| Within the last century, Bali has shifted from an intensely hierarchical system of eight competing kingdoms to the very different context of inclusion as a province within the Indonesian nation-state. This ongoing process has involved new kinds of political power and reinterpretations of practices, cosmologies, and space. This study analyzes changes in Balinese culture and religion as Bali has shifted from a dynastic to a (trans-) national system, where the very concepts of culture and religion are usefully seen as emergent effects of broader transformations.;Using the newly distinct domain of religion as a point of access to these wider historical shifts, I look to the interrelations between new media, new categories, and new collectivities. Older hierarchical forms are increasingly reinterpreted in terms of new moral, economic, and egalitarian logics, leaving former royal houses in an ambiguous position. The assumed perspectives of outside Others generate profoundly new interpretations of practices and new ways of imagining collectivities. Balinese discover that they are monotheistic Hindus, yet paradoxically find that they must differentiate their religion from transnational Hinduism and from ethnicity. The past is appropriated, both regionally and nationally, as the state generates "culturalized" ritual forms; yet the past, in the form of older cultural models, continues to inform many newer social forms on a new scale.;With my main research site in a ward composed mostly of civil servants in a precolonial court center turned regional capital (Bangli), I was suspended between local ethnographic realities and the encompassing worlds of Balinese media. This research "site," with one foot in a dynastic world and one in a regional bureaucracy, containing a local branch of the Hindu Council, both localized and extending in all directions through the eyes and ears of media, provided an ideal position from which to study some of the major cultural/religious shifts and ambiguities of Balinese modernity. |
