Perfect order Lansing, J. Stephen; Lansing, J. Stephen
2012., 20120916, 2012, 2006, 2006-01-01, 20060101, Letnik:
11
eBook
Along rivers in Bali, small groups of farmers meet regularly in water temples to manage their irrigation systems. They have done so for a thousand years. Over the centuries, water temple networks ...have expanded to manage the ecology of rice terraces at the scale of whole watersheds. Although each group focuses on its own problems, a global solution nonetheless emerges that optimizes irrigation flows for everyone. Did someone have to design Bali's water temple networks, or could they have emerged from a self-organizing process?
Perfect Order--a groundbreaking work at the nexus of conservation, complexity theory, and anthropology--describes a series of fieldwork projects triggered by this question, ranging from the archaeology of the water temples to their ecological functions and their place in Balinese cosmology. Stephen Lansing shows that the temple networks are fragile, vulnerable to the cross-currents produced by competition among male descent groups. But the feminine rites of water temples mirror the farmers' awareness that when they act in unison, small miracles of order occur regularly, as the jewel-like perfection of the rice terraces produces general prosperity. Much of this is barely visible from within the horizons of Western social theory.
The fruit of a decade of multidisciplinary research, this absorbing book shows that even as researchers probe the foundations of cooperation in the water temple networks, the very existence of the traditional farming techniques they represent is threatened by large-scale development projects.
"The glossy guide book image of Bali is of a timeless paradise whose people are devoutly religious and artistically gifted. However, a hundred years of colonialism, war and Indonesian independence, ...and tourism have produced both modernizing changes and created an image of Bali as 'traditional'.
Incorporating up-to-date ethnographic field work the book investigates the myriad of ways in which the Balinese has responded to the influx of outside influence. The book focuses on the fascinating interrelationship between tourism, economy, culture and religion in Bali, painting a twenty-first century picture of the Balinese. In documenting these diverse changes Howe critically assesses some of the work of Bali's most famous ethnographer, Clifford Geertz and demonstrates the importance of a historically grounded and broadly contextualized approach to the analysis of a complex society."
In recent years, girls' and mixed-gender ensembles have challenged the tradition of male-dominated gamelan performance. The change heralds a fundamental shift in how Balinese think about gender roles ...and the gender behavior taught in children's music education. It also makes visible a national reorganization of the arts taking place within debates over issues like women's rights and cultural preservation. Sonja Lynn Downing draws on over a decade of immersive ethnographic work to analyze the ways Balinese musical practices have influenced the processes behind these dramatic changes. As Downing shows, girls and young women assert their agency within the gamelan learning process to challenge entrenched notions of performance and gender. One dramatic result is the creation of new combinations of femininity, musicality, and Balinese identity that resist messages about gendered behavior from the Indonesian nation-state and beyond. Such experimentation expands the accepted gender aesthetics of gamelan performance but also sparks new understanding of the role children can and do play in ongoing debates about identity and power.
This book investigates tourism as a form of globalization within the context of the island of Bali. The authors analyse crisis management with regard to the Bali bombings, examine the impact of the ...bombings on the tourism development cycle and investigate the motives of the bombers. They argue that the actions of the bombers can best be understood with regard to the rise of political Islam as a global issue and the book breaks new ground with an analysis of the bombers' global experiences. Home-grown resistance to certain aspects of globalization is also examined, notably the attempt to turn Besakih, the island's mother temple, into a World Heritage Site and top tourist destination.
In Storytelling in Bali, Hildred Geertz analyzes over 200 texts of popular stories dictated in 1936 by the painters of Batuan, Bali. The tales reveal strong ambivalences in the tellers regarding the ...magical powers of kings, priests and healers.
This ethnographic book deals with the emergence of the Wali Pitu (seven saints) tradition and Muslim pilgrimage in Bali, Indonesia. It touches upon the issues of translocal connectivity between Java ...and Bali, Islam-Hindu relationship, relations between Muslim groups, and questions of authority and authenticity of saint worship tradition. It offers a new perspective on Bali, seeing the island as a site of cultural motion straddling in between Islam and Hinduism with complexities of local figurations, and belongings of ‘Muslim Balinese’. The study also urges the intricate relationship between religion and tourism, between devotion and economy, and shows that the Wali Pitu tradition has facilitated the transgression of spatial and cultural boundaries.
Bali is an island that always attracts tourists with its beauty. This natural beauty makes Bali always succeed as an interesting topic to discuss. Apart from its natural beauty, poetry about Bali is ...also interesting to research. “Malam Pengantin di Pesisir Serangan” is a poem that explains the condition of Serangan Beach in 1997. This poem, created by Wayan Sunarta, tries to express environmental criticism firmly through the choice of diction. The social criticism in this poem describes two interesting things to study, namely Serangan Beach with its naturalness and Serangan Beach with its modernity. This research uses Riffaterre’s semiotic theory by focusing on the process of interpreting poetry in heuristic and hermeneutic reading. Heuristic reading is the first stage of reading in understanding poetry. At this stage, the poem is read following the rules of the language. After that, hermeneutic reading, namely the process of interpreting poetry using literary conventions.
Wayang kulit, or shadow puppetry, connects a mythic
past to the present through public ritual performance and is one of
most important performance traditions in Bali. The dalang,
or puppeteer, is ...revered in Balinese society as a teacher and
spiritual leader. Recently, women have begun to study and perform
in this traditionally male role, an innovation that has triggered
resistance and controversy.
In Women in the Shadows, Jennifer Goodlander draws on
her own experience training as a dalang as well as interviews with
early women dalang and leading artists to upend the usual
assessments of such gender role shifts. She argues that rather than
assuming that women performers are necessarily mounting a challenge
to tradition, "tradition" in Bali must be understood as a system of
power that is inextricably linked to gender hierarchy.
She examines the very idea of "tradition" and how it forms both
an ideological and social foundation in Balinese culture.
Ultimately, Goodlander offers a richer, more complicated
understanding of both tradition and gender in Balinese society.
Following in the footsteps of other eminent reflexive
ethnographies, Women in the Shadows will be of value to
anyone interested in performance studies, Southeast Asian culture,
or ethnographic methods.
