Preface

51
again I would ask Indonesian readers: Is this something to which you could
seriously consider subscribing?
In the final chapter, I move away from contrasting anthropologists’ and
Balinese presuppositions to discuss how Balinese articulate the world about
them through theatre. I examine a play performed in the village where I
work and which I discussed at length with interested members of the
audience and also two of the main actors. From their commentaries it was
clear that a central theme was the nature of power and how it should be
exercised. The play was set in the pre-colonial period about which Geertz
wrote in Negara. There is virtually nothing in Negara which sheds much
light on the depiction of pre-conquest Bali. So we are faced to the
conclusion that cultural analysis may imagine a world quite different from
that which a number of distinguished Balinese live in and reflect on. A
central problem for Geertz is that he insists on interpreting using
contemporary American categories. This makes his work appealing and
accessible to the readership that presumably matters to him. As Margaret
Wiener showed in a thoughtful and scholarly analysis of the fall of the
kingdom of Klungkung to the Dutch, Balinese understood what happened
in quite different terms from the Dutch, and from Geertz (1995a). In
Chapter 7, I analyze in some detail excerpts from the play. In so doing, it
becomes clear that the divergences between the categories Geertz uses to
comment on Bali and those Balinese use have so little in common that they
appear to be referring to two quite different islands called Bali. Far from
culture helping us understand other peoples, or them their interrogators, on
a review of the evidence from Bali, culture seems designed to inhibit such
understanding.
A theme of the book as a whole surfaces yet again in Chapter 7. It
is the extent to which people are often articulate intellectuals not just in
thinking about what is going on in their own societies, but recursively
address more general themes, which may require us to reconsider our own
presuppositions. I have made extensive use of the notion of articulation, as
developed by Laclau and Hall. While their aims are to link – or, for
Laclau, to do away with the distinction between – the material and mental,
articulation tends to emerge as a highly abstract idea. By contrast, the
actors in the play stress the extent to which articulation is always specific: it
takes place under particular conditions for particular purposes. And its
success cannot be foretold: it depends on what actually happened. Even
(1996), Nyoman Darma Putra outlined incisive arguments by young Balinese scholars who
criticized the authors (one of whom is herself a distinguished Balinese psychiatrist) among
other things precisely for attributing an entire people with such passivity and
unreflectiveness.