Negara Ubud: The Theatre-state in Twenty-first-century Bali

Why Negara?

Why (and indeed how) did such an experienced and competent scholar come to produce a model apparently so at variance with the evidence? Part of the answer to this question has been suggested above and will be discussed further below: he created it “tendentiously”, first for specific theoretical purposes to do with political theory—“an alternate conception of what politics is about” (Geertz, 1980: 135); second to advance a general approach to history not as a continuous, let alone material, process, but as succession of broad cultural schemata (Geertz, 1980: 5–6); and third, like Milner (1982), to contribute a cultural dimension missing from the existing discussion about Southeast Asian polities (Geertz, 1980: 18–19). In other words, he knew what he was doing. However, there are, I think, also four more specific, but perhaps less deliberate reasons, which are evident from a closer reading of his text.

One of Geertz’s stated reasons for his approach was the simple fact, still true today, that we have very little direct evidence with which to write about pre-colonial Bali (Geertz, 1980: 5–6). Consequently, he used as his primary (not secondary, let alone supplementary) source: his own ethnographic knowledge of Bali in the mid-twentieth century (Geertz, 1980: 7). This is most obvious in his discussions of the social organi- zation of both the ruling class (in Chapter 2) and the village (Chapter 3), which are rich with ethnographic detail and subtlety. It is also, I believe, implicit in his discussion of ritual display (Chapter 4), which forms the core of his argument, but lacks the detail and subtlety of the previous ones. The only evidence actually cited of pre-colonial Bali is Helms’ account of the cremation and a plan of the main palace of Klungkung in 1905. Like me, he had very little else to go on, apart from the accounts of other postcolonial ethnographers and his own experience of months of fieldwork, in the course of which he undoubtedly witnessed countless ceremonies and visited palaces and surviving royal courts in action. His image of pre-colonial ritual and its political function was, at least in part, a retro-projection of his experience of his ethnographic present.

The second point concerns the larger argument of Negara about “the classical South- east Asian Indic states of the fifth to fifteenth centuries” (Geertz, 1980: 10). This is based on the assumption that: “Bali in the … nineteenth century may not have been a mere replica … of the fourteenth, but it was … fully continuous with it [and] no matter what alterations [it] had suffered … it was [an] example of a system of government once more widespread” (Geertz, 1980: 9). This assumption provides the basis for several key parts of his argument and, leaving aside any debate (e.g., Schulte-Nordholt, 1996: 13) about how much or little Bali had changed, it raises the question of just how “Indic” Balinese states really were. Geertz (1980:16, 239) acknowledges that “caste” is something of a misnomer in Bali, resulting from “its Indic trappings”, and that “[t]he Indic surface of Balinese political institutions has acted to inhibit a comparative refer- ence eastwards … toward the Pacific”. His (detailed, ethnographically-based) discus- sions of social and political organization contain neither Indic trappings nor Westward references, but when he moves to “political symbology” his argument assumes that Balinese kingship is essentially Indic. His discussion of the philosophical basis of ritual (Geertz, 1980: 105–107) is entirely in terms of a set of Indic concepts. His analysis of “the palace as temple” (Geertz, 1980: 109–115), a questionable analogy in itself, finds all manner of Indicisms, but ignores the elements that are clearly of indigenous rather than Indic origin.6 Both these discussions are based almost entirely on the writings of scholars of Indological bent. Even where he considers the changes effected to “political institutions” in “their passage south and east”, he sees them essentially as transformed Indic ones rather than indigenous Indonesian ones (Geertz, 1980: 124–126). None of this is to deny Indic influence in Balinese politic-religious ideas and practice, but it is a matter of (im)balance of representation.

Bali was a Hocartian polity, organised by a concern for prosperity controlled by spirits, gods and demons. … Balinese rulers were responsible for the well-being of their depen- dents and their land. Thus kings were referred to … as “protector and refuge”. … Power entailed a capacity to mediate with invisible forces on behalf of one’s followers. (Wiener, 1995: 56)

Royal authority … rested … upon the ruler’s special relationship with specific deities, demons, ancestors and spirits. … Such power … had to be actively augmented by a variety of practices, among them rituals, private meditation … and manufacturing or otherwise obtaining magical objects. (Wiener, 1995: 58)

So, whether we look at my story of Ubud, those of other Balinese states, or more general models of precolonial Southeast Asian polities, there is precious little evidence or argument to support Geertz’s model, beyond the recognition of the centrality of the king and the importance of ritual. Yet in spite of the evidence for its demise, his negara will not go away, as so many historical negara have done, either in scholarly debate or, as we will see, in Bali itself.

Negaras Lost and Found: Ubud in the Twentieth Century

By the time of my fieldwork twenty years later, Ubud was a tourist boomtown with a growing commercially based middle class, but the palace was still the centre in many ways. It is here that many of the nightly performances of traditional music/dance/ drama take place. What the palace also does is organize and sponsor ritual and renova- tion of temples (on an increasingly extravagant scale) in Ubud itself, but also through- out a network of villages around Ubud, especially in the valley upstream toward the mountains. So wherever I go throughout this area I come across lavishly restored temples and huge ceremonies in out-of-the-way and often quite poor villages. The story is always the same: Puri Ubud told them what they needed to do and organized and helped financially. Of course, the people of these villages express suitable gratitude to and respect for the Puri. They also feel a sense of obligation, so when there are major ceremonies in Ubud, they are invited, and they feel obliged to come to contribute their labour to the preparations.16

While there may be debate over the motivation for this programme of sponsorship, the net effect is clear: Puri Ubud are rebuilding their former kingdom not through direct political or economic dominance, but through control over cultural production: a symbolic kingdom constituted by ritual display, traditional status roles and moral obligation.18 This is more or less what Geertz’s model would have us believe they were doing in the nineteenth century. Whether they were or not, and whether his Negara existed or not, we have no way of knowing. Furthermore, Geertz clearly regarded the negara, at least its Balinese variant, as a form which had passed, the “death of the old order [which had] expired as it lived, absorbed in pageant” (Geertz, 1980: 13), but only because “the modern world [had] at length caught up with [it]” (Geertz, 1980: 19). However, ironically, as the modern world increasingly catches up, perhaps even over- takes Bali in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Ubud at least is coming increasingly to resemble what Geertz though it was like in the nineteenth century. It almost looks as though “[t]hose cokordas in Ubud must have been reading Clifford Geertz”19 (Degung Santikarma, [Balinese anthropologist], personal communication).

As the contemporary tourist gapes like the proverbial “cow looking at a gamelan orchestra” (Geertz, 1973c: 185) at the extravagance of ceremonial performance and draws the conclusion that the lives of Balinese must be constituted by religious sensi- bilities different, deeper and stranger than their own; the material political-economic forces that condition those very Balinese lives remain invisible to them, obscured by the correspondence between the ceremony itself and the image propagated by the tourist industry. Similarly when Helms and other Europeans observed pre-colonial Bali, they saw and recorded what stood out, that which was most different, and concurred with contemporary European preconceptions. What they did not see or at least bother to record was that which was most familiar and commonsensical: the facts that people worked for their livings and that rulers wielded power. Conversely, indigenous accounts of the late nineteenth century took the trouble to record not what was commonplace and taken-for-granted, which may well have included ritual display, but what was remarkable and noteworthy: the size of the armies, the military hardware arrayed, and the magico-spiritual powers of the leaders and their weapons. It seems likely that the two sets of accounts record different kinds of information about different aspects of pre-colonial politics for different purposes.20 Geertz, for the tendentious reasons he makes so clear, has chosen to emphasize one aspect over the other. What he has not done, except in passing comments, is to consider them both together, much less to articulate any kind of dynamic relationship between. This, in the end is the problem with Negara: not the absolute rightness or wrongness of its account, but its partialness and its denial of dialectic. This incompleteness defines the final task of this article.

It comes from a combination of two main sources. Most of the labour and some of the materials come from the voluntary/invited contributions of their subjects through- out their symbolic kingdom in Ubud and their wider network of client villages. Most of the cash comes from their own businesses, tourism and other, but also from the lease and sale of land. Where did the land come from? The basis of it was won through the political and military prowess of their ancestors over a hundred years ago, but this material base of land, supplemented by tourism enterprises that are ultimately based on land too, is also what they use to finance the programme of sponsorship through which they build their symbolic kingdom. What they are doing is investing material resources into enterprises from which they can expect little or no direct material return. What they get instead is a significant return in terms of prestige (“nama” in Milner’s terms), spiritual kudos (“perceived kesaktian” in Wiener’s terms), and moral obliga- tion from dozens of villages—the symbolic returns that constitute a symbolic kingdom. These symbolic resources can then be called upon when needed and re-invested in the form of the material resource of labour for yet another ritual display, and so on.

This way of looking at it comes of course from Bourdieu’s (1991:230) conceptualiza- tion of different kinds of social power in terms of the metaphor of capital, and espe- cially his insistence that they can, like different forms of energy, be endlessly converted and re-converted into each other. “The only way such an accountancy can apprehend the indifferentiatedness of economic and symbolic capital is in the form of their perfect interconvertibility” (Bourdieu, 1977: 178). Thus in twenty-first-century as in nine- teenth-century Bali, as in the North Africa Bourdieu (1977: 180) refers to “it is easy to see why the great families never miss a chance (and this is one reason for their predi- lection for distant marriages and vast processions) to organise exhibitions of symbolic capital (in which conspicuous consumption is only the most visible aspect)”.

While in Bali, it is cremations rather than marriages that are the locus of the greatest investment in ritual performance, there is no reason to believe that this process of capi- tal-conversion so evident in the twenty-first century was not also going on in the nine- teenth century. Geertz may not much like the economistic metaphor, but this is the sense in which I think he is partly right: his Negara probably did involve the conversion and accumulation of symbolic as well as material capital. Yet—and this is where his model is not so much wrong as misleading or at best incomplete—as we have also seen clearly in contemporary Ubud: “Symbolic capital, a transformed and disguised form of physical ‘economic’ capital, produces its proper effect inasmuch, and only inasmuch, as it conceals the fact that it originates in ‘material’ forms of capital which are also, in the last analysis, the source of its effects” (Bourdieu, 1977: 183, emphasis in original).

We need not accept Bourdieu’s reduction in his “last analysis” of the symbolic to the material or even the implicit materialism of his metaphor of capital itself to heed his reminder of the dynamic relationship between the material and symbolic dimensions of such institutions as negaras.21 Geertz’s contribution has been (like that of other anthropologists of history-as-culture) to remind us of the symbolic dimension of Balinese, and by implication all political systems. Yet a believable and useful model of South East Asian polities, certainly of Balinese ones, both pre-colonial and postmod- ern, needs to re-embed the truth of his Negara where the actual evidence from Bali, the models of other scholars, the theoretical critiques of his critics and ethnographic and historical commonsense all suggest it belongs: in the flow of concrete, material, histor- ical process.

Notes

[11]  The bibliography of Negara, which runs to eleven pages, contains only ten local historical texts, all of them published versions of mid-twentieth-century transcriptions. Several others, many of them unpublished, that I was able to find without much difficulty in private collec- tions over thirty years later are notably absent.

[12]  Tambiah’s (1976) earlier work World Conquerer and World Renouncer is, however, listed in the bibliography of Negara.

[13]  Shelly Errington’s (1989) Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm arguably represents another model. However, apart from a useful discussion of the political sociology of “entou- rages” (Errington, 1989: 104–108) and more focus on local understandings of power, it is essentially a Negara-like model of an ahistorical Indic cultural form.

[14]  For a general discussion of kesaktian in Bali, see Geertz (1994); and on its role in modern Indonesian politics, see Anderson (1972).

[15]  The Balinese term “puri” refers, very much like the English “palace”, simultaneously to the physical buildings, the (extended) family and the institution in general terms.

[16]  There is a delicate balance of obligation and compulsion here. While the palace insist that villages volunteer their services, and indeed fear missing out on such an opportunity, it is obvious from enquiries in these villages that they are notified of such ceremonies and invited to participate. The lynchpin in the process is usually a local leader keen to enhance his status and power by making things happen in the village and serving the palace at the same time. For an analysis by a local sociologist, see Dwipayana (2001: 256–260)

[17]  Such elite control or “ownership” of local history is not uncommon in south Bali (see, e.g., Parker, 2003: 31, 42).

[18]  It would be easy to impute motivations to the puri on the basis of an analysis of strategic use symbolic and material resources, but this would be to reduce Balinese motivations to the cate- gories of Western political science—the very mistake Geertz is trying, according to Wiener unsuccessfully, to avoid. More importantly, despite over a decade of fieldwork in Ubud, I cannot claim to know these motivations with any certainty. What I do know and can analyze, however, is the effects of their actions; but to impute motivations from effects is something else.

[19]  At a conference presentation of this article, I was asked the obvious question “Had they in fact been reading Geertz?”. The answer is, I think: No, but they are certainly thinking about Balinese culture and about Ubud and their place in it in terms of a complex cultural forma- tion involving Balinese re-appropriation of a courtly/theatrical model of Balinese culture developed by expatriates in the 1930s and cultivated retained by contemporary expatriates and the tourism industry.

[20]  While this is true of the Balinese texts with which I am familiar, it is apparently much less so of the Malay and Bugis ones with which Milner (1982) and Errington (1989) worked, in which there was much mention of the ceremonial aspects, while the underlying political machina- tions were systematically obscured. I suspect this may reflect different traditions of historiog- raphy, perhaps influenced by Islamic scholarship, but it is a matter for further research.

[21]  For a defence of Bourdieu against the charge of economic reductionism “in the last analysis”, see Thompson (1991: 14–15). However Bourdieu’s use of the language of economics and symbolism locates him inescapably in the endless debate between “Culture and Practical Reason” in a position that is more or less a mirror-image of Sahlins (1976). However, this too is another discussion.