those to Divinity (déwayadnya), there are also
resiyadnya, rites for priests (not discussed here); pitrayadnya, rites for the dead;
butayadnya, rites to demons or element(al)s; and lastly manusayadnya, rites for the living.