Staying Local in the Global Village : Bali in the Twentieth Century

One of the world's most intensively studied societies, Bali has hosted scholars and writers as renowned as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Miguel Covarrubias, Fred Barth, and Hildred and Clifford Geertz. __Staying Local in the Global Village__ is part of a continuing tradition in which Balinese and foreign scholars reflect on the processes of transformation that link Bali to Indonesia and the world beyond. The chapters in this volume are based on research carried out in the early 1990s, when Suharto's New Order still enjoyed widespread legitimacy in Indonesia. Even then, political consensus in Bali was weakened by the inhabitants' view of themselves as an exploited minority of Hindus in a nation dominated by Islamic Javanese. As this book reveals, the ambivalent positioning of Balinese vis-à-vis the national and the global in recent decades has been played out in many different spheres of life. Contributors take up a number of themes that reflect different articulations of the local throughout the twentieth century. Early chapters provide a bird's-eye view of the public culture, local history, definitions of "Balinese-ness," and political struggles over land and sacred space. Later chapters explore specific aspects of Balinese participation in the transformations associated with the tourism-dominated provincial economy, the growth of communications and mass media, and the incursions of the nation-state trough its imperatives of economic development and rationalist discourses. New forms of traditional hegemony, status struggles over the priesthood, contestation about cultural authenticity by marginal groups within the island itself, women's work, the performing arts, and television watching, are all considered in this light, providing a highly nuanced and "local" perspective of global processes in Bali. **Contributors:** Linda Connor, Mark Hobart, Brett Hough, Graeme MacRae, Ayami Nakatani, Michel Picard, I Gde Pitana, Thomas Reuter, Raechelle Rubinstein, Putu Suasta, Margaret Wiener

Imagining the Course of Life offers a rich portrait of rural life in contemporary Southeast Asia and an accessible introduction to the complexities of Theravada Buddhism as it is actually lived and experienced. It is both an ethnography of indigenous views of human development and a theoretical consideration of how any ethnopsychology is embedded in society and culture. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a Shan village in northern Thailand, Nancy Eberhardt illustrates how indigenous theories of the life course are connected to local constructions of self and personhood. In the process, she draws our attention to contrasting models in the Euro-American tradition and invites us to reconsider how we think about the trajectory of a human life.

Moving beyond the entrenched categories that can hamper our understanding of other views, Imagining the Course of Life demonstrates the real-life connections between the "religious" and the "psychological." Eberhardt shows how such beliefs and practices are used, sometimes strategically, in people's constructions of themselves, in their interpretations of others' behavior, and in their attempts at social positioning. Individual chapters explore Shan ideas about the overall course of human development, from infancy to old age and beyond, and show how these ideas inform people’s understanding of personhood and maturity, gender and social inequality, illness and well-being, emotions and mental health.

Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments A Note on Spelling Introduction Chapter 1. The Discourse of Kebalian: Transcultural Constructions of Balinese Identity Chapter 2. Making Local History in New Order Bali: Public Culture and the Politics of the Past Chapter 3. Democratic Mobilization and Political Authoritarianism: Tourism Developments in Bali Chapter 4. Acting Global, Thinking Local in a Balinese Tourist Town Chapter 5. People of the Mountains, People of the Sea: Negotiating the Local and the Foreign in Bali Chapter 6. Status Struggles and the Priesthood in Contemporary Bali Chapter 7. “Eating Threads”: Brocades as Cash Crop for Weaving Mothers and Daughters in Bali Chapter 8. Education for the Performing Arts: Contesting and Mediating Identity in Contemporary Bali Chapter 9. The End of the World News: Articulating Television in Bali Glossary References Contributors Index