Bali Tourism 9781134622252, 9780789035196

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Arthur Asa Berger

Bali Tourism

Pre-publication REVIEWS, COMMENTARIES, EVALUATIONS . . . n outstanding explanation and “A justification of the theories of tourism, which one would give to any tourism student. . . . The second group of readers for which this book would be completely ideal is to the general tourists to Bali. Whereas guides such as the Lonely Planet Guide, adequately describe what is physically there, places to visit, places to stay, places to eat, and so on, they tend not to give the insights and depth of understanding of the local culture and the impacts and relation-

ship of tourism to Bali. . . . A superb pocket guide to everything Bali. . . . I find this book is the exceptional value in so many ways: to me as a professor, to my students in their research and understanding of tourism concepts, and to the general tourist, who can visit Bali with a full understanding of all that is going on around them. I really do believe this book will help any tourist and any student in their quest for knowledge of one of the world’s major tourist destinations.” Dr. Jeremy Huyton Lecturer, School of Business and Government, Division of Business, Law and Information Sciences, University of Canberra

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Bali Tourism

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Bali Tourism

Arthur Asa Berger

The Haworth Press New York and London

First published 2013 by Haworth Press 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Haworth Press 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Haworth Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Arthur Asa Berger The right of Arthur Asa Berger to be identied as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identication and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-7890-3519-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-7890-3520-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-88583-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman

CONTENTS About the Author Foreword

viii ix

Keith Loveard Preface

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Imagining Bali The Imagined Bali and the Real Bali Japanese Tourists in Bali: A Case Study The Semiotic Nature of the Tourist Experience A Very Brief Overview of Semiotics

3 3 7 9 14

PART I: TOURISM IN BALI Chapter 1. The Image of Bali in Guidebooks Bali Handbook, 2nd Edition Insight’s Pocket Guides: Bali Bali: Indonesia The Rough Guide to Bali & Lombok, 4th Edition Conclusions

19 19 20 21 21 22

Chapter 2. Bali on the Internet

27

Bali Googled Bali on Frommer’s Forum Site Blogging Bali

27 29 32

Chapter 3. Bali Tourism Statistics

37

Direct Foreign Tourist Arrivals to Bali 1973-2003 Who Goes to Bali? The Importance of Tourism in Bali

37 38 40

Chapter 4. Is Bali a Southeast Asian Disneyland? Cultural Tourism and Touristic Cultures New Understandings of Culture Can Paradises Change? Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden Is Bali a Kind of Disneyland? The Problem of Authenticity Bali and the Carnivalesque: A Hypothesis A Comparison of Balinese Ceremonial Culture and Carnivalization Chapter 5. Hypotheses About Tourism and Bali Tourism and the Base/Superstructure Problem The Male Gaze and the Tourist Gaze “Happy Natives” in Colonized Nations A Dilemma for People in “Exotic” Cultures Is Bali Postmodern? The Four Lifestyles and Bali As a Tourism Destination Culture and Personality in Bali The Uses and Gratifications of Travel in Bali Image and Reality in Bali Are the Balinese Charming Schizophrenics? Seeing for Myself

47 47 49 50 52 57 59 60 65 65 67 68 70 72 76 81 83 87 89 91

PART II: SEMIOTIC BALI Chapter 6. Balinese Symbols and Icons Touristic Bali Postcards of Bali Barong Rangda Cockfights (Sabungan) Women with Towers of Fruit on Their Heads The Legong Dance The Kecak “Monkey” Dance Gamelan Orchestras Names in Bali

97 97 100 102 107 114 118 121 124 126 129

Balinese Temples (Pura) Ubud

131 133

Coda: Bali on My Mind

137

Bibliography

141

Index

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arthur Asa Berger, PhD, is professor emeritus of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Art at San Francisco State University, where he taught between 1965 and 2003. Dr. Berger is the author of numerous articles, book reviews, and more than 50 books on the mass media, popular culture, humor, tourism, and everyday life. His books include Ocean Travel and Cruising; Vietnam Tourism; Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on Tourism; Thailand Tourism; and Media and Communication Research Methods.

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Foreword Foreword Few places in the world have become as iconic as the island of Bali. I first stumbled across it in 1970, as one of the wave of young Western travelers (Asians and much of the rest of the world knew us as hippies) on the Australia-UK overland route. Some did that trip in a short few months; I dragged out my tour of this part of the world to eighteen months, half of it spent in India. Bali in 1970 was indeed a paradise of beautiful beaches and lush forests. Kuta, now wall-to-wall with hotels, restaurants, and shops, boasted only the Kuta Beach Hotel, and the rest was a quiet fishing village, one that incidentally used to be the scene of a thriving slave market. Denpasar, now a crowded city, was open and relaxed. From there, the roads into the hills were simple, rutted tracks and traffic was largely confined to overcrowded buses which one invariably had to share with a pig or two and a handful of chickens. Before coming to Bali I had heard little of the uniqueness of the island. I arrived at traveling deck class on an inter-island ferry I boarded at Kupang in Indonesian Timor. The ferry wandered its way to the ports of Alor, Larantuka, Bima, and then to Lombok, from where I crossed to neighboring Bali. If I had known then that the rest of Asia was not a carbon copy of Bali I might have been tempted to stay longer, as some did. Unknowing, I moved on to Java and Sumatra which, while equally fascinating, lacked the remarkable convergence of lush nature and a remarkable culture that proved to be unique to Bali. But Bali in 1970 was by no means a paradise for the Balinese. Poverty was biting in what continues to this day to be an overpopulated part of the Indonesian archipelago, and the island was just recovering from the trauma of the anticommunist purge that took place across Indonesia in the early months of 1966. There were visibly more women than men due to the killing of so many activists and sympathizers of

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the Indonesian Communist Party, and I heard tales of rivers clogged with bodies. Returning to Indonesia in 1990 as correspondent for Asiaweek magazine, Bali became a useful place for rest and recuperation, for meeting up with friends and relatives. I have lived in Indonesia ever since and can no longer count the number of times I have visited Bali, but they have been certainly enough to visit virtually every corner of the island. Journalists typically spend their working lives getting on to aircraft going to places that other people are trying to flee. My ‘tours’ in Indonesia during my time with Asiaweek were more often focused on the trouble spots of East Timor or Aceh than Bali, unless as a transit point to the islands further east. I recall one trip to Manado, famed for its nearby coral reefs, in which I spent all my time at the hospital interviewing refugees from the interreligious strife in Maluku. It was thus a pleasant surprise to be sent to Bali by my editor in 1997 for a week to consider whether Bali’s unique culture was truly still alive or whether it had all become an exhibit in an exotic Disneyland. My conclusion was, somewhat paradoxically, that both arguments were true. Such is the strength of Bali as a global icon that my article continues to be prominent on material on the island on the Internet. Tourism cannot exist without inevitably altering the part of the planet on which it feeds. It is at best symbiotic, though often parasitic. My endeavors have tended to be more concerned with probing the way in which the Balinese see their Bali than with the view of it that the tourists may have. Yet I have watched, even sympathetically, a family of sunburned, shorts- and tank-top wearing, first-time tourists, their pudgy girls with their hair braided and beaded, running down the street at Kuta being pursued by a group of hawkers trying to sell them copy watches and other dubious goods. It is little consolation to people whose hoped-for paradise has turned into hell to be told that hawkers almost invariably come from Java. To some degree the Balinese watch all of this—and every other element of the variety of tourism and tourists—with the deep awareness that their religion brings them. Hinduism in any of its forms— and Balinese Hinduism is strongly different than the Indian variety— makes much of maya, or illusion. And since karma dictates every-

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thing in everyone’s life, there is an easy explanation for what is happening. This may explain why it is very rare to see a Balinese get angry. There is plenty to get steamed up about, not least the traffic. But, as elsewhere in Indonesia, violence does lie behind the surface and it is no surprise that the word ‘amok’ comes from Indonesia, describing that moment when all reason is thrown aside and human beings are controlled by their anger alone. Still, such displays are rare and, when they do occur, tend to be directed at fellow Balinese or other Indonesians rather than at tourists, who are genuinely seen as guests who must be treated with respect. Great concern has been shown by the Balinese over the decade since the fall of Suharto to insulate the island from the chaos that ensnared many other parts of the archipelago. Eventually, of course, Bali was not spared from the wave of bombings that reached its peak in October 2002, when Islamist extremists blew up two nightclubs in Kuta. Seen from the standpoint of those extremists, there was every reason to destroy the Sari Club and Paddy’s Bar. Tourism, with its tendency to concentrate on the three Ss—sand, sun, and sex—has inevitably brought with it a degree of licentiousness that is offensive to many Indonesians, not just the handful of radicals. The Balinese have in general kept on smiling at the displays of carnality in the pubs and clubs, although many older Balinese are concerned that the young are being affected by this erosion of morals. For most of the time, the Balinese have achieved a level of symbiosis between the vital tourism industry and their daily lives, including their religious and cultural beliefs. Many Balinese will tell you that in their order of priorities, culture is most important, followed by religion, and with business only in third place. In this context, culture and religion are very closely connected. The first-time tourist is invariably struck with the tiny offerings placed in front of every temple, home, office or shop across the island every day, a potent symbol of the desire of the Balinese to honor their gods. There are clear signs that a large degree of ‘spiritual materialism’ has infected the island, with people who want to impress their neighbors with their wealth going all out to mount elaborate ceremonies and occasionally bankrupting themselves in the process. Yet visit Bali on Nyepi, the day of silence, and few people can fail to be im-

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pressed by the genuine intensity of the most important religious date on the calendar, when the tourists have to fend for themselves for a day while the Balinese shut themselves up at home. Not everyone, of course, is religious. The gigolos of the Peanuts Bar (higher prices for Japanese girls than for Australians) and the pimps who sell girls along the main street in Kuta at night may be lost souls, and some of the tour guides I have met have certainly abandoned reason in their desire for quick cash. These are exceptions. On the whole Bali is a place where everyone gets on nicely and the smiles are genuine. Visitors are welcome and are treated well for the very simple reason that they give Bali a local economy at least 50 percent richer than Indonesia as a whole. Tourists today are even more treasured, since the Balinese have been scarred by the sharp and lengthy downturn in tourist arrivals which followed the 2002 terrorist bombings. For people living in a virtual single-sector economy, visitors are indeed honored guests. Foreigners who want to stay longer will find that the Balinese are also happy to cooperate in finding ways around national laws. Under those laws, foreigners are not allowed to own land, but the Balinese are well accustomed to leasehold systems and in some cases virtual freehold that breach the spirit of the law, if not the letter. The island’s immigration officials take a similarly liberal view of their country’s regulations, granting residence visas on very tenuous grounds in return for quiet bribes. As a result, the famous rice fields of Bali have been covered in cement to build villas and homes for long-stay visitors. A water shortage is looming on the south of the island and the traffic is often terrible, tiny roads clogged with cars and motorcycles so badly that what should be a 20-minute trip to the airport can end in a jangle of nerves as you move forward meter by meter. Areas like Jimbani and Cangguh are becoming just another real estate development as privately owned villas and time-shares spring up to cater to the growing market for long-term residential property. All of this development is inevitably impacting the capacity of the island’s infrastructure to sustain a reasonable level of services. The Balinese are increasingly aware that something needs to be done. One popular song that hit the charts in the mid-1990s across Indonesia was the lament “Baliku Kembali Padaku” (Give Bali Back to

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Me). But while officialdom seems to have few ideas on how to deal with the myriad problems, the people as a whole cling to the reality that, for good or bad, tourism means wealth. Fully aware that their traditional pursuits of rice farming and fishing will do little to sustain their new lifestyles, they have every reason to smile sweetly at the passing tourists. The Balinese are also aware that a successful tourism industry requires a degree of flexibility, and enough Balinese have had interactions with foreigners for long enough that an element of mutual respect has also developed above and beyond the symbolic requirements of the immediate tourist trade. Genuine friendships and family bonds have been created in which both sides have learned to live with each other’s excesses and eccentricities. While developing flexibility and moving toward a cosmopolitan view of life, the Balinese continue to maintain their cultural and religious traditions in a manner that is to a large degree closed to most newcomers. There is no intention on the part of the Balinese to shut off their secret world and in fact anyone is welcome to come and learn. The reality of course is that few tourists are even aware that the overriding concern of many Balinese is the spiritual side of their lives. A kecak dance in which the dancers end by walking on burning coconut shells provides a brief, and sometimes slightly spooky glimpse of the power of this spiritual side, but many dismiss this as a tourist gimmick. Processions of finely dressed Balinese are everywhere to be seen, but few understand their significance. My own understanding of the religion and culture of Bali began with a conversation not in Bali but in Solo, one of the royal courts of Java. In a conversation with a man who had rescued the traditions of the court, I asked how it was possible for a blacksmith, or empu, to shape with his fingers the famous wavy blade of the traditional dagger, or keris, when to do so the steel must be white hot. “There is a meditation,” I was told. I asked the name of the meditation, and was told “Kolo Cokro.” Remarkably, this meditation that can stop the passage of time and the heat of white-hot steel is a very close relative to the Kalacakra, one of the highest initiations of Tibetan Buddhism.

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What began as Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism in seventh century Bengal continues to live on today in the traditional court-dominated belief of Java, kejawen, and in the Hinduism of Bali, just as it does in the Buddhism of Tibet. A spiritually inclined Balinese, Nyoman Suwesi, told me more about his religion. Nearly 50 percent is derived directly from Tantric Buddhism, and the bell used by Hindu priests in their ceremonies are very similar to the bell and dorje used by Tibetan monks, the bell signifying compassion and the dorje, or thunderbolt, a symbol of wisdom. Balinese dance, with its similarities to Thailand’s traditional dancing, and the court dances of Java, feature mudra—hand movements—that must spring from the same roots. While Bali may no longer be a paradise, it remains mysterious. The Balinese, like most Indonesians, continue to believe in the power of magic and to be convinced that their world is filled with spirits, both good and bad. Hence the ritual of placing offerings at the entrance to every habitation is both a symbol of religious piety and an expression of fear. Special trees are places of power, and ghosts may roam the world at night. Few tourists can ever hope to enter this world and indeed few will ever want to do so. Nevertheless the abiding value of Bali as a tourist destination remains incredibly enriched by the magic that permeates every inch of the island. Bali may offer the three Ss of tourism but it adds to them the C of culture and the R of religion in a form that is remarkably attractive and which feeds the creative talents of a whole island. These additional values give the island a strong advantage over other regional tourism destinations such as Thailand’s Phuket. Bali is not paradise, though a temporary form may be found in many of the elite hotels and resorts that dot the island, as long as you have the money to pay for such luxury. More simple pleasures are available in the many simpler hotels. I recall bedding down on a transit stop on one of my trips further east in a room in a traditional Balinese compound tucked into the heart of bustling Kuta, and paying a mere $5 for a bed and fan and what was in fact a genuine experience of traditional Balinese lifestyles. While the prices are now higher, such charms remain accessible to those that seek them out.

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Bali, as with any other place redolent with history, is no place for the nostalgic. It is not what it was when I first visited in 1970 and the Balinese are happy that their lives are more economically stable. There remains concern that the tourism bubble is unsustainable, but that is a problem that the planners and engineers will one day have to come to grips with. For the tourist, Bali remains an iconic gem that fully deserves the multiple visits that many make, unlocking more of its secrets each time. Keith Loveard Author of Suharto: Indonesia’s Last Sultan (Horizon Books, 1999)

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Preface

The interpretations of various Balinese icons, symbols, activities, rituals, ceremonies, and material culture are my own, based on my application of semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, sociological theory and other methods of analysis. I got my idea for writing about cultures from reading Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes, in which he “reads” Japanese culture by looking at various important signs and signifiers of that society. I used this approach in my books Vietnam Tourism and Thailand Tourism (both published by The Haworth Press) and will say more about it later. I was trained in American studies, and have applied my multidisciplinary, cultural studies approach to Vietnam, Thailand, and now Bali. These investigations I’ve made have been extremely interesting for me, because in each country I discovered phenomena that were puzzling, and when “deconstructed,” yielded fascinating, and, as you will see, sometimes controversial conclusions. Scholarly studies of tourism, which sound to many people like an oxymoron, are very important. Tourism is now the largest industry in the world. It makes good sense, then, to find out more about tourism and how it is impacting various countries and how they are responding to it. With this in mind, let us take a look at Bali, which has been described as “the last paradise.” At the end of the book, if I’ve been successful, you will be in a position to determine whether this description is correct, or to what degree it might be correct. After reading this book you will have gained some insights into Balinese culture and society, in general, and also have had descriptions and analyses of many of the most important touristic experiences in Bali, so, although this book is not meant to be a guidebook, it does give tourists information about many aspects of Balinese culture that will be of interest to them. Bali is one of the most remarkable,

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most complicated, most unusual cultures tourists will generally encounter in the course of their travels. I hope my deconstruction of some icons and other aspects of Balinese culture will not destroy their magic but enable us to understand better their importance and appeal.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following people who have helped me with this book, either by supplying statistics on tourism in Bali or offering insights into Balinese culture of one sort or another in conversations or e-mail messages: Agus Wineko, Kekuk Jaman, Diana Elizabeth Korompia, Jean Howe, and Made Wijaya, whose Web site http://www.strangerinparadise.com is worth investigating. In addition, I gained a great deal of information about Bali from the following writers and scholars who have written valuable books about Bali: Bill Dalton (Bali Handbook), Clifford Geertz (The Interpretation of Cultures), Dean MacCannell (The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class), Eric Oey (Bali: Indonesia), Lesley Reader and Lucy Ridout (The Rough Guide to Bali & Lombok), Adrian Vickers (Bali: A Paradise Created), Shinji Yamashita (Bali and Beyond: Explorations in the Anthropology of Tourism), William Ingram (A Little Bit of One O’clock) and Made Wijaya (Insight Pocket Guides: Bali). Finally, I would like to thank Kaye Chon for encouraging me to investigate tourism.

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The building of a new airport just south of Sanur, the Ngurah Rai Airport named after Bali’s heroic martyr of the Revolution, confirmed the expansion of Indonesian tourism toward the end of the 1970s. The bulk of the tourists were not the expected rich Americans that an emerging nation craved to boost its revenues, but the new breed of western middle-class youth, hippies. Bali was at the bottom end of the “Asian highway” that stretched from London and Amsterdam to Sydney, with every spot on the way a paradise of free love and cheap drugs. . . . The pre-war image of Bali as a rich religious culture fed directly into happy ideas about the mystical East. Those who were better read may have come across the writings of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead on Bali. Bateson was at the time living in the hippy mecca of Southern California as one of its western gurus, while Mead’s writing and public appearances had been important in developing ideas of liberation from the boringly puritanical mainstream of middle America. Both were active proponents of alternative lifestyles, of which Bali’s culture was perhaps the most perfect example. In the wake of hippydom came the “surfies,” of which Australians have always been the largest group. Bali emerged in surfie mythology as the “cosmic trip” complete with magic mushrooms and dangerous waves . . . in the late 1970s the hippies and Australian surfies were overtaken by a kind of “swinging singles” youth scene, characterized by loud music, drunkenness, and commercializing. In 1989 there are hundred of hotels, big and small, catering for the 400,000 tourists who come to Bali each year from all over the world. (Vickers, 1990: 186-187)

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Introduction Introduction: Imagining Imagining BaliBali

Let me begin with a discussion of two Balis that exist and constantly interact with each other—the Bali we imagine and the Bali we experience when we actually go there. THE IMAGINED BALI AND THE REAL BALI Before you decide to travel to distant lands such as Bali, you investigate them by reading guidebooks and magazine articles about them and finding out whatever else you can, often by using the Internet to gather information. If you are going to Bali, for example, you make a point to ask people you know or meet who have been there whether they liked it or not, and about different places to visit, good restaurants, and so on. Going to Bali from the United States involves a considerable investment in time and money, so you want to make sure you’re making the right decision. For example, to get to Bali from San Francisco, you often have to fly to Hong Kong first and then to Bali. When you count the time spent waiting in the San Francisco airport to board the flight to Hong Kong, the time spent in Hong Kong changing planes, and then the flight to Bali, it takes about twenty hours. People flying to Bali from the east coast have to factor in another six hours or so getting to the west coast. In my case, since I had an individual package tour from Escapes Unlimited, which uses Singapore Airlines, I flew from San Francisco to Hong Kong (around fourteen hours), then to Singapore (another few hours), and then to Bali. So you can see, getting to paradise is ex-

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hausting. Tourists work hard to have their pleasures. An individual package tour takes advantage of matters such as package deals made by tour companies for flights and hotel accommodations, but doesn’t involve traveling with a group of other people.

Sanur beach, near the Golden Bali Hotel.

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As a result of your inquiries, and based on articles about Bali you read in newspapers and magazines, books about Bali you read, films you see that might have scenes from Bali or supposedly are about Bali (for example, The Road to Bali), songs about Bali you hear, advertisements for Bali you come across, and comments people who have been there make, you come to a decision about whether or not to go there. Let’s assume, based on the research you do, you decide to visit Bali. This Bali is what I would describe as your personal imagined Bali, the Bali you think or hope you will find when you get there. This is the paradisical Bali, the Eden-like garden, the so-called “last paradise,” with beautiful brown maidens, endless ceremonies, a rich cultural life, and magnificent beaches. But it is also the Bali “overwhelmed,” as put by tourists of different kinds. The image of this paradise-like Bali was shattered when an explosion in a night club on October 12, 2002, killed several hundred tourists, mainly Australians, and delivered a crushing blow to the tourism industry in Bali. The explosion suggested that a dark side of Bali existed that few people had taken notice of, that was hidden from general view. In actuality, as Adrian Vickers points out in Bali: A Paradise Created, a great deal of violence has occurred in Bali, over the years and at one time; in the early 1900s Bali had an image as a wild and violent place (Vickers, 1990). As late as 1965, some 40,000 people were killed in anticommunist riots in Bali. In recent years, the tourism authorities in Indonesia helped create a different image of Bali—the peaceful, paradisical image known now. The real Bali is, of course, always different from the imagined Bali, just as imagined experiences of all kinds are different from the real thing. But travelers always carry in their heads images of what they expect to see when they arrive in Bali, or anyplace they visit. And for many tourists, what they see and do is conditioned by what they expect to see and do; that is, in the case of Bali, they bring an imagined Bali to Bali and use that imagined Bali as a set of goggles through which they see Bali. What happens, generally speaking, is that tourists have all kinds of unanticipated experiences. Some of these experiences are pleasant, and others aren’t, but that is part of the joy of traveling—escaping from the routines and certainties of everyday life, if only for a brief period of time, and encountering a “foreign” culture.

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Of course different tourists to Bali want different things. Some visitors seek the beaches of Kuta (crowded, we are led to believe, with drunken and free-spending Australian surfers, mediocre restaurants, and tacky shops) and other beach areas, while so-called “cultural” tourists tend to go to Ubud, away from the beaches but not, it turns out, away from the maddening crowds. Bali is a small island that attracts many tourists, so unless you decide to stay in some out-of-theway village, you generally find many other tourists around from a number of different countries.

Temple and yard in Ubud.

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JAPANESE TOURISTS IN BALI: A CASE STUDY In his book Bali and Beyond, Shinji Yamashita describes the “typical” Japanese tourist visit to Bali, which begins with a ten hour flight from Japan. Japanese tourists, he explains, often come on short, fiveday group package tours, and many of them follow or approximate this schedule: Day 1: Arriving in late afternoon or evening and settling in Day 2: Sightseeing, buying souvenirs, and attending a Barong dance Day 3: Visiting craft villages such as Celuk or Mas or Ubud. In the evening they generally take advantage of two popular tour options: they watch the Kecak and have a lobster dinner Day 4: Flying to Yogyakarta to visit the temple at Borobudur and returning to Bali that evening Day 5: Wandering around, buying souvenirs before taking a night flight back to Japan (Yamashita, 2003) This schedule means that Japanese tourists are very busy and are generally away from their hotels from early in the morning until late in the evening, so they don’t really get to enjoy the sea view hotel rooms they usually book. Tourism, Yamashita suggests, is a kind of “work” for Japanese, who feel upset if they miss (and presumably don’t photograph) something (Yamashita, 2003). Westerners, he adds, generally come for stays of one or two weeks and thus can be much more relaxed about their sightseeing and shopping. They also come, he writes, to “listen” and question rather than see (Yamashita, 2003). Yamashita (2003) offers an interesting statistic: the Japanese account for 20 percent of the tourists in Bali but account for 50 percent of the money spent on souvenirs. They spend a much higher percentage of their time shopping than do tourists from Western countries, often for name-brand items. This is due, in part, to the gift-giving (and gift-receiving) nature of Japanese culture. Bali for many Japanese tourists isn’t seen as exotic but reminds older Japanese of the “lost” agrarian Japan of their youth or the one they heard about from their parents. It also is seen by many Japanese women who go there as a means of recuperating from the stresses of daily life in Japan.

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Balinese dancers in the Barong-Rangda dance.

We must recognize that tourism is a highly segmented industry and that many different kinds of tourists travel to destinations for a variety of reasons. A great deal of competition exists for tourists from countries, all of which wage marketing campaigns to attract visitors. Thus, similar to other important tourism destinations, Bali reaches out to tourists and welcomes them. Bali has a highly developed tourism industry, and tourists generally can have the kind of Bali experience they want, or think they want.

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A Balinese temple near Ubud.

THE SEMIOTIC NATURE OF THE TOURIST EXPERIENCE Countless day and half-day tours are available, to important temples and other sites of touristic interest in Bali, for those who want to experience Balinese culture. And the beach experience and all that goes with life in beach towns is available for others. Every tourist has his or her own personal “imagined” and then realized Bali, in the final analysis—similar to what other tourists experience, yet different from all of them, at the same time.

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Tourism theorists have argued that people don’t really experience a city or a country in any kind of totality, but, instead, have a number of discrete experiences of important symbols and places that provide them with their sense of the place they have visited. Their visits can be thought of as a series of snapshots of places and people and ceremonies they encounter—a series of moments, but not a coherent narrative, so to speak. Perhaps a slide show rather than a video would be a good metaphor? The poet T.S. Eliot once offered a list of traits that defined English culture, which is similar in nature to the important symbols and discrete images in people’s heads when they visit somewhere. Eliot was talking about important symbols of English culture and character, symbols involving matters such as celebrations, foods, buildings, and common experiences: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wenselydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th century Goth churches, the music of Elgar. (Eliot, 1949) Adam Kuper, who offers this list in an article in the Financial Times, suggested that most people in Britain wouldn’t recognize half the items on this list as the result of changes in British culture. He discusses some problems in dealing with culture: Culture seems to explain everything at the moment, the way gender once did or before that class. However, culture is a slippery term. It expands to mean way of life, or contracts to mean the idiosyncratic atmosphere of a company’s head office, and it may also still be used in Matthew Arnold’s sense to mean high culture, “the best that has been thought and said.” (Kuper, 2005: 13) I will deal with this matter of what culture is in more detail later in the book. But Kuper’s point, that a culture is often defined for its members by certain events, certain foods, certain practices, is an important one. Equally important is his citing T.S. Eliot, for the Eliot quote shows that cultures are always evolving. The items Eliot wrote about can be described, semiotically speaking, as signs.

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Dean MacCannell, a semiotician and social scientist, makes the same point in his discussion of tourist attractions. As he explains in his seminal study The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class: Semiotics is the science of signs. It’s most distinctive theoretical characteristic is the negation of the division of subject from object which is the keystone of traditional Western science. Semiotics locates the sign, which it treats as an original unification of subject and object, in place of the old subject-object split at the center of scientific investigation. In Charles Sanders Peirce’s original formulation, a sign represents something to someone. I have suggested that tourist attractions are signs . . . Sightseers do not, in any empirical sense, see San Francisco. They see Fisherman’s Wharf, a cable car, the Golden Gate Bridge, Union Square, Coit Tower, the Presidio, City Lights Bookstore, Chinatown, and perhaps the Haight Ashbury or a nude go-go dancer in a North Beach-Barbary Coast club. (MacCannell, 1976: 109111) In the same way, tourists to Bali tend to visit Kuta Beach and other beaches, see some important temples, and attend various ceremonies, but they don’t, and can’t, “see” Bali or anyplace they go. This is because, it seems, our sensory apparatus system is keyed to focusing on particulars, from which we then build, in our minds, generalizations and supply the narratives between discrete images. This is very much like the process of dreams, as Freud explained it. Dreams are made of static images that we connect, by a process of secondary elaboration, into coherent narratives. They are very much like the slide shows many tourists put together, and secondary elaboration is like the narratives we create when we show our slides to others. Psychologists have discovered that when we look at an object, we scan it in a very rapid series of saccades, sweeping movements that our eyes make back and forth over the object. We then fashion in our minds an image out of the different inputs we get. As psychologist Robert Ornstein has explained in his book The Psychology of Consciousness:

12

BALI TOURISM

If we “saw” an image on our retina, the visual world would be different each second, sometimes one object, then another, sometimes a blur due to the eyes moving, sometimes darkness due to blinks. We must then construct a personal consciousness from the selected input, and in this way achieve some stability of awareness out of the rich and continually changing flow of information reaching our receptors. (Ornstein, 1972: 27) I would suggest a process analogous to what our eyes do when we scan an object happens when we visit a temple, city, or country. We construct a generalized image and “sense” of that place based on all the momentary or partial images we see. In the first part of Bali Tourism, which focuses on the research I did while preparing to go to Bali, I deal with statistics on tourism in general and with tourism to Bali in particular. This will give readers some insights into the scope of tourism in Bali and how Bali ranks in terms of most popular destinations for tourists. I also deal with scholarly discussions of the nature of tourism, which will enable us to see how tourism in Bali relates to tourism in other places. Bali tourism then becomes the “figure” against the “ground” of tourism in general, which is now a global phenomenon. I also consider other aspects of tourism in Bali, such as advertisements for Bali and Bali on the Internet, where numerous forums exist about travel in Bali (including answers to questions about places to stay, places to see, things to do, and good restaurants to dine at) as well as travel blogs about trips bloggers have made in Bali. Then, in the second part of the book, I analyze and interpret important Balinese signs, or, in other words, aspects, of Balinese culture in an effort to explain the meaning of the typical sites and events a tourist to Bali experiences. In this section I use a combination of different approaches or disciplines such as semiotics, aesthetics, psychoanalytic thought, and sociological and anthropological theory to help make sense of the paradigmatic or typical (to the extent such a thing is possible) tourist experience in Bali. This cultural studies approach helps me deal with a number of different phenomena, whether it be ritual dances or temple architecture, in a manner they deserve. It is generally recognized that tourism demands a multidisciplinary approach to deal adequately with its numerous complexities.

Introduction: Imagining Bali

13

My approach, I should make clear, is ethnographic, which means, literally, a picture of a people. Ethnography is a form of research, based on participant observation, in which the firsthand experiences of researchers plays an important part in the analysis of the culture being studied. It is also semiotic in that I devote a good deal of attention to interpreting and analyzing important icons, symbols, ceremonies, and other signs that characterize and distinguish Balinese culture from other cultures. In the last section of the book I offer some remembrances of Bali as I try to sort out what the experiences my wife and I had in Bali meant and come to some conclusions about tourism in Bali and Balinese culture. This book is a scholarly one, but you will find I write in an accessible style and my voice and tone are not academic or full of jargon. Since this is a serious study of tourism in Bali, my preparations for my visit there were more extensive than those of a typical tourist. I read a number of scholarly books about Bali (which I listed earlier in the Acknowledgments section) and a number of scholarly articles on Bali. I also read some guidebooks, such as Bill Dalton’s Bali Handbook, Lesley Reader and Lucy Ridout’s The Rough Guide to Bali and Lombok, and Made Wijaya’s Insight Pocket Guides: Bali to see how guidebooks characterized Bali.. Taking a long-distance trip is analogous to planning a military campaign. Tourists must think about such matters as transportation to the place or places they wish to visit, housing, healthy dining, medical matters (requiring shots of different kinds and in some cases pills to prevent diseases such as malaria), clothing to pack and wear, in addition to deciding which local tours to take and which sights to see. Tourists who travel to distant lands tend to read their guidebooks with great care so that they will have the best possible experience and not miss spectacular temples, beautiful beaches, important museums, great restaurants, etc. Bali Tourism is not a guidebook to Bali but a study of tourism in Bali and Balinese culture. It will, however, help tourists who visit Bali gain a better understanding of a number of specific aspects of Balinese culture and thus help them have a richer and more meaningful experience when they go there. Clifford Geertz, a distinguished anthropologist, writes in The Interpretation of Cultures that “the concept of culture I espouse and whose utility the essays below attempt

14

BALI TOURISM

to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one” (1973: 5). By this he means his focus is on interpreting symbolic actions, rituals, ceremonies, and aspects of material culture, phenomena that function as “signs” (the key concept in semiotics) that help him understand Balinese culture. The middle section of my book offers on my semiotic interpretations of a number of what I consider to be important icons and symbolic aspects of Balinese culture, signs that help me penetrate the meanings of activities and objects found in Bali. The last section of the book involves my experiences in Bali and my reflections on what the experiences in Bali meant. A VERY BRIEF OVERVIEW OF SEMIOTICS Since I’ve mentioned semiotics earlier, let me offer a brief overview of the most important concepts in semiotics, the science of signs. The root of the word semiotics comes from the Greek semeion, which means “sign.” Signs, according to the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the founding fathers of the science of semiotics, are combinations of signifiers (sounds or objects) and signifieds (concepts or meanings). Signifiers and signifieds are like two sides of a piece of paper. What is important to recognize, de Saussure added, is that the relationship between signifiers and signifieds is based on convention and has to be learned. So the meanings of signs can change over time (de Saussure, 1966). As de Saussure (1966) pointed out, concepts don’t have any meaning in themselves but, strange as it might seem, take their meaning from being the opposite of something else. That is, their meaning arises through differences that stem from the nature of language, the most important difference being polar opposition. Thus rich has meaning only if poor exists and beautiful has meaning only if ugly exists. In language, de Saussure (1966) suggested, only differences exist. The other founding father of semiotics it the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce, who wrote that three kinds of signs exist: icons, which signify by resemblance (photographs of people, for example); indexes, which signify by logical relationships (smoke and fire), and

Introduction: Imagining Bali

15

symbols, whose meaning is completely arbitrary and must be learned. Peirce’s theories differ considerably from those of de Saussure’s, but for our purposes we can combine their two approaches and focus our attention on signs of all kinds (Zeman, 1977: 36).

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PART I: TOURISM IN BALI

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Chapter 1

The Image The Image ofofBali Bali inin Guidebooks Guidebooks In this chapter, to show how guidebooks to Bali characterize the island, I will quote the first paragraph in the book from a selection of guidebooks on Bali I’ve collected. It will give you an idea of how the writers of these books wanted their readers to see Bali. Then I will compare these descriptions of Bali with some material from scholarly books on Bali tourism, to show how they differ in terms of their concerns. BALI HANDBOOK, 2ND EDITION Bill Dalton, the author of this book, points out that Bali is part of Indonesia, and offers a rather dark image of the island. He writes: This tiny island of nearly three million Hindus, surrounded by a sea of 190 million Muslims, is one of the smallest yet most visited of Indonesia’s many islands. More than 500,000 visitors arrive each year on this beautiful isle that exactly fits the Western definition of a tropical paradise, famous for its charming people, lovely scenery, and the sophisticated artistry of its distinctly Indonesian-Hindu civilization. Earlier versions of this Hindu culture once flourished over large areas of Java and portions of other islands, but it’s now found almost exclusively on Bali. Today Bali is less a western Pacific paradise than an Asian hotbox—overpopulated, overdeveloped, underfed, and prone to eruptions both volcanic and political. (Dalton, 1997: 1)

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BALI TOURISM

Dalton published his book in 1997, five years before the terrible bombing in Kuta Beach in Bali, but his words indicate the volatile nature of the island and describe the many problems the island faces— problems that have been exacerbated by the increase in tourism in Bali in recent years. He dismisses the notion that Bali is a tropical paradise, which, he points out, is a Western perspective, and uses the metaphor of Bali as a hotbox to characterize the island. One might say that Dalton’s view of Bali helps us understand, to some degree, why the bombing took place. Dalton’s Bali Handbook is probably the most complete, most detailed, and most honest view of Bali. It is more than 700 pages long, with double columns and numerous boxes, illustrations, and charts. When Dalton wrote his book, 500,000 people visited Bali each year. Since then the number of tourists increased, on average, to 1.5 million visitors per year. The bombing in Kuta in October 12, 2002, devastated the tourism industry in Bali and it has struggled, since then, to attract visitors. INSIGHT’S POCKET GUIDES: BALI The first paragraph of this book, published in Singapore by APA Publications, reads as follows: Welcome. Both magical and mythical, this land of volcanic lakes, spectacular rice terraces and ancient temples and palaces is a melting cauldron of cultures and peoples. Renowned for its unsurpassed architecture, traditional theatre and dance, and elaborate religious festivals, the evocative Balinese culture is a lively dynamic force that is constantly synthesizing the old and the new, the traditional and the innovative. You may be surprised by Bali’s modernness, but you’ll be equally intrigued by the medievalism of its culture—an isolated civilization still experiencing its golden age. (Wijaya, 1998: 5) This introduction to Bali, written by Made Wijaya, an Australian who has lived in Bali for a number of years (and who changed his name to a Balinese one) raises a number of issues that have preoccupied tourism scholars over the years. Wijaya mentions that Bali has

The Image of Bali in Guidebooks

21

been “constantly synthesizing” its culture and has become Westernized, to a considerable extent. Yet, he argues, that it also maintains elements of its ancient culture, which tourists can enjoy. Scholars continue to debate the impact of the West on Bali and the degree to which the Balinese have modified certain aspects of their culture to suit the needs of its tourism industry. That is, do we find anything that is truly “authentic” in Bali, or is it a synthetic and artificial culture, designed for tourists? I will have more to say on this matter later in the book. BALI: INDONESIA This book, which appeared in 1999 and was published in Singapore, deals with the “magic” of Bali and its exceptionalism. The first paragraph reads as follows: Even today, there is a certain magic about Bali. The longer one stays on the island, the more one is impressed by the many exquisite sights and the scores of talented and charming people one encounters. All the tourist hype aside, Bali truly is exceptional. (Oey, 1999: 17) The author then goes on, in the second paragraph, to mention a topic that most guidebooks to Bali deal with—the notion that it is both an ancient and traditional society, one characterized by its cultural continuity and that is “alive and vital,” but also one that has accepted “new and innovative elements, whether home grown or foreign.” (Oey, 1999: 17). THE ROUGH GUIDE TO BALI & LOMBOK, 4TH EDITION I will skip some material in the first two paragraphs of this book because it doesn’t deal with Bali, per se, but with Bali and Lombok. The first paragraph that deals with Bali, in actuality the third paragraph on the page, reads as follows:

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BALI TOURISM

The tiny island of Bali (population three million) draws in more than one and a half million foreign visitors every year, plus around a million domestic tourists. As a result, it has become very much a mainstream destination, offering all the comforts and facilities expected by better-off tourists, and suffering the predictable problems of congestion, commercialization and breakneck Westernization. However, its original charm is still very much in evidence, its stunning temples and spectacular festivals set off by the gorgeously lush landscape of the interior. (Reader and Ridout, 2002: v). What we find in this passage is a muted ambivalence about visiting Bali: the authors mention the problems tourism causes everywhere and, at the same time, offer a rather glowing image of Bali’s delights. Tourism has led to an upgrading of the hotels and infrastructure, but also to problems. However, the discriminating tourist, we are led to believe, will still find Bali’s charm in tact and still be able to have wonderful experiences in Bali. CONCLUSIONS What do we learn about Bali from these four paragraphs? They have certain concerns in common. First, they mention that Bali is “tiny,” which suggests that it is also fragile and implies that it is perhaps weak and unable to cope with the pressures brought on by the development of tourism in the island. We have a small population, of three million Hindus living in Bali, surrounded by a huge Muslim population, in Indonesia, of some 190 million people. In addition, a number of the authors mention the matter of the way the people of Bali have adapted, if that’s the right word, to modernization and the pressures of tourism. The Balinese people, it is suggested, have managed to hold on to their ancient ways, though perhaps in modified forms, and have created a fascinating blended culture that combines ancient practices and modern ways of living. We find the word “charm” being used to describe the Balinese people and the island itself. The people of Bali, with their distinctive “theatrical” or “ceremonial” culture, are held to be welcoming and

The Image of Bali in Guidebooks

23

kindly. It is only Bill Dalton, with his metaphor of Bali as a “hotbox,” who suggests that beneath the calm surface of life in Bali, for the people there and the tourists who visit the place, dark and surging forces are at work. We are left with two conflicting images of Bali, expressed in two different metaphors: Bali is a tropical paradise and Bali is a hotbox. The answer may be that Bali is both. It is important, also, to realize that writers of tour guides have a vested interest in “selling” the country they are writing about. So superlatives can be used rather loosely. Some of the adjectives used to describe Bali and its people follow: beautiful, lively, charming, dynamic, magical, and mystical. But at the same time the writers of these books—in their very first paragraphs—do raise issues and some “red flags” that give their readers an honest and fairly accurate appraisal of what they can expect to find when they travel to Bali.

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In his essay, “Creating a New Version of Paradise,” Michael Picard points out that many people in the West see Bali as “paradise,” with inhabitants of the island blessed with remarkable artistic abilities. These notions are connected, Picard argues, to romantic notions people in the west have about Bali, which, we must recognize, have been developed by the Indonesian government as a tourist destination. (Oey, 1999)

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Chapter 2

BaliBaliononthe the Internet Internet In this chapter I will deal with the way Bali is characterized on the Internet, starting with what happens when you type “Bali” on Google. BALI GOOGLED If you type “Bali” on Google, your first page informs you that there are millions of sites that have something about Bali in them. On August 13, 2007, when I typed “Bali” in Google, I found 37,700,000 links to Bali. The Web links to Bali on the first page which were: 1. Bali.com: The Best of Bali 2. Bali: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 3. Bali Paradise Online 4. Bali Travel Information: Lonely Planet Destination Guide 5. Bali Hotels Discount Bali Travel Bali Hilton, Bali Hotel, Bali 6. Baliguide.com: Information about Bali in Indonesia These links offer insights into the way Bali is presented on Google and by implication on the Internet in general. Other search engines are different in terms of what they show, and some require searchers to narrow their searches down to a number of different categories. Each of these Web sites leads to other sources of information. Thus, for example, the first Web site, Bali.com offers other sites to investigate, depending upon one’s interests and desires. The Bali.com site listed the following sites:

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BALI TOURISM

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Balivillas.com “Kembali: Return to School” Charity Program Your Best Choice: Private Vacation Villas in Bali Private Villas in Bali: Listed by Price Private Villas in Bali: Listed by Location Weddings, Renewal of Vows, and Honeymoons in Bali Advantages of Renting a Private Villa in Bali How to Select and Reserve the Best Villa or Hotel in Bali on the Internet Bali Hotel Bargain Hunter Bali Today: Continually Updated Insider’s Guide Scheduled or Chartered Cruises from Bali Save with BALIVACATIONS Packages from the U.S. Baliproperties.com: Acquiring and Owning Property in Bali Detailed Bali Map The Bali Paradise Paradox Internet Access from Bali Bali Weather Report and 5-Day Forecast Currency Exchange Rates Bali Tours: What to See and Do in Bali Food and Restaurants in Bali Recipes for Traditional Balinese Food and Delicacies Bali after Dark Private Boat and Yacht Charters from Bali “Bali Impian Estates” Villas for Sale Potential Hazards for Visitors to Bali The “BEST of BALI” Poll Page Real-time Bali and Indonesia News The “BALI travel FORUM” The “BALI travel FORUM Summary”

The remaining eight sites were in Russian, German, Mandarin, or Japanese. Each of these thirty-seven sites, when opened, generally would lead on to numerous other sites, so a branching system exists in which one site, Bali.com, leads to thirty-six other sites, which, in turn lead on to countless other sites. The topics found in the sites give a pretty good idea of what tourists planning to visit Bali might be interested in and what people in

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the Balinese tourism industry think visitors might find interesting and valuable. The quotation with which I began this chapter, on the paradox of tourism in Bali, was item 15 on this list. The list deals with the basic needs of tourists: housing, food, things to see and do, problems that might be encountered, and so on. It is obvious that an enormous amount of information about Bali is available on the Internet. A number of scholarly sites on Bali can be accessed through Google Scholar, and I was able to find thirty scholarly articles by anthropologists and other social scientists in a very short time and download them onto my computer. BALI ON FROMMER’S FORUM SITE A number of forums are available to travelers who wish to give their impressions of trips they’ve had, alert readers to good hotels and restaurants, and solve problems that people send to the forum. I’ve included in this section a negative comment about Bali that appeared in a Frommer’s online forum in 2004 as well as a set of reader replies, which will give you a decent idea of what can be found in travel forums. Many of the selections found in these forums are very specific and ask about certain places, specific hotels, and ask (or answer) travel questions. The first two quotes are taken directly from the Web site (Frommer’s, 2004). Subsequent responses have been paraphrased. I’ve also disguised the names of all the people involved in this discussion of Bali. Frommer’s Travel Talk Travel Talk/Asia/Bali and Indonesia Bali ain’t no Bali Hi! Joe March, 2004 “Bali’s tourism is off 50 percent. The hotels are empty. The shops are empty, the restaurants are empty. People are begging like never before. The island is polluted, noisy, and commercialized as hell. Having lived in the Philippines and other spots I found Bali highly overrated. . . .”

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Frank (1 of 8) May, 2004 “Joe, it might interest you to know that the commercialism you saw is a struggling post bomb population desperately trying to forge a living, to earn some money to feed, school, and care for their family. They do not have massive wealth or a nice secure world like you they make do with what they have and do you know what—those poor desperate Balinese still smile—yes smile despite the poverty, despite hard times and despite the sort of banal comment from the likes of you. . . .” Kyle (2 of 8) August 2004 Kyle shared that he had spent a week in Bali with his girlfriend and loved it, in great measure because of the Balinese people. Patty (3 of 8) September 2004 Patty reported that she’d visited Bali twice and loved the place, and that she intended to go back again. Cassie (Tennessee) (4 of 8) October 2004 Cassie reported that she’d just returned from her sixth trip to Bali, and, as expected, had loved it. She deemed it worth the long trip from home. Sam (5 of 8) November 2004 Sam is a Hawaiian who lives in Bali and says that the Bali experience depends a great deal on where tourists go, who they meet, and what their outlook is. He adds that tourists who only go to Kuta and take only quick trips to various sites in Bali are missing the real Balinese experience.

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Lillian (6 of 8) November 2004 Lillian wondered whether Joe visited the same island she did. She writes that her husband is from Indonesia and they visit Bali every year. Fran (Holland) (7 of 8) February 2005 Fran chastises Joe for spreading negativity, and she asks him to reconsider his negative appraisal of Bali, and his negative attitude in general. She suggests he learn to live life “to the fullest” and try to find joy in life wherever he is. Jenni (8 of 8) February 2005 Jenni thanks Cassie for sharing her photos of Bali and says she’s going to Bali and is thinking of going to a hotel that looked interesting in Cassie’s photos. (Frommer’s, 2004) The first item on this forum is a negative appraisal of Bali, by someone who didn’t find much to like about the island and stated his preference for Hawaii. The remainder of the thread offers defenses of Bali, attacks on Joe, and comments on the nature of tourism. Joe’s criticisms were that Bali is overly commercialized, noisy, polluted, and that the people on island are doing a great deal of begging. He writes that he has lived in the Philippines and other places, presumably similar in nature to Bali, and suggests more interesting destinations, such as Lombok, Komodo, and so on. Frank’s comments deal with the situation in Bali after the horrible bombing and explains why the Balinese are so hard pressed to earn a living. He points out that despite their difficulties, the Balinese still manage to smile, and that it is the warmth and friendliness of the people that leads him, and other Australians, to visit Bali. This sense that the Balinese people are welcoming and “warm and friendly” is an important theme found in several of the comments. Cassie, the fourth commenter, didn’t argue with Joe but merely stated that she’s been to Bali six times and loves it.

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Sam, the fifth commenter, is a Hawaiian who lives in Bali and points out that tourists who stay most of the time in Kuta and other beach towns don’t get to experience “the magic of the Balinese culture.” Lillian, commenter six, says that not having people such as Joe in Bali is fine and makes it better for those who do enjoy it, and Fran, commenter seven, suggests that Joe’s expectations were too high, so he was bound to be disappointed and that his negativity was ill founded. She points out that he didn’t like one thing about Bali. Finally, Jenni says nothing about Joe’s critique but thanks Cassie for posting her photographs. This discussion, one of many on the Frommer’s Travel Talk forum for Bali, offers us an overview of the way people respond to Bali. Some are put off by the commercialism and the hawkers, while others find many different things to like, or love, about Bali. Joe, presumably, will never go to Bali again, whereas Cassie from Tennessee has been there six times. The Keith Loveard selection from his article “The Paradise Paradox” in Asiaweek was posted on the Internet and it deals with the complexities of Balinese culture and the impact of tourism on Bali (Loveard, 1997). The Internet, it is fair to say, offers potential tourists who use it information about Bali, an enormous amount of information about every aspect of Bali and Balinese culture, and, I think it fair to say, a fairly realistic picture of what they will find when they visit Bali. BLOGGING BALI Many personal blogs about Bali also exist on the Internet in which you can read about trips people have made, and are often accompanied by photographs. These blogs deal with a person’s (or sometimes a group of people’s) adventures and are useful because they go into details about aspects of Bali of interest to potential tourists. If you type “Bali blogs” into any search engine you will find a huge list of blogs about Bali. They are similar, in nature, to a letter a person might write to a friend, except that they are written for public consumption and, in some cases, for financial gain.

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We can see, then, that the Internet is a source of a great deal of information about Bali. You can find a travel agent to book a tour to Bali or book tickets on airlines by yourself, and you can get information about topics of interest, such as hotels to stay at, places to visit, restaurants worth going to, and names of guides. Marketers now study blogs to get a reading of how members of some target audience feel about something—whether it is a brand of jeans or a new film or music album. So blogs, and Internet forums, have a considerable amount of utility for people considering going to Bali who want to get personal opinions about the place. For those who are interested in finding out how scholars have dealt with Bali, a subject of great interest to academics of various persuasions, a number of scholarly papers and articles can be found on the Internet, some of which can be downloaded for free and others that require payment.

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Romantic Westerners once sold Balinese culture to the globe. Now locals wonder if their island is becoming a giant theme park. BIG MACS IN THE macrobiotic hills of Ubud? West Bali National Park handed over to a timber magnate for eco-tourism? Similar rumors of development doom have been flying on Indonesia’s fabled island ever since the 1930s, when it was first marketed to the world as paradise on earth. True or not, the latest whispers making the rounds point to an increasingly gnawing worry. More and more Balinese are asking: Is our home being turned into a giant theme park? Nothing perhaps has stoked fears more that Bali is being Disneyfied than the 40-story (140-meter) statue of the mythical Garuda bird that sculptor I Nyoman Nuarta is creating across from the international airport. Once it is completed in a couple of years, you can be sure tourist brochures will describe it as “The Largest in the World!” A recent history of Bali might well be called The Paradise Paradox. Here we have an Asian culture that was sold to the world by Western romantics, a Hindu island in a mostly Muslim archipelago, a tourist destination that is at once commercial and deeply spiritual. While other famous tropical idylls have succumbed to jet-loads of fun-seekers, Bali culture has proved itself remarkably resilient. Nor have the people utterly lost out to the powerful business elites from the neighboring island of Java. Nonetheless, with the government planning to divide the island into 21 tourist zones, locals and tourists alike are wondering yet again whether Bali’s photogenic dances and festivals, beaches and rice terraces can survive intact. (Loveard, 1997)

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Chapter 3

BaliBali Tourism Tourism Statistics Statistics The statistics on tourism in Bali that follow come from a number of different sources, such as the Bali Tourism Authority and articles in Asia Times online that deal with tourism in Bali. A large number of people are attracted to Bali, a “new version of paradise,” as it is described by Michel Picard in Eric Oey’s Bali: Indonesia, for varying reasons (Oey, 1999). This notion that Bali is seen as some kind of a tropical paradise (whether it deserves to be seen as such or not) is a theme that informs my analysis of tourism in Bali and one that is found in many books on Bali. DIRECT FOREIGN TOURIST ARRIVALS TO BALI 1973-2003 The data in Table 3.1 are a compilation of information taken from the Bali Tourism Authority, which tracks foreign tourism arrivals in Bali every year since 1973. I have selected the years 1973, 1983, 1993, and 2003 to give a longitudinal picture of the development of foreign tourism in Bali. We must always keep in mind the tragedy of the bombing in Kuta-Legian region on October 12, 2002, which dealt a devastating blow to tourism in Bali for several years. Bali Indonesia The total number of foreign visitors to Bali from 1969 to 2003 was 6,400,000. (All numbers have been rounded off; information retrieved from the Bali Tourism Authority.) To understand the significance of the number of tourists in Bali, I have presented figures for

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BALI TOURISM TABLE 3.1. Foreign Visitors to Bali

Population

Foreign visitors Bali

Foreign visitors Indonesia

3,000,000

200,000,000

1973

53,800

270,000

1983

170,500

638,000

1993

885,000

3,400,000

2003

993,000

4,456,000

Indonesia. You can see that Bali has more than a fifth of tourism for Indonesia, which suggests it is the most important tourism destination in Indonesia. These figures do not count internal tourism in Bali, which is considerable. WHO GOES TO BALI? In Table 3.2 I list in order of importance the countries whose populations visited Bali and offer figures on how many tourists came from each country for the years 2000-2003. Figures on tourism are often imprecise and sometimes inflated, so we always have to be on our guard when examining tourism figures. The figures for Table 3.3, from 2005, are adapted from Bali Tourism Board (2005). It’s impossible to be sure how accurate any figures are, but this does reveal some startling drops in the number of tourists visiting Bali from Australia, England, Germany, the United States, France, and Italy. One country, South Korea, actually increased the number of people traveling in Bali, moving from 13,000 tourists in 2000 to 46,000 in 2003. Bali generally has about 1.5 million foreign visitors each year. This means one foreign tourist is present for every two people in Bali. To gain some perspective on this figure, let’s consider the number of tourists in other countries, which is shown in Table 3.4. Since 2000, South Koreans have been visiting Bali in increasing numbers, but they still lag behind the number of tourists from Taiwan. We see that Austria, with a population of approximately 8 million people, re-

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TABLE 3.2. Bali Tourists by Nationality, 2000-2003 Tourists 2000

Tourists 2001

Tourists 2002

Tourists 2003

1. Japan

360,000

296,000

301,000

185,000

2. Australia

231,000

238,000

183,000

139,000

3. Taiwan

160,000

154,000

168,000

170,000

4. England

107,000

116,000

98,000

50,000

5. Germany

83,000

84,000

72,000

53,000

6. United States

80,000

68,000

50,000

36,000

7. France

43,000

43,000

43,000

29,000

8. Italy

39,000

33,000

32,000

12,000

9. The Netherlands

33,000

40,000

39,000

32,000

13,000

35,000

41,000

46,000

Country

10. South Korea

TABLE 3.3. Bali Tourists by Nationality, 2005 Nationality

Rank

Tourist Arrivals 2005

Japan

1

310,000

Australia

2

249,000

Taiwan

3

128,000

South Korea

4

78,000

United Kingdom

5

75,000

Germany

6

74,000

Malaysia

7

66,000

United States

8

51,000

France

9

44,000

10

42,000

The Netherlands

Source: Adapted from Bali Tourism Board (2005).

40

BALI TOURISM TABLE 3.4. Tourists Vists in Major Destinations, 2005

Country

Tourists Visiting

Population

1. France

79.1 million

60 million

2. Spain

58.5 million

41 million

3. United States

51.1 million

300 million

4. PR. China

49.6 million

5. Italy

41.1 million

58 million

6. United Kingdom

30.1 million

60 million

7. Germany

23.6 million

82 million

8. Mexico

21.4 million

103 million

9. Austria

20.3 million

8 million

20.2 million

143 million

10. Russian Federation

1.3 billion

Source: Adapted from World Tourism Organization (2007).

ceives more than 18 million foreign tourists in a typical year. So it isn’t the number of foreign tourists per population that is critical when we consider tourism in Bali, but the supposed “fragility” of the Balinese people and Balinese culture. Bali, incidentally, is approximately 2,200 square miles (roughly 50 miles by 40 miles). It is about the size of the state of Delaware in the United States, which has a population of about 820,000 people—about a third of Bali’s population of three million people. THE IMPORTANCE OF TOURISM IN BALI An article in the online Asia Times states that either directly or indirectly, tourism provides incomes for as much as 80 percent of Bali families (LaMashi, 2003). If this is the case, the precipitous decline in tourism in Bali after the bombing of the Kuta nightclub in October 2002 had an incredible impact. In November of 2002, 72,000 foreign visitors came to Bali. In October of 2003, the figure was 31,000. Bali had 419,000 fewer visitors after the bomb, and tourist spending declined by $400,000,000 (LaMashi, 2003). In addition, the composition of the tourists changed as more Asian tourists came to Bali.

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41

Many of them were on five-day packages that were heavily discounted, and the spending patterns of these tourists were considerably different from those of European tourists and “free-spending” Australians who used to flock to Bali. In article published on www.BaliDiscovery.com, the chairman of the Working Committee for Bali Recovery, I. Gusti Kade Sutawa, argued that the tourism industry in Bali was not recovering, even though statistics on foreign visitor arrivals were growing. In an address to the press on April 26, 2004 he said: How can you claim recovery when, in fact, the tourism industry is still gasping for air? Occupancy rates of hotel in Candi Dasa are on the average below 15 percent. And don’t forget we lost 40 percent of our European market. (Bali Discovery Tours, 2004) Sutawa argued that the government was mistaken in assuming that foreign tourism arrivals at Bali’s Ngurah Rai airport told the whole story and claimed that the government wasn’t doing enough to help the tourism industry in Bali get out of the “crisis” mode in which it found itself. The loss of the European market was especially critical since European tourists (and tourists from other first world nations) generally have higher spending power and stay for longer periods of time than Asian tourists do. Since it takes a long time and costs a considerable amount of money for European and American tourists to get to Bali, they tend to stay for longer periods of time. And when the amount of time European and American tourists spend in Bali and their spending power is factored in, the loss of this market was of considerable importance. It shouldn’t be surprising to notice that among the countries sending the most tourists to Bali were Japan, England, Germany, the United States, Italy, and France. This is because these countries spend the most amount of money on foreign travel, as Table 3.5 demonstrates. The World Tourism Organization lists the top tourism spenders as the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and the United States, so it is reasonable to expect to find tourists from these countries in Bali (World Tourism Organization, 2003). One interest fact that emerges from Tables 3.6 and 3.7 is that people from the United Kingdom are the top spenders in terms of money

42

BALI TOURISM TABLE 3.5. International Tourism Expenditures, 2004

Country

Billions of U.S. dollars

Germany

71.0

United States

65.6

UK

56.5

Japan

38.2

France

28.6

Italy

20.5

Source: Adapted from World Tourism Organization (2005).

Table 3.6. Per Capita Tourism Expenditures, 2004

Country

Expenditure (U.S. dollars)

Population

Per capita

Rank

Germany

71.0 billion

82 million

$861

2

UK

56.5 billion

60 million

$938

1

United States

65.6 billion

293 million

$224

5

Japan

38.2 billion

127 million

$300

4

France

28.6 billion

60 million

$474

3

Source: Adapted from World Tourism Organization (2005).

TABLE 3.7. Per Capita Tourism Expenditures, 2007 Country

Expenditure

Population

Per capita

Ranking

United States

60 billion

300 million

$222

5

Germany

46 billion

82 million

$575

2

United Kingdom

37 billion

60 million

$637

1

Japan

31 billion

127 million

$258

4

France

17 billion

61 million

$293

3

Source: Adapted from World Tourism Organization (2005).

Bali Tourism Statistics

43

spent per capita on foreign travel and tourism. Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are “neighbors” of Bali, so to speak, so it is reasonable to expect them to provide large number of tourists. But high up on the list of countries providing foreign tourists to Bali we find England, Germany, the United States, and France. In my case, I booked a tour to Bali with a company I found on the Internet, Escapes Unlimited. If I had chosen to fly to Bali on Cathay Pacific, a round-trip ticket to Bali, five nights at a two-and-a-half star hotel, and a half day tour of Bali would have cost $829. The company also provides transportation to the hotel from the airport and to the airport from the hotel. My wife and I decided to go on Singapore Airlines, because we wanted to stop off in Singapore for a few days, so our tour cost $889 per person. If you visit Singapore and fly on Singapore Airlines, you can get very favorable rates at hotels there—approximately half the stated price for rooms. We also extended our trip, which Escapes Unlimited allows (for up to thirty-one days). It is possible to find very decent hotels in Bali for around $25 a night, generally including breakfast. This independent tour package is similar in price to other companies that offer package tours to Bali. Prices rise during certain high periods, but Escapes Unlimited offered this price from January 10 to May 31, 2005, and August 17 to December 8, 2005. My agent at Escapes Unlimited had been to Bali seventeen times, and obviously had a love affair with the island. Why people “fall in love” with Bali is a subject that has been of great interest to anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars involved with tourism. I decided to go to Bali because several people I had met at parties and other places had spoken in glowing terms about their visits there. A friend of mine, who had been to Bali twice, loved the place and said he’d like to go back again. On the other hand, I have met people who didn’t like it at all. As one person put it, “I didn’t see anything so great about the place. We stayed in a beach town, but we also went to Ubud. I like Hawaii a lot better.” But this kind of a difference of opinion about places to travel is to be expected, because people have varying interests and tastes.

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From the start, the Balinese have evinced an ambivalent attitude toward tourism, which they perceived as being at once filled with the promise of prosperity and yet fraught with danger. The foreign invasion was seen to contain the threat of “cultural pollution” which might destroy those very traditions which provided Bali’s main attraction for tourists. According to Indonesian tourism officials, the influx of tourists has helped the Balinese revive many of their cultural traditions and reinforced their cultural identity. In truth, Picard argues, the Balinese cultural traditions never were destroyed and thus didn’t need to be revived. The Balinese have come to recognize, he suggests, that their culture is a valuable commodity that can be “photographed, staged, promoted, reproduced and sold.” (Oey, 1999: 85)

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Chapter 4

Is BaliIsaBali Southeast a Southeast Asian Asian Disneyland? Disneyland? Michel Picard, a French anthropologist, is the author of one of the most important books on Bali, Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture (Picard, 1996). The quote preceding this chapter offers a capsule view of his analysis of Balinese tourism; he argues that we should not ask whether the impact of tourism on Bali (or any place, for that matter) is positive or negative, but should look at how tourism impacts on Bali and how the Balinese have responded to tourism. CULTURAL TOURISM AND TOURISTIC CULTURES Cultural tourism refers to the policy adopted by the Dutch rulers of Bali, and later by Indonesian government when Indonesia had gained independence, to make Bali into an important tourist destination. This has been spectacularly (a word chosen on purpose) successful, as tourism in Bali went from 6,000 visitors in 1969 to 1,230,000 visitors in 1997. In a review of Picard’s book, Shinji Yamashita, one of the foremost scholars of tourism in Bali (and author of Bali and Beyond: Explorations in the Anthropology of Tourism) suggests that tourism has now become an increasingly important aspect of the study of culture nowadays and that in many places “traditional dress, traditional houses, and traditional dances exist only for tourists.” Tourism becomes, as Dean MacCannell writes, “a field of cultural production on a global scale” (Yamashita, 1999). In his review of the Picard book, Yamashita explains that the Balinese decided to focus on, as one of their slogans put it, “Tourism for Bali, not Bali for tourism” (Yamashita, 1999). As a result of becoming conscious of the importance of their culture, financially and oth-

47

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BALI TOURISM

A scene in the Barong-Rangda dance.

erwise, the Balinese decided to “stage” their culture for tourists and become a “touristic culture.” This has reached the point, Picard argues, that it is not impossible in many cases to differentiate between arts that were “ethnographic” or, in other words, authentic, and arts that are created or staged for tourists.

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NEW UNDERSTANDINGS OF CULTURE This means, Yamashita (1999) argues, that tourism has changed the way we see culture. It sees culture as dynamic and not static, especially as culture relates to tourism. As he writes: . . . culture is not regarded as a static entity, but rather as always in the process of creation and re-creation within a changing sociopolitical environment. When one examines these kinds of cultural processes, one has to adopt the framework not of a narrative of “authentic” cultures which are vanishing, but rather a narrative of new cultures emerging. Culture in this context is, therefore, not the body of “unconscious customs” with which conventional anthropology had previously been concerned but rather it is an object of conscious manipulation, invention, and consumption, within a broader social, economic and cultural context. (Yamashita, 1999) Tourism has led, then, to a major change in the way we think about culture. Anthropologists used to think of the “traditional” that they investigated as essentially static and unchanging or “authentic.” Now, thanks to our focus on tourism as a part of anthropology, we see cultures as dynamic, always changing, always evolving. Cultures, according to this definition of the term, are not “dead” specimens examined in the moral equivalent of a Petri dish by anthropologists who were “parachuted” down into the middle of isolated “primitive” and supposedly static cultures, but are—and have always been, even if we didn’t recognize that this was so—evolving and changing. I should point out that an estimated hundred different definition of culture have been offered by anthropologists and scholars in other disciplines. What follows is a definition from the Dictionary of Sociology and Related Terms that covers most of the ideas associated with the concept of culture: A collective name for all behavior patterns socially acquired and transmitted by means of symbols, hence a name for the distinctive achievements of human groups, including not only such items as language, tool-making, industry, art, science, law, government, morals and religion, but also the material instruments

50

BALI TOURISM

or artifacts in which cultural achievements are embodied and by which intellectual cultural features are given practical effect, such as buildings, tools, machines, communication devices, art objects . . . As culture is transmitted by processes of teaching and learning, whether formal or informal, by what is called “inter-learning,” the essential part of culture is to be found in patterns embodied in social traditions of the group, that is, the knowledge, ideas, values, standards and sentiments prevalent in the group. (Fairchild, 1967: 80) Clifford Geertz (1973) devotes a considerable amount of attention to understandings of what culture is and how it is to be studied in his book The Interpretation of Cultures. His use of the term interpretation suggests that dealing with culture is, to a great extent, a matter of interpretation and not simply a matter of data collection. After all, after data is collected, it still has to be interpreted, so there is no escaping from interpretation. One problem with the hypothesis suggested by Yamashita (1999), namely that cultures are always evolving, is that if cultures are always changing to suit the needs and desires of people in a particular culture (or tourists who come to visit that culture), can anything be called culture . . . or a distinctive culture? Are these changes leading to what Claude Lévi-Strauss called a “monoculture,” a worldwide culture that is essentially the same everywhere? On the other hand, if you think about individuals, they change all of the time, yet, most of the time, they also maintain their identities and personalities. So change doesn’t necessarily mean a loss of identity, or, in the case of Bali, a loss of “authentic” Balinese culture. CAN PARADISES CHANGE? ADAM AND EVE IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN The tendency to think of primitive cultures as unchanging comes, I would suggest, from the most important paradise story for those living in the first world countries of the West—namely the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In this story, Adam and Eve exist in a natural paradise, the Garden of Eden. They can remain in the Garden for eternity, but one thing is forbidden to them—eating from

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51

the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As we read in the Book of Genesis: And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2: 8-9, King James Version) God told Adam, the first man, that if he ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil he would die. But Eve, the first woman, was beguiled by the serpent that lived in the garden and ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and also convinced Adam to eat from it. This led to “the fall” (“In Adam’s fall, we sinned all”), and as a result of Adam’s transgressions, Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden; he was condemned to work, women to bear children “in sorrow,” and the serpent was condemned to slither on its belly, with eternal enmity between serpents and human beings. It is only after Adam and Eve’s eyes “were opened” that they recognized that they were naked and so they sewed fig leaves together to hide their nakedness. And Adam and Eve and all human beings after them were no longer to have eternal life. We see this in the passage in which God says to Adam, “For dust thou art, And unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3: 19, KJV). The expulsion of Adam and Eve opens the door to human history, for before their expulsion, they lived in a kind of eternal present, without awareness of good and evil, or anything else for that matter. Thus, I would suggest that in the popular mind people see paradise as static, as unchanging, as not influenced by good and evil and human transgressions. This is why I believe many people bring to Bali and other so-called “tropical paradises” unreal expectations and a notion that Bali and other southeast Asian paradises exist in a state of radical and unchanging innocence. In this scenario, the tourist becomes the serpent, bringing not only knowledge of good and evil but actual good and evil to the Adamic innocents living in Bali and elsewhere. We can see interesting paral-

52

BALI TOURISM

lels between the paradise story in the Bible and ideas and attitudes about tourism in Bali (see Table 4.1). The problem with this comparison is that it assumes that Bali, like the Garden of Eden, is unchanging and that its inhabitants are unaware of the modern world and have not been affected by it. But this isn’t the case with Bali just as it isn’t the case with the ethnic tribes in Thailand and Vietnam and people living everywhere else in the world. This is because, except perhaps for a few isolated and unknown tribes in the middle of the Brazilian jungle or other jungles, people and societies are always changing. Even societies and cultures that might seem to be extremely traditional often are in tune with developments all over the world, as the result of the ubiquity in recent years of television, films, and other forms of mass-mediated culture. No Shangri-las exist in the real world, and people who live in third world countries are generally not as simple or backward as we may think. Tourists who have naive notions of what Bali is like are likely to be shocked when they discover that Bali is highly commercialized and that the aspects of Balinese culture to which tourists are exposed has been shaped, in large measure, by governmental bureaucrats in Indonesia, and, as well, by the Balinese people in response to the perceived desires of tourists to Bali. IS BALI A KIND OF DISNEYLAND? As I read through the travel guides to Bali, which are often very clear about the commercialization of Balinese culture and the problems that tourism has created for Bali, I couldn’t help but wonder—is TABLE 4.1. The Garden of Eden and Bali The Garden

Bali

Adam and Eve

Balinese people

The Serpent

Tourists

Knowledge of Right and Wrong

Modernism

Expulsion

Destruction of Culture

Poison

Money

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53

Bali a Southeast Asian kind of Disneyland? Disneyland advertises itself as a kind of paradise, as “The Happiest Place on Earth.” Bali is conventionally seen as a “tropical island paradise,” but one that has made many accommodations to suit the needs of its highly developed tourism industry. See Table 4.2 for some comparisons and differences between Disneyland (and Disney World) and Bali. Disneyland, the self-proclaimed “Happiest Place on Earth,” is a contrived paradise, a theme park that is obsessively clean and one in which Disney’s pop culture characters such as Mickey Mouse hold sway. Workers in Disneyland are trained to smile and are taught how to relate to patrons, who generally pay a considerable amount of money to go to Disneyland. The executives in the Disney corporation who created and run Disneyland and Disney World pay a great deal of attention to how it is perceived by people who visit it, and have a vested interest in making certain, to the extent that they can, that people come back. Relatively little is available to do in these parks except “spectate,” and go on rides, for which one must wait in long lines that the Disney designers cleverly disguise and break up so that those waiting in line don’t realize how long they must wait. Few opportunities exist to test one’s abilities in games of chance or similar entertainment. The rides are often exciting, which means a typical visit to Disneyland has moments of great excitement that occur occasionally between long waits between rides and other Disney “experiences.” TABLE 4.2. Disneyland and Bali Compared Disneyland

Bali

Man-made paradise

Natural paradise

Completely artificial

Somewhat artificial

Ecologically advanced

Ecologically backward

Hyperclean, aseptic

Messy

Pop culture rituals

Cultural rituals

Contrived spectacles

Religious spectacles

Pastiche

Unitary

Christian

Hindu

Anal

Phallic/genital

Disney Corporation

Indonesian tourism officials

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BALI TOURISM

For the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, Disneyland and Disney World represent examples of what he describes as “hyperreality,” the triumph of simulations over reality. He writes: . . . Disney, the precursor, the grand initiator of the imaginary as virtual reality, is now in the process of capturing all the real world to integrate it into its synthetic universe, in the form of a vast “reality show” where reality itself becomes a spectacle [vient se donner en spectacle], where the real becomes a theme park. The transfusion of the real is like a blood transfusion, except that here it is a transfusion of real blood into the exsanguine universe of virtuality. After the prostitution of the imaginary, here is now the hallucination of the real in its ideal and simplified version. At Disney World in Orlando, they are even building an identical replica of the Los Angeles Disneyland, as a sort of historical attraction to the second degree, a simulacrum to the second power. . . . (Baudrillard, 1996) American scholar S. M. Fjellman explains the degrees of fakery found in Disney: “The concepts of real and fake, however, are too blunt to capture the subtlety of Disney simulations. As WDW things are not just real or fake but real real, fake real, real fake, and fake fake” (Fjellman 1992: 253). The Disney theme parks thus pose a problem to scholars who try to make sense of it. So many different kinds of simulations are established that it is hard to grasp what is happening in these parks. This question of authenticity in Disneyland and Disney World has relevance for our understanding of tourism in Bali. Bali is, of course, far different from the Disney creations in that Bali is an island with a distinctive culture—but one that has evolved in many respects, scholars tell us, to meet the requirements of tourists who visit the island. The influx of tourism in Bali has been produced, in part, by the Indonesian government, which decided to make Bali into a major tourism destination, because of the money to be gained by doing so. The Indonesian government also wanted to protect Bali’s distinctive culture, to the extent they could, from the “ravages” of mass tourism. The extent that Bali’s culture (or any culture “penetrated” by mass

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55

tourism) has been affected, for better or worse, by mass tourism is hard to determine. Michel Picard’s suggestion seems reasonable: we can’t know whether tourism’s influence is good or bad in Bali, so we should focus our attention on how the Balinese have responded to .

Ulan Danu Temple on Lake Bratan.

56

BALI TOURISM

tourism, moving from what he describes as cultural tourism to a touristic culture. THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY The aspects of Balinese culture that have been adapted for tourists may not be purely authentic, but they are not “fake” in the Disney sense; the Balinese culture tourists experience has been adapted to suit the needs and interests of tourists there (as perceived by Indonesian tourism officials and the Balinese people). These changes may be seen as typical of the adaptations people make in all cultures as new technologies and new ideas become popular. The United States of 2007 is far different from the way the country was in 1997, though certain core attitudes and values probably have remained constant. Sociologist Ning Wang, in his book Tourism and Modernity, explains the way that Disneyland, and, by implication, touristic simulations in general, are looked upon by postmodernists. He writes: Implied in the approaches of postmodernism is justification of the contrived, the copy, and the imitation. One of the most interesting responses to this postmodern cultural condition is Cohen’s recent justification of contrived attractions in tourism. According to him, postmodern tourists have become less concerned with the authenticity of the original . . . Two reasons can be identified. First, if the cultural sanction of the modern tourist has been the “quest for authenticity,” then that of the postmodernist tourist is a “playful search for enjoyment” or an “aesthetic enjoyment of surfaces.” Secondly, the postmodern tourist becomes more sensitive to the impact of tourism upon fragile host communities or tourist sights. Staged authenticity thus helps project a fragile toured culture and community from disturbance by acting as a substitute for the original and keeping tourists away from it. (Wang, 2000: 55) Wang’s argument is that postmodern tourists—that is, contemporary tourists who find themselves living in a postmodern age—are not concerned with authenticity the way modernist tourists supposedly were. Postmodern tourists are more interested in enjoying themselves

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and having fun, which means that “staged” authenticity (or simulations) are perfectly acceptable to them as long as they are entertaining. Wang adds that these simulated attractions have another benefit: they keep tourists away from fragile but authentic cultural sites and thus help them maintain themselves. The authenticity debate among tourism scholars assumes, then, a modernist perspective, but this notion doesn’t apply to many contemporary tourists, who perceive the world through postmodern perspectives. This helps explain, in part, why “fake” Balinese paintings and artifacts are purchased by tourists there. Most of these tourists aren’t necessarily interested in authentic Balinese art objects but in ones that reflect their cultural taste level, which in many cases may not be very elevated.

Rangda, the demon witch, takes the stage.

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BALI TOURISM

BALI AND THE CARNIVALESQUE: A HYPOTHESIS Bali, according to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, has its own version of the Hindu religion. As he explains in The Interpretation of Cultures: As the Balinese are, in a broad sense, Hindus, one might expect that a significant part, at least, of their religious life would be relatively well rationalized, that over and above the usual torrent of popular religiosity there would exist a developed system of either ethical or mystical theology. Yet this is not the case. A number of overintellectualized descriptions of it to the contrary, Balinese religion, even among the priests, is concrete, actioncentered, thoroughly interwoven with the details of everyday life, and touch with little, if any, of the philosophical sophistication or generalized concern of classical Brahmanism or its Buddhist offshoot . . . If one comes, as I did, to Bali after having worked in Java, it is the near total absence of either doubt or dogmatism, the metaphysical nonchalance, that almost immediately strikes one. That, and the astounding proliferation of ceremonial activity. The Balinese, perpetually weaving intricate palm-leaf offerings, preparing elaborate ritual meals, decorating all sorts of temples, marching in massive processions, and falling into sudden trances, seem much too busy practicing their religion to think (or worry) very much about it. (Geertz, 1973: 175-176) When I read Geertz’s description of the degree to which religious celebrations permeated Balinese culture, I could not help but think of the similarities between the “theatrical” and festival-rich Balinese way of life and what the critic M. M. Bakhtin wrote about in his discussions of carnival and moments of carnivalized culture in the middle ages. What follows is highly speculative undertaking, but I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to see some interesting similarities between Balinese highly ceremonial religious practice and medieval carnival periods and the phenomenon Bakhtin calls “carnivalization.” As Bakhtin writes, in his monumental and highly influential study of Rabelais Rabelais and His World:

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59

Carnival is a well- known festivity that has often been described throughout many centuries. Even during its later development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it still preserved certain fundamental traits in a quite clear, though reduced form. Carnival discloses these traits as the best preserved fragments of an immense, immensely rich world. This permits us to use the epithet “carnivalesque” in that broad sense of the word. (Bakhtin, 1984: 218) The carnivalesque aspects of life, Bakhtin adds, involve numerous and regularly scheduled feasts, a festive sensibility, various rituals and paraphernalia, and so on. These periods of carnival in Europe were held at certain times of the year and functioned as a means for people to escape, for a while, from the rigors of their everyday lives. Europe, in the middle ages, was saturated with religious thought and practice and centered around the church much the same way that Bali seems to be a highly ceremonial religion, centered around its temples, or so it seems from what I’ve been able to ascertain from reading

Typical temple scene in Bali.

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Geertz and other writers. Eventually, Bakhtin adds, the carnivalesque spirit became concentrated in carnival periods and, to this day, carnival is celebrated in many different countries with varying degrees of enthusiasm (Bakhtin, 1984). From what I’ve seen in Bali, I don’t think the element of folk merriment that Bakhtin sees in the carnivalesque is as strong in Bali as it was in medieval Europe, though the celebrations during those times had certain similarities to Balinese celebrations. Thus, Bakhtin writes, “the carnivalesque character appeared on private family occasions, christenings and memorial services, as well as on agricultural feasts, the harvest of grapes (vendage) and the slaughter of cattle” (Bakhtin, 1984). This carnivalesque spirit was almost destroyed by medieval asceticism. Carnival, Bakhtin (1984) explains, resembles spectacle, but it is different from spectacle in that it is not something seen by people but something people participate in. He writes, “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people” (Bakhtin, 1984: 7). The feasts, which played an important part in the carnival, were important because, Bakhtin (1984) asserts, “The feast (every feast) is an important primary form of human culture.” What we must recognize, he adds, is that these feasts didn’t lead people to an alternative life but instead sanctioned the social order, the pattern of things that existed at the time. He also mentions that a great deal of folk laughter and theater was connected with carnival. A COMPARISON OF BALINESE CEREMONIAL CULTURE AND CARNIVALIZATION We can see the similarities and differences between Balinese culture and what Bakhtin called “carnivalization” in Table 4.3. If this comparison is correct, it would suggest that one aspect of Bali that tourists like so much is that, in its own way, it offers tourists many of the gratifications and delights that are associated with the carnival, but it in regular and somewhat diluted form. Visitors to Bali may not recognize that life in Bali has a carnivalesque quality, but a fairly strong element of this quality does exist. Bakhtin (1984), we must re-

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TABLE 4.3. Bali and Carnivalization Comparison Bali

Carnivalization

Hindu

Catholic

The temple

The church

Nontheological

Mock theological

Serious

Comic

Dance

Theater

Integration

Liberation

Regular celebrations

Time-bound celebrations

Ritual meals

Feasts

Life cycle events important

Life cycle events important

Pigs slaughtered

Cows slaughtered

call, asserts that feasts are an important element in all cultures, so finding two cultures with feasts in common isn’t unusual, but interesting parallels and differences are apparent between Balinese culture and Bakhtinian carnivalization that are worth considering, at the very least.

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What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country . . . we are seized by a vague fear, and this instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being. . . . This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in travelling, and I look upon it as an occasion for spiritual testing. Pleasure takes us away from ourselves the same way that distraction, as in Pascal’s use of the world, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and grave science, brings us back to ourselves. (Camus, 1963: 13,14) “Tourist” is used to mean two things in this book. It designates actual tourists: sightseers, mainly middle-class, who are at this moment deployed through the entire world in search of experience. I want the book to serve as a sociological study of this group. But I should make it known that, from the beginning, I intended something more. The tourist is an actual person, or real people are actually tourists. At the same time, “the tourist” is one of the best models for modern-man-in-general. I am equally interested in “the tourist” in this second, metasociological sense of the term. Our first apprehension of modern civilization, it seems to me, emerges in the mind of the tourist. (MacCannell, 1976: 1)

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Chapter 5

Hypotheses Hypotheses About About Tourism Tourism and Bali and Bali In this chapter I will deal with some hypotheses or speculations about tourism in general, and as it relates to Bali in particular. Tourism is now the most important industry in the world, and as such should be taken seriously by scholars, and not, as used to be the case until fairly recently, considered a trivial matter. Tourism touches many different aspects of our lives, and now seems even to be shaping political behavior in many societies. Since this is the case, it is a subject that demands attention. What follows are some hypotheses about tourism that may help explain its importance and its impact. My focus here is on issues that are found in scholarly literature about tourism, but I consider other topics as well. This discussion is not a review of scholarly literature on tourism, but is a series of “probes” or hypotheses about tourism that I offer for consideration, some of which are quite fanciful. TOURISM AND THE BASE/SUPERSTRUCTURE PROBLEM In Marxist thought, a distinction is made between the base, the economic relations found in a given society, and the superstructure, the social and cultural institutions that, Marxists believe, stem from the base. Friedrich Engels (1972) explained the relationship between the two: The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive states, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the 65

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modes of production and exchange—in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. (Engels, 1972: 621) This theory suggests that the culture of a society is a function of its economic system, a matter that is highly questionable. But we can use this base/superstructure relationship to help make sense of tourism, for when tourism becomes a dominant force in a society, as it has in Bali, it would seem that the normal relationship between the base and the superstructure becomes reversed and the superstructure becomes the base. In a tourist destination such as Bali, where what the Balinese have to “sell” is their culture, it has now become the base, the dominant mode of economic “production” or, in simpler terms, of earning money. The culture, or superstructure in Marxist terms, now is the base, and the economic system becomes a reflection of or an adjunct to the superstructure. If this is so, it would explain why Bali has continued to fascinate tourism scholars in many disciplines and may also help explain, in part, Bali’s exceptionalism, its uniqueness. Bali, in Marxist terms, is dominated by its superstructure, reversing the order of things. Class struggles have occurred in Bali. I think we can consider the purge of communists in 1965, during which some 45,000 to 60,000 people were killed, an example of class (and political) struggle. What seems to have happened since then is that Bali, with its distinctive version of Hinduism, has been able to substitute caste consciousness for class consciousness. Still, the memory of the mass killings and the savagery of the Balinese people may also play a role in everyday life in Bali, as well and linger in the consciousness of the Balinese. Now that tourism is becoming the dominant industry in the world, it is possible to suggest that it is bringing about a major dislocation in the scheme of things, as the traditional economic structure in many places is now being replaced or shaped, in large measure, by superstructural phenomena such as culture, the arts, and related concerns. The superstructural cultural tail is now wagging the dog, that is, the economic base.

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THE MALE GAZE AND THE TOURIST GAZE Cultural theorists have, for a number of decades, written about the “male gaze.” This gaze involves males, who wield power in so-called phallocentric societies, gazing at women and seeing them, essentially, as sexual objects to be lusted after. What makes matters worse, theorists of the male gaze argue that in most societies women acquiesce to the male gaze, dress in ways designed to attract male attention, and are flattered to be gazed at, not recognizing that they are accepting their subordinate status in society. Thus, men look and women are looked at. The tourist gaze can be seen as a movement from focusing attention just on women (often in various stages of undress in advertisements for various products) to culture in general, which may still involve women. Tourists direct their gazing at visually arresting people and places and spend a good deal of energy and time in photographing them. I would suggest that this description of tourism is somewhat reductionistic. In a chapter titled “The Ideal Village: Interactions through Tourism in Central Anatolia,” Hazel Tucker discusses the tourist gaze. She describes tourist experiences in Goreme, a Cappadocian village in Central Turkey: Analysis of tourism and tourist culture have tended to work through a purely visual framework, responding to the perpetual visualization in tourism-related discourses. Indeed, Urry (1990) argues that tourism is all about gazing upon particular scenes that are different from those encountered in everyday life. Furthermore, this view of tourism has led Urry to the conclusion that since postmodernity is marked by “the proliferation of images and symbols” . . . tourism is coming home, since it is now possible “to see many of the typical objects of the tourist gaze . . . in one’s own living room, at the flick of a switch.” (Tucker 1997: 107) What the gaze theorists don’t acknowledge is that many tourists want to have interactions with people in the places they visit and want to do more than just see sights and photograph them. In addition, we must recognize that tourists are not the only ones doing the gazing.

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People in the places tourists visit also gaze back. I would argue that it is simplistic to suggest that tourism is essentially visual, that it is little more than sightseeing, and that the tourist gaze in foreign lands is not returned by the native gaze. Tourists gaze, because tourists go to places that are different from where they come from, so the visual aspects of tourism are important, but other components of tourism are also important. I also wonder whether tourism involves an amplification of the male gaze, which now becomes directed at all people in other cultures rather than being confined to women. It may also be that women who travel abroad take on the sense of power and dominance that males have in their societies and thus become “males,” and the “male” gaze is done by both males and females. The male gaze and the tourist gaze come together in Bali most explicitly in the photographs of barebreasted Balinese women, taken years ago, that are seen in so many guide books. “HAPPY NATIVES” IN COLONIZED NATIONS We now recognize that notions many people in imperial nations had of “happy natives” in the colonies were only rationalizations to justify their domination. The colonies and the people in the colonies were both exploited, and the experience of having been a colony can leave scars on the psyches of the colonized people in the same way that having a traumatic experience affects an individual’s psyche. The United States was once a colony of Britain, and it can be argued that Americans still have lingering remnants of the colonial experience in their psyches and national character. These cultural memories, however, did not prevent the United States from becoming a colonial power itself and maintaining, in a subtle way, colonies or supporting regimes in countries friendly to us. One of the few countries that did not have a colonial experience in Southeast Asia is Thailand, and the Thais are profoundly aware of this matter. Having been a colony may explain, to some degree, the way some Balinese react to tourists and others they find living in their midst. Those Balinese who work in the tourism industry are, of course, re-

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quired to interact with visitors from foreign lands, and one of the terms many tourists use to describe Balinese people is “charming.” How the Balinese really feel about tourism may be another matter. The French sociologist Michel de Certeau dealt with how people who are, for one reason or another, subordinates interact with those ranked above them. He deals in his book The Practice of Everyday Life with the “ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong” (1984: xvii). So-called “inferiors” develop a tactical approach to their interactions with their “superiors,” or those who have more power than they do, and usually create a repertoire of “tricks” and “ploys” to achieve their goals. In this respect, I recall reading Clifford Geertz’s (1973) description of how the villages reacted to him and his wife when they first arrived in a small village in Bali. The inhabitants of the village looked right through Geertz and his wife as if they didn’t exist. This state existed until, by chance, Geertz and his wife were at a cockfight that was raided. Rather than showing his papers to the police and getting off, Geertz and his wife ran away with other villagers and followed one Balinese man into a courtyard, where the man’s wife suddenly appeared with cups of tea and they pretended they were having afternoon tea and hadn’t been to the cockfight. After that, everything changed. I can recall reading other authors who have dealt with Bali, writing about how the Balinese often act as if no tourists are around them, how the Balinese more or less shut tourists out from their field of vision. Tourists then become invisible. This phenomenon is connected, perhaps, to what Geertz (1973) calls the “anonymization” of other Balinese with whom the Balinese are in daily contact due to a desire to avoid intimacy. But this rendering invisible of others is stronger, it seems, with tourists and strangers. Of course Geertz (1973) wrote about a small village he lived in, and he wrote a chapter on Balinese cockfights more than thirty years ago. Situations have changed, no doubt, due to the pressures of modernization, the impact of tourism, and the spread of Western mass media and popular culture. From what I can tell from my investigations, the Balinese relate to others in an extremely binary way: people either are treated as if they don’t exist or, on the opposite pole, they are treated very warmly. Americans, on the other hand, are often said to

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treat strangers warmly but are intimate with hardly anyone. This would suggest that the Balinese and Americans are what might be described as complementary opposites. This Balinese tactic I’ve been writing about, this rendering of tourists and others invisible, may be the best method the Balinese have to deal with tourists from foreign lands who, in many cases, “anonymize” or render the Balinese invisible and don’t take any notice of them to speak of. The Balinesian paradise then becomes, in a sense, “empty,” with the Balinese and tourists rendering one another invisible or anonymous, at least until they need one another. A DILEMMA FOR PEOPLE IN “EXOTIC” CULTURES Tourists who visit Bali generally consider it to be “exotic.” The word exotic comes from the Greek word exotikos, which means “foreign.” The exo in exotikos means “outside,” but in common usage also unusual, strange, different, distant (from another part of the world), and in certain cases glamorous. The “tic” is a suffix used with Greek words to create adjectives. One of the reasons tourists go to distant places is that they are in search of cultures that are different. There’s little sense in traveling thousands of miles to visit a country that’s just the same as the one you came from. So difference is an important matter. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure makes difference an important aspect of the way meaning is found in life. I alluded to his ideas earlier, but let me say something about his ideas in a bit more detail here. In his book Course in General Linguistics, de Saussure (1966) wrote: It is understood that concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the other are not . . . Signs function, then, not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position. (117-118) What this means, then, is that we make sense of concepts (and, by implication, everything else,) by placing them in a system of relation-

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ships and recognizing what they are by seeing what they are not. He added, “in language there are only differences” (de Saussure, 1966: 120) and “The entire mechanism of language . . . is based on oppositions” (de Suassure, 1966: 121). We make sense of the world, de Saussure (1966) argues, by seeing it in terms of relationships, and the basic relationship is that of oppositions. Since it is language that structures the way we think, oppositions play an important part in our thinking. It is here that the exotic comes into play. It is the exotic, that which is opposite to our ordinary, everyday life, that helps us define ourselves. We seek that which is different to understand better what we are like. The dilemma people in “exotic” countries such as Bali face is that since it is the exotic that tourists seek, the inhabitants of Bali must provide them with it, and if they were to modernize too much they would lose their attractiveness. The question becomes, then, how the Balinese maintain their “traditional” culture enough to satisfy tourists and yet make changes to help them function in the modern world. What happens in Bali and many other “exotic” countries, I would imagine, is that enough of the exotic, “traditional” Balinese culture exists (in the architecture, customs, traditions, ceremonies, food, arts) to satisfy tourists in search of the exotic, while, backstage, Balinese culture adapts to the twenty-first century. The Balinese, similar to many people in “exotic” cultures, find themselves in a difficult situation—they must balance touristic imperatives with modernization. From what I’ve seen, the Balinese are doing an excellent job. We have to recognize that some traditions are fairly new and some aspects of modernization hark back to earlier times—such as the “old towns” in many American cities that are now being refurbished for tourists. We tend to think of so-called “traditional” cultures as being frozen in time, but this is not the case by any means. Table 5.1 shows how the exotic contrasts with its opposite, everyday life, which is what we leave when we become tourists. The table overstates certain things in an effort to show how exotic cultures differ from American and other modern, everyday life, but it does capture the essence of the two ways of life. As I suggested, the modern and the traditional are not really polar opposites, but the two terms are useful in that they suggest different kinds of cultures.

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BALI TOURISM TABLE 5.1. The Exotic and the Everyday Compared

Everyday Life

The Exotic

Near

Distant

The present

The past

Familiar

Strange

Modern

Ancient, traditional

The skyscraper

The hut

The supermarket

The souk

Cathedrals

Hindu temples, mosques

Euro-American cuisine

Ethnic cuisines

Electronic

Mechanical

Suits, dresses

Turbans, robes, costumes

Source: Berger (2004). Reprinted with permission from Rowman & Littlefield.

The term exotic works both ways, of course. To people from third world countries and even other first world countries, America can be quite exotic. A visitor to an American high school would find the various groups of students there quite strange. In some American high schools one finds such groups as: preppies, jocks, surfers, skateboarders, punks, cheerleaders, geeks, dorks, Goths, hicks, metalheads, skinheads, vatos (Latinos), brothers (African Americans), dreads (African Americans with dreadlocks), and skaters. Many of these groups have their own ways of dressing, styling their hair, using body ornaments, and other subcultural attributes. Exotic is a relative term; people from distant lands would probably find these aspects of American culture exotic, whereas many Americans would use terms such as strange or bizarre for some of the groups and kinds of people one finds in America. IS BALI POSTMODERN? It might seem strange to suggest that a so-called “exotic” third world culture, such as the one we find in Bali, might also be postmodern. Postmodern Bali sounds like an oxymoron. The term post-

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modern has to do with periodization, and so we assume that you can have a postmodern society only after you have a modern one, which means a so-called traditional society, such as is found in Bali, has to become modern before it can become postmodern. It may be, however, that we can find postmodern societies in places such as Bali. One of the basic aspects of the postmodern involves the pastiche, a mixture of different elements in some entity, with simulations and a lack of concern with that which is “authentic.” The postmodern is also identified with a lack of belief in overarching and universal philosophical principles. On all of these counts I think it is reasonable to suggest that Bali is postmodern, and tourism was probably the agent that led to Bali achieving its postmodernity. For one thing, a great deal of eclecticism exists in Bali. Some people, in villages that are not frequented by tourists, lead the kind of lives that the Balinese have always led, though they have access to the new media, and this is a force for change. Other villages, where tourists frequent, have interesting combinations of contemporary consumer cultures and Balinese ceremonial religious cultures. The restaurant scene in Ubud, for example, is very eclectic now, and one can find French, Italian, Thai, Chinese, and other cuisines, in addition to the Balinese Indonesian-based cuisine. The Balinese form of Hinduism is, Geertz (1973) suggests, nontheological, and is focused on a seemingly endless series of ceremonies tied to the large number of Hindu temples found on the island. The Balinese, if Geertz (1973) is correct, are not interested in theology, but in religious practices, and this seems quite postmodern. In addition, the modified and adapted forms of dance and other kinds of artistic expression in Bali can be construed as “simulations” of sorts, suggesting something of the postmodern in them. Writers such as Daniel Boorstin (1961) attack these adapted forms of artistic expression as “impure,” but I’ve always thought it makes sense to tailor one’s arts to one’s audience. The best, by which I mean the traditional and unmodified forms of dance and music and artistic expression that Boorstin (1961) favors, is the enemy of the good— that which tourists can assimilate and appreciate. Boorstin (1961) writes from a modernist perspective; his writing on tourism and its so-called “pseudo-experiences” exudes a strong tinge of the elitist. Reading his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

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A beautiful Balinese temple.

(and by implication elsewhere in the world) I can’t help but think that he makes the same arguments about tourism that critics, over many decades, have made about popular culture and the mass media. His discussion of tourist attractions presages the discussions of sociologists and anthropologists and other scholars about tourism in Bali. As he writes: Tourist attractions serve their purpose best when they are pseudo-events. To be repeatable at will they must be factitious.

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Emphasis of the artificial comes from the ruthless truthfulness of tourist agents. What they can really guarantee you are not spontaneous cultural products but only those made especially for tourist consumption. Not only in Mexico City and Montreal, but also in the remote Guatamalan Tourist Mecca of Chichescastenago and in far-off villages of Japan, earnest honest natives embellish their ancient rites, change, enlarge, and spectacularize their festivals, so that tourists will not be disappointed. In order to satisfy the exaggerated expectations of tour agents and tourists, people everywhere obligingly become dishonest mimics of themselves. To provide a full schedule of events at the best seasons and at convenient hours, they travesty their most solemn rituals, holidays, and folk celebrations—all for the benefit of tourists. (Boorstin, 1961:103) Tourists, according to Boorstin, are agents of cultural destruction who lead his idealized natives in distant lands, and we might include Bali here, to bastardize, if not destroy, their traditional cultures and to prostitute themselves culturally (if not in other ways) for financial gain from “cash customers.” It’s worth considering Boorstin’s language in this passage. Notice in Table 5.2 his choice of words for what tourism lead to as contrasted with natives in destinations where tourists go. Boorstin (1961) is living in a fantasy land of distant cultures not affected, in any ways, by modernization forces, assuming his earnest natives live in a state of nature and have not changed over the years. There’s something extremist about his views—if a dance or a musical concert is not “pure” it is, then, worthless. As Michel Picard has suggested, tourism made the Balinese conscious of the richness of their culture and thus helped the Balinese strengthen their culture. If they made adaptations to suit the taste of the tourists who visit Bali, it doesn’t mean the Balinese have become “mimics” of themselves and made a travesty of their culture. Postmodernists have suggested that no important differences exist between elite arts and popular culture, and between what is real and what is a simulation. If tourism is full of “pseudo-events” and “pseudo-experiences,” as Boorstin (1961) argues, then he is really suggesting (without recognizing this) that in a number of respects,

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BALI TOURISM TABLE 5.2. Boorstin on Tourists and Natives

Tourists

Natives

Artificial

Spontaneous

Embellish

Ancient rites

Spectacularize

Earnest

Travesty

Honest

Exaggerated expectations

Solemn celebrations

Source: Compiled from Boorstin (1961).

Balinese culture is, indeed, postmodern. His book was subtitled Or What Happened to the American Dream. It was only in the paperback version that the subtitle was changed to A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. His book reflects the animus that many elitists had toward the common man and woman and the popular culture they enjoyed. Tourism, we must recognize, is a form of popular culture, and it is the mass or popular nature of tourism, unleashing “ugly Americans” (and ugly Japanese, British, French, Germans, and tourists from other countries) that seems to bother Boorstin and elitists like him the most. THE FOUR LIFESTYLES AND BALI AS A TOURISM DESTINATION British social anthropologist Mary Douglas has developed what she calls grid/group theory, which argues, in essence, that everyone (with rare exception) belongs to one of four lifestyles or consumer cultures in contemporary societies, each of which are antithetical to all the others. Her grid refers to whether few or many prescriptions must be followed, and her group refers to whether the boundaries in the group are strong or weak. In their book Cultural Theory Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky (1990) explain how the grid/group Typology works. They write: Our theory has a specific point of departure: the grid-group typology proposed by Mary Douglas. She argues that the vari-

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ability of an individual’s involvement in social life can be adequately captured by two dimensions of sociality: group and grid. Group refers to the extent to which an individual is incorporated into bounded units. The greater the incorporation, the more individual choice is subject to group determination. Grid denotes the degree to which an individual’s life is circumscribed by externally imposed prescriptions. The more binding and extensive the scope of the prescriptions, the less of life that is open to individual negotiation. (Thompson et al., 1990: 5) It would seem that the Balinese have, generally speaking, very strong group and grid affiliations. Table 5.3 shows these four lifestyles and how they relate to grid and group. Douglas also collaborated with the American political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, who gave the lifestyles the names they have. He used these four groupings to describe political cultures found in modern societies. (Douglas uses the term enclavists for egalitarians and isolates for fatalists.) According to Douglas, everyone belongs to one of these lifestyles whether they are aware of the matter or not, and it is membership in one of these lifestyles rather than psychological predispositions that shape their daily lives and preferences as consumers. They are each in competition with one another and hold feelings of mutual hostility toward one another. Hierarchists believe in stratification but have a sense of obligation to those beneath them. Individualists (or enclavists) believe in the free market and want as little government interference as possible. Egalitarians focus on the needs that all people have and want, especially to raise up the fatalists, who find themselves at the bottom of the ladder, with little chance of rising unless they are lucky.

TABLE 5.3. The Four Consumer Cultures or Lifestyles Lifestyle

Group Boundaries

Number of prescriptions

Hierarchists

Strong

Numerous and varied

Individualists

Weak

Few

Egalitarians

Strong

Few

Fatalists

Weak

Numerous and varied

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It would seem that Bali is, generally speaking, what Douglas would describe as essentially a hierarchical society—one that has strong boundaries, highly defined stratification, and numerous rules and prescriptions that people obey. In the most recent edition of Insight Guides: Bali we read: “Every Balinese individual is born into a community, and she or he remains part of the community from cradle to grave” (Rutherford, 2002: 67). The foundation of Balinese daily life are the banjar, which are, in essence: cooperative groups neighbors who assist each other at festivals, family gatherings and in crisis. Membership in the banjar is compulsory for every married man . . . From cradle to grave, the lives of Balinese are punctuated with various rites of passage that mark the leaving behind of a former stage in the life cycle and the signaling of the individual’s willingness to enter the next. Symbolic acts of shedding the old life—such as cutting hair or filing teeth—are typical elements of these rites of passage, which are often followed by carrying the individual undergoing the rite over a threshold of some sort or carrying them through the village in procession. (Rutherford, 2002: 67, 68) We can see, then, that in Bali we have both strong group membership and numerous and varied prescriptions, in the form of rituals, which suggests that Bali is a hierarchist society. In addition, Bali is overtly hierarchical, with a caste system and with different forms of language that are used to address people with higher or lower status. The three other lifestyles or cultures exist, to some extent, but the hierachist is dominant in Bali. The Marxist-egalitarian political culture was wiped out during the riots, where an estimated one hundred thousand people in Bali, not all of them Marxists, were killed. (Some scholars put the figure at around fifty thousand, I should add.) I should point out that Thompson et al. (1990) suggest that in most societies, the hierachist and individualist cultures are dominant, forming what they call “the establishment,” and the egalitarians function as critics of the two dominant cultures. Douglas explains how these lifestyles function in an article titled “In Defence of Shopping”:

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None of these four lifestyles (individualist, hierarchical, enclavist, isolated) is new to students of consumer behavior. What may be new and unacceptable is the point that that these are the only four distinctive lifestyles to be taken into account, and the other point, that each is set up in competition with the others. Mutual hostility is the force that accounts for their stability. These four distinct lifestyles persist because they rest of incompatible organizational principles. Each culture is a way of organizing; each is predatory on the others for time and space and resources. It is hard for them to co-exist peacefully, and yet they must, for the survival of each is the guarantee of the survival of the others. Hostility keeps them going. (Douglas, 1997) Her theory attacks the notion that ties consumption to individualist psychology, and, as she explains, “cultural alignment is the strongest predictor of preferences in a wide variety of fields.” (1997: 23). [My italics] So we have four lifestyles that, if Wildavsky and Douglas are correct, shape our preferences for everything from presidents to places to travel. How might we apply this grid-group theory of Douglas to tourist behavior in Bali? We can dismiss the fatalists from consideration, for they are generally without funds to undertake long and expensive (for them) trips, so we are left with three lifestyles: hierarchists, individualists, and egalitarians. What follows is a highly speculative attempt to use the Douglas typology to understand tourist behavior in Bali. Let me preface this analysis by pointing out that not everyone in a lifestyle acts exactly the same way as everyone else, though members of each lifestyle do share common views and have similar tastes. In addition, movement can occur from one lifestyle to another, except, that is, for fatalists, who find themselves stuck where they are, with little chance of escaping from their plight (see Table 5.4). The hierarchist tourists would tend to go to exclusive and expensive resorts in Bali, where they would presumably find others like themselves. They would be deeply ensconced in what Erik Cohen (1999) has described as the “tourist bubble,” by which he means firstworld creature comforts. Individualists, I would assume, might prefer to stay in small, out-of-the-way towns, where they won’t be forced to

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BALI TOURISM TABLE 5.4. Bali Tourist Locations and Goals of Tourists

Bali Tourists

Locations and Goals

Hierarchists

Expensive, exclusive resorts prestige, relaxation, comfort

Individualists

Small, out-of-the-way towns, adventure tourism

Egalitarians

Cultural centers such as Ubud, explore Balinese culture

Fatalists

N/A

Source: Compiled from Douglas (1997).

be with egalitarians, who presumably would be in cultural centers such as Ubud, where they could explore Balinese culture and try to be “at one” with the Balinese people. Individualists would be attracted to adventure touring, to exploring parts of Bali that are off the beaten track. I assume, of course, that a great deal of our behavior is based on unconscious imperatives. Psychoanalytic theory suggests that the unconscious is the source of many of our behaviors, even though we do not recognize that such is the case. The members of each of these lifestyles are not aware that they belong to them, but they know that they don’t like the people (and their tastes) in the other lifestyles and wish to avoid them. A market research firm that bases its research on consumer demographics argues that “birds of a feather flock together,” and we can make the same point in terms of the members of the four different and antagonistic lifestyles. Douglas is a social anthropologist and sees human behavior as being shaped by sociological considerations. In her book How Institutions Think she quotes a German thinker, Ludwig Fleck, to this effect: The individual within the collective is never, or hardly ever, conscious of the prevailing thought style which almost always exerts an absolutely compulsive force upon his thinking and with which it is not possible to be at variance. (Douglas 1986: 13) As Douglas (1986) explains, “individuals carry the social order around inside their heads and project it out onto nature” (13). This perspective has problems, in that other forces operate on people in ev-

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ery society, but that Balinese culture is so highly structured along the grid-group lines helps explain why it is so powerful and resilient. CULTURE AND PERSONALITY IN BALI In his book Culture and Personality anthropologist Victor Barnouw (1963) has a short discussion of Balinese culture and personality. A basic presupposition of the school of anthropologists dealing with culture and personality is that any society has a basic personality type, shared by most of members of that society, that is shaped, in large measure, by the childhood experiences that they have in common. With this in mind we can look at Barnouw’s (1963) discussion of Balinese postural habits. He points out that Bali is fairly unique in the literature of culture and personality in terms of the amount of work done on the relationship between posture and personality. He writes: Observations on Balinese posture and gesture have been made by Jane Belo, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson in a number of publications. Jane Belo has drawn attention to the “absolute poise and balance” of the Balinese in their movements and gestures, which, however, is combined with a sort of carefulness of bearing, as if they were afraid to disturb a delicate equilibrium. Belo discusses, as Bateson and Mead also do, the sense of spacial and social orientation which is always part of the Balinese consciousness: the sense of one’s relationship to the points of the compass, to up and down, and to the social standing of people or higher or lower caste. (Barnouw, 1963: 254) He quotes Belo about the slow and deliberate way in which Balinese people move, which some scholars have connected to the low tonus or muscle tone of Balinese children. Margaret Mead has suggested that Balinese children are very passive and relatively inactive, which she traces to the Balinese custom of carrying children around until they are from fifteen to eighteen months old. As a result of this, Balinese children never experience the crawling stage—a stage that leads children to explore and investigate the world. The Balinese be-

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lieve that crawling is very animalistic and thus carry their children around until they are able to walk. As Barnouw (1973) writes: They have no crawling stage comparable to that of Western children because the Balinese disapprove of crawling, and so do not show as much activity as American children of the same age. Children learn to adjust passively to the movements of the mother’s body as they are carried about. The child’s limbs are manipulated to teach it gestures and hand-dancing before he learns to walk . . . Another aspect of Balinese posture noted by Bateson and Mead is an economy of movement which they see as involving a kind of dissociation. (255) The result for Bateson and Mead (1942) is a personality trait characterized by narcissism and schizoid withdrawal, generally derived from childhood frustrations. This is caused by mothers overstimulating their children and then unrewardingly teasing them or by withdrawing interest in them. As a result of these experiences, Barnow (1973) suggests “children learn, between the ages of three and six, to become aloof from the mother and other adults and turn in upon themselves” (256). Barnouw implies that the Balinese have an aura of mildness and passivity. It is only during trance experiences that the pent-up frustrations and tribulations caused by excessive self-control can be thrown off, and Balinese men and women become animated, aggressive, and violent, generally toward themselves, as they drive their daggers (krises) against their chests, usually while leaning backward in a strained posture. Generally this is followed by collapsing, in an exhausted state, and experiencing convulsions. Barnouw (1973) relates this experience to the classic Balinese drama Tjalonarang, which features a fight between a witch, Rangda, and a hero, Barong. According to Mead and Bateson, this drama is really a recapitulation of the experiences of Balinese children involving a rejection by the mother and an attack, then, upon the self. These analyses were made many years ago and we must wonder, first, whether they were accurate then, and second, if so, whether matters have changed in recent years with the development of tourism and the mass media. In Bill Dalton’s handbook on Bali, published in

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1997, he mentions the way children are raised in Bali and confirms that children are not allowed to crawl. So Bateson and Mead’s (1942) characterization of Balinese posture, personality, and culture, is still worth considering. But we have to keep in mind that children generally don’t start crawling until well after six months, so they wouldn’t crawl even if they were allowed to touch the ground. In my research I’ve noted that many visitors to Bali describe the Balinese people in glowing terms and are very positive about how charming and friendly the Balinese people are. How one reconciles this charm with narcissistic and schizoid withdrawal is a question that remains to be answered. THE USES AND GRATIFICATIONS OF TRAVEL IN BALI Philip Kotler, John Bowen, and James Makens’s Marketing for Hospitality and Tourism, Second Edition contains a list of the “psychological determinants of demand.” These are: prestige, escape, sexual opportunity, education, social interaction, family bonding, relaxation, and self-discovery (Kotler et al., 1999). I offer here a somewhat different list, based on the theory of uses and gratifications, which I am adapting from its original use in mass media research. When social scientists asked people why they listened to soap operas or read comics or consumed one or another kind of media, they obtained a list of the uses people made of the media they consumed and the gratifications the media offered them. This was a different approach from what social scientists are usually interested in, relative to media, namely the effects media have on people. To Experience the Beautiful and Sublime One of Bali’s selling points is that it is strikingly a beautiful island. An article by Denny Lee titled “Recovering Paradise Regained” describes Bali as “ringed by velvety beaches and marbled cliffs” with “breathtaking topography.” Lee quotes a visitor describing Bali as “almost mystical and magical” (Lee, 2005). Spending time in such a place is, we assume, spiritually uplifting.

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Lake Batur in Bali.

To Be Amused and Entertained Bali has a number of tours that visitors can take, an interesting and rich ceremonial culture, and a vibrant beach scene for those who prefer sand, sea, sex, and shopping. One important way that tourists “amuse” themselves is by shopping for objects that will remind them of their experiences in Bali, and Bali has a large number of artists and craftspeople to satisfy the needs of shoppers. My travel agent informed me that Ubud is considered one of the best shopping areas in the world.

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To Gain a Sense of Fellowship with Men and Women The social anthropologist Mary Douglas described egalitarians as deriving a great deal of pleasure from interacting with people in other countries and gaining a sense of fellowship and community with them. Tourists who visit Bali frequently describe the Balinese as “charming,” suggesting that tourists find Bali a destination where they can find a way to relate to the people there. This can be construed as an element in a person’s moral education and self-discovery, for, as I’ve suggested, it is through our interactions with others that we find out about ourselves. To Satisfy One’s Curiosity and Gain Information About the World People are naturally curious and tourists are people who act on their curiosity and desire for information and experience about what life in other lands is like. Bali, with its “idiosyncratic culture,” as Denny Lee put it in his article (Lee, 2005), finds its blend of Hinduism and animism fascinating. Even travelers who visit foreign countries such as Bali for a short period of time can gain insights about them if they are perceptive and make an effort to learn about the Balinese by observing where they are, by taking tours, and by reading guidebooks. To Obtain Guilt-Free Outlets for Sexual Drives Sexual tourism and exploitation is an important element in the travel industry, even though governments in countries where it exists try (or claim they try) to curtail it. In addition, people who visit foreign lands often don’t feel bound by the cultural restraints they feel in their own culture, which explains why they take advantage of the sex industry in the lands they visit. Bali, of course, is no exception to this. Many travelers feel that having sex with women from foreign countries or with fellow tourists in foreign lands is not morally problematic. In a similar manner, many males from foreign lands feel that having sex with women travelers is perfectly acceptable, and even desirable as a means, among other things, of getting back at those who they feel are exploit-

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Statue of KumbaKarna at Bedugal Botanical Gardens.

ing them. Any number of “Kuta Beach gigolos” (and others like them in other places in Bali) prey on women tourists in Bali. To Help Gain an Identity Visiting a distant and famous island such as Bali helps give people an identity. A visit to “magical” Bali confers a kind of halo effect on

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tourists. We must remember that only about 1.5 million tourists go to Bali in a given year, in contrast to France, which has 77 million visitors a year, so going to Bali suggests an adventurous personality. People who do a great deal of traveling in distant lands such as Bali become, whatever else they may be, “world travelers,” and often use this identity, which has positive connotations, when interacting with others. They find ways to introduce the subject when they meet new people. Travel allows those who have traveled to demonstrate a certain amount of expertise (“there’s a wonderful restaurant in Ubud”), suggests an adventurous character (“part of the road to Singaraja was washed out, so everyone on the bus got out and found rocks to rebuild the road”), and also provides a subject for people to talk about that is innocuous and unlikely to lead to arguments. This list suggests, then, that tourism provides many gratifications for people, which may help explain why tourism has become the largest industry in the world. In my list I deal with some of the more important uses and gratifications that tourism provides, but people use tourism for many other purposes, such as to travel for medical care, to visit disasters, to attend family reunions and celebrations, to attend important sports events, to take cooking classes and have gourmet dining experiences, and to take wilderness adventure trips. Many tourists, I should add, combine a number of these gratifications in one trip. IMAGE AND REALITY IN BALI According to Marshall McLuhan, who probably picked up the idea from various anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, who visited Bali in the 1930s, the Balinese are all artists of one kind of another (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967). The Balinese, McLuhan explained, don’t have a word for art because it applies to everyone. “We do everything well,” he writes, quoting an archetypal Balinese artist (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967). This characterization of the Balinese as artists and very creative individuals raises the question of the relationship that exists between images people have of Bali, which they get from travel guides, articles in newspapers and magazines, essays and

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books by anthropologists and other kinds of social scientists, films and documentaries, and other sources, and what Bali is really like. One of the most interesting analyses of Balinese culture was made by Gregory Bateson in his article “Bali: The Value System of a Steady State” (Bateson, 1949). This article appeared first in 1949 and is republished in Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson, 1972). In it Bateson defines the term ethos as “The expression of a culturally standardized system of organization of the instincts and emotions of the individuals.” He argues that the Balinese have an ethos, which can be described as “steady state.” He uses a neologism, “schismogenesis” to describe cultures in which rivalries and hostilities exist, which build up and reach climaxes in outlets such as battles and wars. Bateson claimed that “schismogenic sequences were not found in Bali,” which means that the Balinese ethos was one that trained Balinese to avoid conflict and maintain a “steady state.” Thus, a lack of climax exists in interpersonal relationships among Balinese, who value harmony, and a lack of climax exists in Balinese art forms such as music and drama. That is, no build-up of tension (found in schismogenesis) and release occurs, but, instead, a kind of plateau is reached but never transcended. In his section of the article titled “Balinese Character” Bateson describes a scene he observed that explained this lack of schismogenesis: Typically, the mother will start a flirtation with the child, pulling its penis or otherwise stimulating it to interpersonal activity. This will excite the child and for a few moments cumulative interaction will occur. Then, just as the child, approaching some small climax, flings its arms around the mother’s neck, her attention wanders. (Bateson, 1949) As a result of their frustrations, Balinese children, Bateson (1949) asserts, develop a deep distrust of this kind of involvement, and their tendencies toward cumulative personal interactions, which would normally lead to a climax, are muted. This leads to a plateau of intensity that is substituted for activities leading to climaxes, which, in turn, explains why Balinese can fall into trances so easily and why they avoid getting into quarrels. Thus, Bateson suggests, the way Ba-

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linese mothers relate to their children explains the peculiarities of Balinese culture and character. Whether this characterization of Bali is correct or not is open to question. After all, Bateson wrote this article in 1949, more than fifty years ago, and his description of the Balinese mother’s behavior as paradigmatic or typical may be an overgeneralization. He uses the term typical in his description of the mother-child relationship, but we can’t be sure that he was correct. One commentator, Zachar Laskewicz, in an article “The Self-Reflexive Cultural Myth: Bali and the Western Anthropological Fantasy Fulfilled” argues that Western anthropologists often read their own presuppositions into Bali. He writes: Various well-meaning artists and anthropologists found on Bali a wealth of undiscovered material which they were able to mould into whatever suited their particular epistemological goals. This includes Antonin Artaud, the French theatre director who based all his theoretical work on after witnessing on Balinese performance, Colin McPhee, the composer cum ethnomusicologist who interacted with Balinese culture in such a way that he changed as much as he observed. Walter Spies, the painter who brought Bali to the outside world but in his own preferred form, Margaret Mead, the anthropologist who was determined to understand Bali in terms of Freudian analysis, Gregory Bateson, who interpreted Bali as a “static” culture in order to further his theories on cognition. (Laskewicz, 2000) The point that Lascewicz raises is that artists and scholars create their own Bali and read Balinese culture and character in terms of their scholarly predispositions and ideologies. ARE THE BALINESE CHARMING SCHIZOPHRENICS? One thing I noticed when I read through comments by tourists who had visited Bali on Frommer’s Web site was that an overwhelming number of them described the Balinese as charming and friendly. How does this square with the Bateson and Mead characterization of the Balinese as schizoid? It didn’t make sense.

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Bateson and Mead (1942) described the Balinese personality as follows: It is a character curiously cut off from interpersonal relationships, existing in a state of dreamy-relaxed dissociation, with intervals of non-personal concentration in trance, in gambling and in the practice of the arts . . . he is driven to fill the hours, so empty of interpersonal relations, with a rhythmic unattended industriousness. (47-48) The answer to this dilemma is suggested in a book by two psychiatrists, Gordon Jensen and Luh Ketut Suryani, who is Balinese. In their book, The Balinese People: A Reinvestigation of Character, they write: In summary, the author’s were unable to replicate critical data or support the majority of Bateson and Mead’s interpretations and conclusions, and found their basic assumptions inherently flawed. Bateson and Mead’s study presented inaccurate and misleading characteristics of the Balinese as they are today and as they were at the time of the study 50 years ago. (Jensen and Suryani, 1992: 7) They explain that Bateson and Mead’s (1992) data often don’t support their concepts and that they “used single cases or very few cases to make generalized interpretations about all Balinese” (51). One important theoretical problem was that they studied people in a hill town who were atypical and not representative of the Balinese people in general. In addition, Jensen and Suryani suggest that Bateson and Mead were predisposed to see the Balinese as schizoid, since they were funded, in part, by a foundation interested in studying schizophrenia and culture. As they write, “The authors have wondered if Mead had a propensity to fit the data to her theories or preconceived ideas” (Bateson and Mead, 1992: 43). Jensen and Suryani did their research many years after Mead and Bateson published their book in 1942. It’s interesting to note that the two psychiatrists concluded that no significant changes in Balinese character occurred in the fifty years since Mead and Bateson wrote their book, which means that it is unlikely that Mead and Bateson’s

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characterization of the Balinese in the early forties was correct. Jensen and Suryani offer a list of their insights into Balinese character, based on their research. They find Balinese people to be trusting, cooperative, industrious, creative, conformist, hypnotizable (easily falling into trance states), and accepting of hierarchy. It is a far different view of the Balinese than the one we find in the work of Mead and Bateson. SEEING FOR MYSELF With this discussion I bring to an end my discussion of research on tourism in Bali. I have offered some statistics on tourism in Bali and a number of different perspectives on Bali, from guidebook descriptions of the island to comments by visitors who wrote about their experiences in Bali and posted them on the Internet. I’ve also dealt with what can be described as the Bali of the scholars, and I’ve discussed some topics of theoretical interest to scholars as they relate to tourism and to Bali. I attempted to cut the Gordian knot of finding which of these sometimes conflicting interpretations of Balinese art, culture, and character is most correct (probably all of them have something of interest and a grain of truth to them) by going there and relying on my firsthand experience, by trying to see Bali as it really is, and to offer a sociosemiotic interpretation of Balinese icons, signifiers, and material culture as they relate to tourism, as accurately as I can.

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PART II: SEMIOTIC BALI

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As I mentioned earlier, PartI II: found Tourism Roland inBarthes’s Bali semiotic analysis of Japanese culture, Empire of Signs, a useful model to help come to grips with “foreign” cultures and have employed his methodology in this book. That is, I looked for and analyzed culturally important Balinese signs and symbols—of which there are many. In his book, published in 1970 in France and not translated and published until 1982 in the United States, Barthes (1982) wrote: I can . . . isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed in linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan. (3) He explains that Japan enabled him “to ‘entertain’ the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own” (Barthes, 1982: 3). Barthes had a number of what he called “flashes” about significant symbols and symbolic practices in Japan, which he contrasted with photographing Japan, by which he meant offering a detailed and logically coherent analysis of Japanese culture. Barthes was a semiotician and wrote a book Mythologies (Barthes, 1972), which used semiotics to analyze France in much the same manner as he analyzed Japan. Empire of Signs contains several dozen short chapters on such topics as Japanese chopsticks, dinner trays, pachinko, bowing, Japanese packages, Japanese eyelids, and Japanese cooking. As an example of the kind of analysis that Barthes made, let me quote from his discussion of Japanese cooking in his chapter titled “Food Decentered.” The chapter starts off with a description of sukiyaki, but moves on to his central concern, the Japanese passion for raw food. Barthes (1982) writes: This Rawness, we know, is the tutelary divinity of Japanese food: to it everything is dedicated, and if Japanese cooking is always performed in front of the eventual diner (a fundamental feature of this cuisine), this is probably because it is important to consecrate by spectacle the death of what is being honored. (20)

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This is the kind of analysis one finds in Empire of Signs, written in Barthes’s distinctive and complicated style, and reflecting his remarkable analytical abilities and highly sophisticated intelligence. For Barthes, whatever else one might want to say about Japanese cuisine, it is the passion for rawness that is the dominating factor or, as he puts it, “the tutelary divinity.” Barthes had a penchant for neologisms, and his “flashes” all dealt with what he would call “Japaneseness.” What a semiotic analysis of tourism does is allow one to analyze the dominant signs and symbols, practices, beliefs—what you will— found in those aspects of that culture that are experienced by tourists in an effort to understand their deeper meanings. A description of an object tells what it looks like, and a description of an event tells what it was like to experience it, but an analysis of an artifact interprets its hidden significance by connecting it to aspects of the culture that shaped it. This approach to tourism treats cultures as similar in nature to literary and artistic texts and uses the same methods of interpretation that are conventionally applied to artistic texts: semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, Marxist theory, sociological analysis, and any other disciplinary approach that can be used to interpret texts; this combination is conventionally understood as a “cultural studies” perspective. What I will be doing in this section of the book is analyze and interpret quintessential symbols and activities in Bali such as the Barong dance, the legong dance, the role of temples in Balinese culture, Balinese names, gamelan music, cockfighting, the city of Ubud, typical tours in Bali, and the ever-present women with large bowls of fruit on their heads as they walk toward temples, among other things. This kind of analysis is similar in nature to the experience tourists have in foreign lands, where they go from touristically important site to site and experience to experience, sampling the “best” sites or, in some cases, the most photographically pleasing that the country they are visiting has to offer. We then construct an image of wherever we are visiting or have visited out of those discrete experiences.

Chapter 6

Balinese Balinese Symbols Symbols and and IconsIcons TOURISTIC BALI In any touristic city in Bali you’ll find numerous agencies selling tours of the island. Tourists in Bali often use Kuta or Ubud as a home base and then take tours to other parts of the island. My wife and I stayed in Ubud on Monkey Forest Road, which was lined with tourism agencies that posted their tours on their windows or on poster boards on the sidewalk. The full day tours generally cost around twenty dollars, and the half day tours around ten dollars. Tours had a driver and a guide who explained the historical and cultural significance of the various sites that were visited. What follows is a listing of some of the more popular tours in Bali: Singahara tour (full day) Bedugul fruit market Botanical garden Ulun Danu Temple Lovina Beach Hot spring at Banjar Village Papuan Village (coffee plantation) Kintamani Besakih (full day) Barong dance at Batubulan Elephant Cave Temple Tampak spring Kintamini Mount Batur and Lake Batur Besakih Temple of Justice Bukit Jambul rice terrace 97

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Kertagosha Court of Justice at Klungkung Bona Village for bamboo furniture Karangasem (full day) Kusamba Village (salt factory) Goa Lawah (Bat Cave Temple) Tenganan (original Balinese village) Candidasa Beach King’s palace Tirtagangga Putung Tanah Lot for sunset (half day) Taman Ayun (Royal Family Temple at Mengwi) Ubud Region (half day) Tohpati Celuk Batuan Kecak dance

Goa Lawah Bat Cave Temple.

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Another view of the Water Palace at Tirtagangga.

If you were to take these five tours, and they are some of the more popular ones, you would see a great deal of the island of Bali and visit a number of places where you could purchase wood carving, jewelry, masks, furniture, paintings, and fabrics. You would also see two dances: the Barong dance, which is a religious one, and the kecak dance, which is purely an entertainment, designed for tourists. And you would see the gorgeous sunset at the Tanah Lot temple, perhaps the most photographed temple on the island. To do all of this, you would spend a good deal of time in a car or van. Often we would leave our hotel at 9:00 a.m. and not return until 6:00 p.m. or later. The places we visited ranged from extremely interesting and very beautiful, such as the Tanah Lot temple, Mount Batur, and the main temple, Besakih, to sites that were of little touristic value, such as the

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Bedugul fruit market, which was no different from any other fruit market in Bali, except that it was run by Muslims. Many sites of cultural interest are available in Bali for those who are interested. Bali is a fascinating culture, and you do not have to search very hard to find religious processions, celebrations at temples, and wonderful dance performances. Beaches and the beach scene is available for others. And for some, there are both. POSTCARDS OF BALI One of the best ways to determine what Balinese think are their main touristic sites is to examine the postcards they sell. During my trip to Tanah Lot I purchased a set of thirty postcards of Bali that, I would suggest, reflect the Balinese notion of its most important places and practices. A list of these postcards follows, with the captions found on each card. They were not numbered so I have put them in alphabetical order and corrected the grammar when necessary. I’ve also attached brief explanations, here and there, of what is being described or shown on the postcard. The photographs on the postcards were all taken by a Balinese photographer, Murdani Usman. Bade: Ceremonial tower used in cremations (symbolizes the macrocosm) Barong: Drives out invisible evil spirits (a grotesque lion figure) Besakih: Mother temple and most important one in Bali Canang: Daily offering of Hindus (little palm leaf boxes with offerings) Danau Batur: The most exotic lake in Bali Gerogang Bunga: Participants in a Balinese arts festival Jatih Luwth: Breathtaking views of a rice field Kehen Temple: Famous temple with unique entrance gate Kerta Gosa: Former seat of the oldest kingdom in Bali Lukison Wayang: Classic painting of the Kamasan shadow puppets Mapeed: Women carrying offerings to temples (in towers of fruit) Melasti: Sacred icons are taken from a temple to a ceremony on a beach

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Mepamit: Going home after praying (with rice on forehead) Monkeys: Alas Kedaton money forest residents Odalan: Women carrying baskets to a religious ceremony (an Odalan) Ogoh-Ogoh: A giant effigy of a monster Panji Semirang Dance: Young male dancer (with finger display) Penglipuran: Unchanged village in Bali Petani: A working farmer Tabuh Rah: Ceremonial Balinese cockfighting Taman Anyn: Former royal family temple Taman Ujung: Royal Garden of Karang Asem kingdom Tanah Lot: Bali’s most important coastal temple (five different cards) Ulun Danu Bedugul: A place to pray for religious prosperity Uluwatu: Cliff in southwest Bali Wayang Kulit: Shadow puppets Cultural tourists who are interested in exploring Balinese culture and society will see many of the places and events depicted on the postcards. Tourists who happen upon Balinese religious processions, of which there are many, will see the Barong dance and they will often see women with tall baskets of fruit that they carry on their heads, carrying their offerings to the temple. Every morning tourists will find canang, the daily offerings that Balinese make—small four-inch (approximately) square baskets, made of palm leaves, with flowers in them, scattered on sidewalks I will be analyzing and interpreting the significance of many of the phenomena found in the postcards, such as Barong (and his nemesis, the monstrous widow-witch Rangda, who is not represented by a card), cockfights, women walking to temples with offerings of towers of fruit on their heads, important dances (such as the Barong dance, the legong dance, and the kecak dance), and some aspects of Balinese culture not shown in the postcards. As a result of the numerous tours I took in Bali I was able to have firsthand experience of many of the places, events, and practices shown on the postcards. I also make use of citations from scholars and others with expertise in Balinese tourism and culture in my analyses. I begin with a discussion of what (or who?) I believe to be the

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A regal figure makes his entrance in the Barong dance.

central figure in the Balinese view of the world, the hero-monster Barong. BARONG Barong ket is the reigning hero in Balinese mythology, religion, and sacred dances. As Rucina Ballinger points out in her chapter on “Dance and Drama” in the Periplus Bali: Indonesia (edited by Eric Oey), Barong Ket, a combination lion and bear, is the most sacred incarnation of Barong but others exist, such as Barong Makan (tiger), Barong Bankal (wild boar), Barong Celeng (pig), and Barong Gajah

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(elephant). As she explains, “The Barong is considered a protector of the village. Of demonic origin, the people have made a beast in his image and transformed him into a playful, benevolent creature” (Ballilnger, 1999: 63). The Barong is similar in nature to Chinese dragons in that it takes two dancers to play Barong—one in the front, who clacks Barong’s teeth and prances around, and a second person in the back, who plays the hind parts of Barong. It takes a great deal of coordination for the two dancers to play Barong, who is a grotesque figure, with bulging

Barong, the lion god, in all his glory.

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eyes, tusks, long hair, fur, and gilded leather and mirrors for decorations. The epic and never-resolved battle between Barong and Rangda, the widow-witch (who is discussed in the next section) is probably the central organizing myth in Balinese culture. Balinese temples have their Barongs, which they display in processions and religious ceremonies. What is interesting is that Barong never defeats Rangda and Rangda never defeats Barong. So their battle continues on, endlessly, throughout time. And Barong seems to have very abrupt mood changes. At times he is playful and friendly and at other times somewhat menacing and very serious about his battle with the forces of evil, represented by Rangda and her followers. Clifford Geertz (1973) sees Barong as an “endearing” monster who is basically ludicrous. He describes the ritualized combat between Barong and Rangda as an inconclusive clash between a farcical and ludicrous Barong and a malignant Rangda, but I think this interpretation doesn’t do justice to the sense of awe with which Balinese see the Barong. He is playful at times but he is also a powerful presence. While Westerners see the dance with Barong and Rangda as a performance, Balinese see it as a religious event, an evocation of the battle between good and evil, and the characters in the dance are real to them, not merely dancers. Sometimes, Balinese dancers get carried away with their roles, with results that can be dangerous. Thus, there is a part of the Barong dance when his helpers attack Rangda, who puts them in a trance and then they turn their kris daggers on themselves, sometimes actually injuring themselves. At the performance I saw, the stage was littered with bodies of helpers of Barong who had supposedly stabbed themselves with their kris daggers. It was obvious that they were pretending to do so, just going through the motions, but sometimes dancers, who get carried away, actually do stab themselves. Some Barong dancers who fall into a trance at the end of the dance race off into the villages where the dances are being held, having become caught up in their roles. Psychiatrists Gordon D. Jensen and Luh Ketut Suryani (1992) deal with Barong in their book The Balinese People: A Reinvestigation of Character. Indeed, a picture of Barong is on the cover of their book. In the photo Barong has reddish hair, the standard large, bulging eyes,

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Warriors, bewitched by Rangda, stab themselves.

and four small tusks. The authors discuss Margaret Mead’s theory that Barong is really an incarnation of the Balinese father “as gentle, unconditionally loving and reassuring,” and disagree with it, pointing out that Barong is considered to be spiritually powerful and is held in great reverence by the Balinese people (Jensen and Suryani, 1992: 84). They also discuss the Balinese attitudes toward the supernatural, in general, and write: To a Balinese, Bali is filled with gods. It is primarily the supernatural phenomena that are at the core of many activities of

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daily life, ceremonies, rituals, dances, plays, trance, physical and mental illnesses, and healing. These include demons, witchcraft, black magic, and leak or spirits. (1992: 85) They add that numerous rituals and religious ceremonies are practiced in Bali that Balinese culture has created to deal with the dangers the Balinese face from supernatural forces, to create balance. Balance seems to be a central element in Balinese culture. Whereas Westerners, generally speaking, believe that supernatural forces are figments of the imagination, the Balinese are animists who believe that these forces really exist and have incredible power. One of our guides during our trip to Bali informed me that his father died because of a curse put on him by an evil neighbor. But for every evil witch such as Rangda, a tutelary hero such as Barong exists, so neither evil nor goodness ever triumphs. This means life is truly exciting, and that the Balinese must continually do what they can to fend off the forces of evil and support the forces of goodness. In Western societies, many people believe in the existence of Satan, but he is generally considered to have been vanquished and thus is not a threat. This is not the case in Bali, where the relationship between the forces of evil and good are unresolved—just as in the Barong dance. Being in Bali is like being caught up in a drama where one must be always on guard. This explains the seemingly endless numbers of religious celebrations that one finds in Bali and the daily offerings the Balinese make to the forces of good and evil. Life, for the Balinese, is a never-ending battle with demons, witches, and the forces of evil, and this is symbolized by the dance-rituals in which Barong contends with Rangda. In Western societies, superstitious people are generally described as having a kind of neurosis, often characterized as hypervigilance. In Bali, to be hypervigilant is necessary to survive psychologically, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. What is interesting is that this religious hypervigilance doesn’t turn the Balinese into neurotics because it seems that they have compartmentalized it. My experience with them is that they are very cordial, warm, and friendly people. As an example of this compartmentalization, one of our guides told us, once, as we were returning from a tour, “I can change myself

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into a car.” He wasn’t joking. And our driver, sitting next to him, corroborated his statement, adding, “generally he does that in the middle of the night.” RANGDA The battle between Barong and its nemesis Rangda actually has historical sources, Rucina Ballinger (1999) writes. She explains that in the eleventh century, Balinese king Udayana married an east Javanese princess Mahendratta. When he discovered that she was practicing black magic, he sent her to live in the forest. In addition, nobody would dare to marry her daughter, who was very beautiful, because they were afraid of Mahendratta’s black magic. Mahendratta became Rangda, and now takes revenge on the Balinese by spreading pestilence throughout the country. Rangda masks are sold in all the tourist areas of Bali. Rangda, in the dance I saw, had long, stringy hair that fell down to her ankles. She wore a gaudy shirt and pants of black and red stripes, and carried her “all powerful” magical white cloth. She has, similar to Barong, bulging eye and tusks, and has a long tongue that hangs out of her mouth. She also has long fingernails. The dance featuring Barong and Rangda is described in the chapter “Sacred Dance” in the Insight Guide to Bali (Rutherford, 2002): When the Barong appears, he is snapping his huge jaws and swishing his tail. He has come to protect the audience and the village. Then Rangda enters with her long claw-like fingers, her flaming tongue, and a necklace of human entrails that hang down over her pendulous breasts. She waves a white cloth, which wafts her evil magic as she stalks the Barong. A group of men with their keris sit nearby, representing the community. They see the threatened Barong and rush to attack Rangda. She casts a spell on them so that instead of stabbing her, they turn their keris upon themselves. But the power of the Barong prevents their keris from piercing their skin. The dancers are in trance, and they are not playacting when they turn the blades upon themselves. (95)

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Rangda in all her glory.

Eventually, the Barong and Rangda fight to a draw, which means they both live to battle each other again. The dancers I saw were not in a trance and it was quite obvious that they were pretending to stab themselves, though sometimes dancers do fall into a trance and attempt to harm themselves. The handout that was presented to English-speaking tourists at the Batubulan version of the Barong and Kris Dance reads as follows (I have made minor editorial changes and corrections to the English):

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Rangda confronts a dancer.

The Barong and Kris Dance The Barong play represents an eternal fight between good and evil spirits. Barong (a mythological animal) represents a good spirit and Rangda (a mythological monster) represents an evil one. The Dances Start with Music Overture Followed by his friend the monkey, the tiger [Barong] comes up. Three masked dancers appear, representing men making palm wine in the forest, one of whose child is killed by Barong. The three men get angry and attack Barong, who is helped by the monkey. During the fight the nose of one of the men is bitten off.

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An action scene in the Barong-Rangda dance.

First Act Two girl dancers appear, representing the servants of the Rangda, looking for the servants of Dewi Kunti who are on the way to meet their patih (prime minister). Second Act The servants of Dewi Kunti come. One of the servants of the Rangda changes into a witch and enters into both servants to make them angry. They meet their patih and go together to Dewi Kunti. Third Act Dewi Kunti and her son, Sadewa, come up. Dewi Kunti has promised Rangda she’d sacrifice Sadewa. A witch appears and enters Dewi Kunti. She becomes angry and orders the patih to bring Sadewa into the forest. The patih is also entered by a witch, so he does not have

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pity on Sadewa. Sadewa is then taken into a forest and tied up to a tree. Fourth Act Unknown by Rangda, the god Siwa appears and gives Sadewa immortality. Rangda appears, ready to kill Sadewa and eat him up, but Sadewa remains alive. She then surrenders and asks him to redeem himself. Sadewa agrees and kills Rangda. Rangda goes to heaven. Fifth Act One of the servants of Rangda, named Kalika, comes before Sadewa and asks to be redeemed. Sadewa refuses. Kalika gets angry and changes herself into a boar and fights Sadewa. He defeats the boar. Kalika changes herself into a bird but is also defeated. Finally, she changes herself into Rangda, and Sadewa cannot kill her. Sadewa then changes himself into Barong. Followers of Barong appear and help him fight Rangda. She is too powerful, and the find ends in a draw. What’s interesting about this dance is that a negative side of Barong is revealed. He has eaten a child before appearing on the state. And Rangda, after being killed, goes to heaven—which is not to be expected. Finally, the battle ends in a stalemate, which means the forces of good and evil are evenly balanced. The question arises as to the meaning of Rangda. The psychiatrists Gordon D. Jensen and Luh Ketut Suryani (who is a Balinese woman) dispute Margaret Mead’s contention that Rangda is a “reconstituted mother” who displays fear to her child and instills fear in him (Jensen and Suryani, 1992). Mead had suggested that Balinese mothers are “teasing, powerful, unsatisfying” women who arouse emotions in their children but do not do anything to satisfy them. The authors disagree with Mead’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Rangda as a mother figure since, they point out, she is held in awe by the Balinese and represents the evil power of demons and witches. The opposite of Rangda, for Mead, was Barong, the father figure, who supplied love to children and made up for deficiencies and problems generated by unresponsive and “murderous” mothers (Jensen and Suryani, 1992).

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They point out that masks of Rangda are kept in village temples, along with those of Barong, to protect villagers from evil. Thus, Rangda is seen in an ambivalent way, just as Barong is seen as having a capacity for evil (Jensen and Suryani, 1992). He eats a child in the forest before he appears on stage. The dance also suggests that it is evil spirits that “enter” people and make them act the way they do, when they act in self-destructive or antisocial ways. These evil spirits are commanded by the numerous leak (also spelled leyan, lejak), witchlike spirits that are transformations or real people who practice black magic and have the power to harm people. In actuality, as Bateson and Mead (1942) admit, the impact of these leak figures on social life in Bali is not very great. For many Westerners, that the Balinese people treat Rangda and Barong as sacred figures, and endowed with great powers, is remarkable. Yet in the West we have a considerable number of demons of one sort or another, such as Satan, vampires, Frankensteins, and death-dealing aliens, though, with the exception Satan, we generally regard these creatures as figments of the human imagination (and some regard Satan as such, as well). Does Rangda’s status as a widow suggest anything about Balinese attitudes toward older women? The description of Rangda as having a long tongue and pendulous breasts suggests a caricature of an elderly woman. Do the Balinese harbor unconscious fears about elderly women and believe that once women lose their husbands they transform their sexual desires and needs into destructive impulses and thus become witches? Is Mahendratta a paradigmatic figure for elderly women in Bali? On the surface, elderly women, grandmother figures, are esteemed in Bali, where people live in large households with many generations. But in their unconscious might the Balinese harbor fears and anxieties about these women? This is not unusual, for attitudes about very old women in parts of the Western world are similar in nature to that of the Balinese. This unconscious fear and anxiety is something to keep in mind when one sees a Rangda mask or a dance with Rangda battling Barong. And what about Mahendratta’s willingness to sacrifice her son Sadewa to Rangda? What does this tell us about relations between mothers (in this case a “murderous” one) and their children?

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Dancers and Rangda in the Barong-Rangda dance.

For Jensen and Suryani (1992), the Balinese see good and bad sides to everything. As they explain, “all things in the Balinese world, e.g., the sun, cars, palm wine, and food, have two sides (rua bineda): the good and the bad. Which effect each has depends on the individual’s use of them” (80). So nothing is simple, and Bali and everything depends on a multitude of factors that determine whether something is harmful or beneficial. This sensibility is reflected, I would suggest, in their two complementary opposing figures Rangda and Barong.

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COCKFIGHTS (SABUNGAN) William Ingram begins his superb memoir of his experiences living with a Balinese family, A Little Bit of One O’Clock, describing the sounds of cocks crowing. He writes: I woke to the sound of roosters. There were hundreds of them. The nearest was right beside my room on the waist-high compound wall. Others scrabbled and crowed in a neighboring bamboo grove. The calls from across the whole village blended into a constant wailing. (Ingram, 1998: 13) The crowing of roosters is one of the basic sounds of Bali. You hear them all the time, making their presence felt by their seemingly endless crowing. You also see them at various sites, in the cages that the Balinese have devised for them, waiting patiently for their brief “moment of glory” and almost inevitable death in cockfights, which are now limited to being held at temple ceremonies, odalans. Cockfights are held in special arenas, in pits next to temples. The one I saw took place in a kalangan, a squared area about fifteen or twenty feet on each side, with tiered concrete rows that served as benches, where people with cocks, people interested in gambling on the fights, or those who are simply spectators watch the fights, sat. Before they fight, you can see the owners of the roosters gently stroking and caressing them. They seem to display deep affection for their birds, which have been trained to fight. People make bets on the outcomes of the fights—money that is supposedly for the temple where the fights are held. At the fight I witnessed, the owners of the contending cocks spent a few minutes attaching a razor sharp blade, perhaps four inches in length, to the spur on one of the legs of their birds. A smallish dirty white cock was matched against a somewhat larger red and black cock. Before they fought, their owners held them near each other, face to face, as if to show them who they would be fighting. When they were released the cocks advanced on each other, and then in a few moments of furious wing flapping and flailing, they assaulted each other. After the initial combat it was obvious that somehow the small white cock had inflicted a serious wound on the red and

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Typical cockfight scene.

black one. It took only a bit more time for the white cock to peck at its opponent’s neck and the wounded cock fell down, dead. A few minutes later, the victorious white cock was matched against another cock, a large brown one, and the same ritual took place. But this time the brown cock severely injured the white cock. It did not kill it, however. The owner of the brown cock picked it up and had the owner of the white cock place it at the neck of the brown cock. The white cock didn’t do anything; it had no energy and was obviously dying. The victory was awarded to the brown cock, who then had to face another cock. Around the arena, cocks were lined up in their cages, waiting to fight. The driver of our car wagered on the fights we saw, and we had to pull him away to continue our tour. Obviously these cockfights have enormous meaning to the Balinese. In his book The Interpretation of Cultures, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) has a long chapter titled “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese cockfight.” He noticed the “deep psychological identification of Balinese men with their cocks,” and points out that Sabung,

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the word for cock, is used metaphorically to suggest “hero,” “warrior,” “champion,” “man of parts,” “lady-killer,” and “tough guy.” He adds that cockfights become the metaphor for wars, trials, political contests, and street fights. He mentions Bateson and Mead’s (1942) notion that since the Balinese see the body as “a set of separately animated parts, cocks are viewed as detachable, self-operating penises, ambulant genitals with a life of their own” (Geertz, 1973: 417). With a rather short life, I might add. Obviously, cockfights strike deep psychological chords in Balinese culture. Geertz’s description of a cockfight is quite poetic. He writes: Most of the time, in any case, the cocks fly almost immediately at one another in a wing-beating, head-thrusting, leg-kicking explosion of fury so pure, so absolute, and in its own way so beautiful, as to be almost abstract, a Platonic concept of hate. Within moments one or the other drives home a solid blow with his spur. (Geertz, 1973: 422) Since Geertz wrote his article, the Indonesian government has banned cockfights, except during religious celebrations at temples, and has tried to limit the gambling that goes on. The psychiatrists Gordon D. Jensen and Luh Ketut Suryani (1992) discuss cockfights and concur with Geertz’s (1973) observation that Balinese show little emotion during cockfights, since it is part of Balinese culture. They are interested in cockfights because they believe that cockfights can be used to counter Bateson’s (1972) assertion in Steps to an Ecology of Mind that no climaxes or resolutions exist in Balinese culture. They discuss some cockfights they attended (and videotapes of) and mention that before the actual fight, a kind of animated feeling is present among the spectators as people placed bets. They expressed emotion during the fight, but once it ended, no emotional responses were seen. As Jensen and Suryani (1992) write, concluding a short discussion of cockfighting: In summary, the cock-fight is an emotionally intense event with a building up of tension to a point of climax. At the preliminary stages of the cock-fight, emotion is expressed overtly. Climactic

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emotional responses are not evident to the observer but are felt internally by the participants. Various emotions associated with winning and losing tend to be suppressed or dealt with by the utilization of the concept of karma, as it is understood by the individual. (108) For the authors, cockfights suggest that Bateson’s notions about Balinese culture always being “steady state” and having no resolutions, such as one finds in Western cultures (where the good ultimately triumph over the bad), were incorrect. The Barong-Rangda relationship, in which neither triumphs, would be an example of a lack of final resolutions or climaxes in Balinese culture. Another matter, related to sexuality, needs to be dealt with. If Bateson and Mead (1942) are correct, and the cock is a “detachable, self-operating penis,” what does this suggest about the male Balinese psyche, which continually is battling other cocks and which is destined, most of the time, to be destroyed. Is a cockfight a kind of circumcision? The very sharp bladed attached to the cocks’ spurs call to mind the scalpels used in circumcisions. Are the cockfights connected to some kind of an unconscious repetition compulsion to undergo symbolic castration or, perhaps, to face it and triumph over it, since another cock is always available to be trained and sacrificed? Our guide informed us that cockfights are necessary because blood has to be spilled at temple ceremonies, and it is the cocks’ blood that is used. So the cockfights have an obvious utilitarian function, connected to Balinese religious beliefs. But this is the manifest or obvious function of these fights. What we must consider is what the latent and unconscious meaning of cockfights might be, and how these fights, which are so central to Balinese life, may relate to unrecognized and unconscious attitudes Balinese men have about their penises. Usually, when intense emotion is involved in some activity, it has a subliminal or masked sexual dimension to it that is operative. It may be far-fetched to suggest that cockfights deal with unconscious attitudes men have toward their penises and with anxieties they have about circumcision or castration, or both, but cockfights, to my mind, at least, can be seen—whatever else they may be—as having to do with these matters.

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Finally, the possibility exists that the conclusion of the cockfight represents a kind of sublimated orgasm, one of a series of “little deaths” that Balinese men experience during sex or during cockfights. Cockfighting has a sexual dimension that involves the lives of the cocks. As Bill Dalton explains in his Bali Handbook: Fighting cocks are giving loving care—regularly massaged, bathed, bounced on the ground, and trained every day. Their feathers, combs, earlobes, and waffles are trimmed so that none provide a beak-hold for the opponent bird. The owner prepares a diet of specially selected grains and a mixture of chopped, grilled meat, and jackfruit, which is believed to thicken the blood—preventing serious bleeding—and to make the bird lean and little subject to fatigue, its sexual energies are directed only toward fighting, so the cock leads a celibate life except when breeding new fighters. (Dalton, 1997: 171) A sexual dimension to cockfighting that involves the cocks is apparent, but also, I would suggest, that involves men who attend these fights. Dalton describes how the cocks are stimulated and excited before they fight—their handlers tease them, pull their tails, ruffle their feathers, and sometimes force red pepper down their throats. This stimulation calls to mind the narrative of the sexual act, which starts with stimulation and excitement and ends, generally speaking, with an orgasm, or, in the case of the cocks, the violent confrontation, which they may experience as orgasmic, as well. Dalton (1997) writes that cocks seldom survive more than five or ten fights in their careers, and that wounded ones are sometimes kept as pets. The passion that one finds in the audiences of cockfights has a much more profound meaning, I believe, than is commonly understood. If it is a symbolic orgasm, it would have to be considered one extremely important example of a climax (physically and psychologically) in Balinese culture. WOMEN WITH TOWERS OF FRUIT ON THEIR HEADS When you visit Bali, you will frequently see women with tall towers of fruit on their heads walking along the sides of the roads. This

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practice of offering these tall towers of fruit and foods is called gebogan or banten tegeh by the Balinese, and it is probably one of the most commonly used and most iconic images to represent Balinese culture. Often lines of forty or fifty women, in single lines, walk by the side of a road, heading toward a temple with their offerings. Some of the items in the towers, such as flowers, fruit, rice cookies, betel nuts, meat and vegetables, symbolically represent the various components of the universe for the Balinese, and the women bring their offerings to a temple to be blessed by a priest. After the services are over, the women fetch their offerings and bring them home for the members of their families to eat. The Agama Hindu-Dharma religion of Bali has an enormous number of different kinds of offerings that are required for the various ceremonies. Bill Dalton (1997) writes that Balinese have more than sixty religious holidays a year—all of which require offerings of one sort or another. He adds Bali has more than 50,000 temples, if you include the temples in every housing compound and others found almost anywhere, and generally once every 210 days temples have odalans, religious festivities that often last for days. I’ve seen the figure of 20,000 for public, nonfamily, temples. Psychiatrists Gordon D. Jensen and Luh Ketut Suryani (1992) offer a description of a typical offering. They point out that a typical Balinese woman belongs to five or six temples, and thus makes the elaborate offerings they carry on their heads at least ten times a year. They write: On the appointed day, one woman from each household (the women may rotate the responsibility) buys the best fruit and flowers they can afford, bakes rice cakes, and then arranges them in a colourful, cylindrical, and aesthetically pleasing design stacked up to one metre high, sometimes topped with a roast chicken and palm leaf crown ornament. With skill and practice this can be completed in an hour or two. She then carries the offering on her head to the local Banjar, returns home to bathe, dresses in her finest traditional Balinese costume and returns to the Banjar. There she joins a group of village women who proceed to walk single file to the temple with stacks of food

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(offering to the gods) on their heads. (Jensen and Suryani, 1992: 108-109) After they bring their offerings to the temple, they place them on a special table, a bale, and then they gather around and chat, in a very happy and elated state. The women wait close to the temple to watch the priest bless their offerings with holy water. Then they pray and the priest blesses them with holy water, which for them is a very serious matter. Then the women all walk to their homes together, in a very cheerful and satisfied mood. The psychiatrists are interested in the temple offerings because they are attempting refute Bateson’s notion that no climaxes, no resolutions, no endings exist in Balinese culture. Jensen and Suryani (1992) point out that a Western observer wouldn’t notice that this is a climactic situation because Balinese women don’t display any emotion, but they suggest that “this ceremony illustrates, as does a cockfight, direct expression before and after, but concealed emotional manifestation during, the climax” (Jensen and Suryani, 1992: 109). That is, the feelings of fulfillment and satisfaction the Balinese women feel, as a result of having participated in the various activities involved in bringing offerings, does have a climax, but one that is not obvious. This kind of behavior, they add, is due to a pattern of suppressing emotion in public situations that is the product of the child-rearing practices of Balinese women. Balinese children, like all children, learn, by identification, by imitation, and by the reinforcement, and so they imitate the behavioral patterns of adult Balinese whose cultural codes teach them to suppress anger and to not demonstrate strong emotions in public. If the manifest or obvious function of these offerings is to fulfill religious obligations, they have a number of latent or hidden functions. These celebrations provide an opportunity for the women to show their creativity and aesthetic sensibilities in a highly public venue. The celebrations also provide an opportunity for the women to gather together and have pleasing social contact with one another. Many benefits, both spiritual and social, exist in this practice of providing offerings, and the institution of religious offerings helps fosters community.

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Whatever else religion in Bali does, it enmeshes the Balinese in an endless series of activities, from their daily offerings that one finds scattered all over sidewalks and in fields and other places to the numerous obligations they have to their community, their Banjar, their families and their friends. The Balinese do not seem to experience alienation due to the inclusive nature of Balinese culture. Whether they chafe at the restrictions placed on them by Balinese religion and culture is another matter. THE LEGONG DANCE The legong dance is one of the most important sacred dances in Bali. It is danced by three prepubescent girls whose artistry and control of their bodies are simply remarkable. One of the more common versions of the dance goes as follows: A female attendant, the condong, is joined by two legongs—who are dressed in tightly rapped golden costumes, with their heads crowned with frangipani blossoms. The King of Lasem has kidnapped a princess Rangkesari, who was lost in the woods. She rejects his attempt at seduction. They are told that the brother of the princess, the prince of Daha, is coming to rescue her. King Lasem decides that he will do battle with the king, but the princess tells him it is futile to do so. She then hits him with his fan. He leaves to battle with the brother, meets a giant crow, generally played by the condong wearing huge wings. Meeting the crow is a sign that he will die in battle. The dance ends with the king dying at the hands of the prince of Daha. The dancers move from role to role seamlessly. This dance is a modification of a sacred dance, the sanghyan legong, which was danced by two young boys wearing masks. The present version involves an innovation by the dancer Ida Bagus Boda, who created the cadong figure in 1932. It is she who introduces the dance in a long solo. The legong is considered the most refined and exquisite of the many Balinese dances, and watching it is a rather intense experience. The costuming is brilliant, as in many Balinese dances. The faces of the dancers are expressionless. Their eyes are outlined with a dark color and their lips are a brilliant red. It is only the way they move

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A scene from the legong dance featuring two young girls.

their eyes that gives viewers any sense of their feelings. Audiences can get a sense of their emotions from the gamelan band, whose music rises and falls in intensity to accompany the actions in the dance. These young girls generally are incredibly poised and they have a remarkable amount of control of their bodies. They can move their fingers into all kinds of different alignments, all of which mean something, and their fingers seem to curve when they extend them. These girls, I’ve been told, often marry well since their position as legong dancers makes them highly esteemed. At the end of some performances, some of the dancers go into a trance, and I’ve seen photographs of men carrying young legong dancers, in their brilliant costumes, who were stiff as a board. Since the Balinese often go into trances, it can be assumed the girls in the photos are authentic. A number of aspects to the legong dance interested me. It is a remarkable spectacle, and I was astounded by the brilliance of the dancers and they way they controlled their bodies and manipulated their

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fingers. It is a highly structured dance and structure; complex codes of behavior seem to be a dominant aspect of life in Bali. But why prepubescent girls, I wondered. Is it because of Balinese attitudes toward menstrual blood? Women who are menstruating are not allowed to enter into Balinese temples. With prepubescent girls one never need fear that menstrual blood will “contaminate” the dance. Could it have something to do with attitudes in Balinese men toward young girls? The dance, after all, is about a kidnapping and attempted seduction, and it might play into subconscious fantasies Balinese men have that involve having sex with virgins. The dance may also be a kind of morality play about the dangers of sex outside of the prescribed rules of society. In Bali, it is not unusual for a man to “kidnap” his girlfriend—in an arranged kidnapping—preparatory to getting married. So an aspect of Balinese sexual arrangements is mirrored in the legong dance. The legong dance is a very powerful one, caused, in part, by the abilities of the dancers and by their inexpressive faces. I’ve seen dancers in Thailand who also had remarkable self-control and could manipulate their fingers in ways similar to Balinese dancers, but the Thai dancers smiled at the audience and obviously saw themselves as involved in an entertainment. In Bali, the legong dance is entirely different. It is an intense experience. Does the lack of expressiveness in the dancers signify some kind of hysteria? Is this form of feeling or expressing emotions a widespread cultural behavioral pattern? I’ve dealt with comments by scholars in various disciplines about this Balinese lack of expressiveness elsewhere in this book. Many commentators have mentioned the lack of overt emotion in Balinese people—with the exception, perhaps, of laughter and expressions of a sense of humor. This lack of emotion may be connected to Balinese, of all ages, being prone to going into trances and other forms of dissociative behavior. Perhaps the legong dance is a paradigmatic one that reflects unconscious attitudes the Balinese have about emotions, sexuality, marriage, and other related phenomena. Whatever else it might be, the legong is a superlative and moving experience in a highly theatrical and ceremonial culture.

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THE KECAK “MONKEY” DANCE This dance is a purely commercial one, designed for tourists, and certainly one of the most bizarre dances I’ve even seen. In this dance, the gamelan orchestra is replaced by a group of fifty or more barechested men, who sit in circles around some source of light and chant “kecak, kecak, kecak, kecak” (sometimes written as cak, cak, cak, kecak) in a variety of different intensities and rhythmic patterns. This sounds, to many people, similar to the chattering of monkeys, which is why it is often called “the monkey dance.” At times, as the dance progresses, the members of the chorus change their positions. A singer, called by the Balinese a juru tandak, chants the story of the dance, which is based upon the Ramayana. The handbill given to patrons in Batubulan describes the story. I have made minor changes to correct for grammatical and spelling errors and facilitate understanding: Act 1: Rama, Sita, and a Golden Deer Rama, Sita, and Laksamana enter the arena. Then a golden deer appears. Sita asks Rama to catch the deer for her. Rama leaves Sita under the protection of Laksamana. Soon a cry for help is heard. Sita thinks this is the voice of Rama and wants Laksamana to leave her alone and go help Rama. At first Laksamana refuses to let her go. Act 2: Sita and Rahwana Rahwana appears, kidnaps Sita, and takes her to his palace, Alengha. Act 3: Sita, Trajita, and Hanoman Accompanied by Trijata, Rahwana’s niece, Sita is bemoaning her misfortune in the garden of Rahwana’s palace. Hanoman, a white monkey appears. He tells Sita that he is Rama’s envoy and shows her one of Rama’s rings. She gives him a hairpin to be taken to Rama with a message stating that she is waiting for Rama’s rescue.

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Act 4: Rama, Meganada, and Garuda In this scene, Rama battles with Meganada, Rahwana’s son. Meganada shoots Rama with a magic arrow, which turns into a dragon and ties Rama up with a rope. Rama calls Garuda, his ally. He appears and unties Rama. Act 5: Rama, Sugriwa, and Meganada Sugriwa, king of the monkeys, appears. He battles Meganada and defeats him. Rama, Sita, and Laksamana return home, happily. This dance is followed by a another dance, the sanghyan jaran dance, in which a dancer, supposedly in a trance, runs across glowing embers a number of times. Some fellow dancers restrain him from dancing on the embers again. Then a priest comes, sprinkles holy water on the dancer, who returns to consciousness. While all the action is going on in the kecak dance, the chorus of men are chanting, at various speeds “kecak, kecak, kecak,” sounding very much like monkeys, and moving into varying positions as the dance progresses. This dance is not a sacred dance, like the Barong dance and the legong dance, but is one that was adapted for tourists by Walter Spies, an important figure in Balinese culture, in 1931. Some question exists about the origins of the dance. In Insight Guides: Bali Scott Rutherford (2002) says that the dance was developed by the villagers in Bededulu and was “popularized” by Spies. Other writers say he adapted it. Whatever the case, he had some role in it becoming an important dance in Bali. Bill Dalton (1997) says that when done well, the dance is an emotionally exhilarating and very exciting dance. The performance I saw in Batubulan came off as a rather bizarre curiosity. In part, it was because the stage area wasn’t adequate and the lighting wasn’t very good, so you had to strain to see what was going on, and though the dancers were excellent, they seemed to be constrained by the small area in which they could dance. I also found the chorus of men chanting like monkeys (or whatever) to be somewhat disconcerting. The dance contained little drama, and I didn’t experience the magical “suspension of disbelief” one has when caught up in the events of some narrative. The actions of the chorus, with the men throwing up

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their arms from time to time and moving about in a highly choreographed manner, at times seemed artificial. An element to the chorus warrants some consideration. In Adrian Vickers’s book Bali: A Paradise Created, he discusses the use of the kecak chorus in a film. He writes: In the soft-core pornography of the film Emmanuelle II Bali appears as one of the backdrops of a badly-acted international orgy, with the chanting chorus of the kecak or monkey dance providing an arousing rhythmic display of the primitive passions supposedly seething in Bali. (Vickers, 1990: 193) What Vickers does here is draw attention to an aspect of this dance that generally escapes our attention—that a sexual dimension to this chorus of fifty or a hundred bare-chested men, chanting in unison, exists. This dance, as so many of the other Balinese dances, has, I would suggest, a subliminally communicated sexual dimension to it, connected, perhaps, to fantasies people in the West have about surging passions and sexual freedom—or is it license—in the tropics. In the kecak dance, the monkeys help defeat the forces of evil, and the chanting of the monkeys is generally thought to be a means of repelling evil or demonic forces in Bali. But as Vickers (1990) suggests, the chanting has other meanings as well. The bare-chested men in the chorus also may function as a turn-on for homosexuals and for women attending the performances. GAMELAN ORCHESTRAS If the sound of cocks crowing is one of the most insistent sounds one hears in Bali, the sound of gamelan bands rehearsing, or playing at sacred dances and celebrations of all kinds, is the other sound one hears in Bali. Since a seemingly endless number of celebrations go on in Bali, a great number of gamelan orchestras are needed. The players in these orchestras are Balinese who may have many different occupations during the day, but become gamelan musicians in the evenings when they practice, and at ceremonial events. As I write this chapter, I am listening to a CD of gamelan music— in this case for the Keybar legong dance—that I purchased in Bali.

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When you first hear gamelan music it strikes you as a bit discordant and perhaps strange. But after a while gamelan music weaves its spell on you. When my flight arrived in Bali, a gamelan orchestra was playing at the airport, as an acoustic introduction, one might say, to Balinese culture. One thing worth noting is that no solos are performed in gamelan music and this, I would suggest, is a reflection of the Balinese cultural ethos, in which it is the group, starting with the family and the village Banjar, that is dominant. Thus, the Balinese get a great deal of support from being a member of a group, and the Balinese see their identities as tied to the collectivity, which also imposes any number of obligations on individuals. The gamelan orchestra, then, symbolizes, one might say, the Balinese notion of how social life is to be organized. A gamelan orchestra (and the word is used both for the orchestra and the players) is generally composed of some combination of bronze keys on bamboo resonators, gongs of varying sizes on wooden frames, drums, hand cymbals, flutes, and two-stringed violins. Orchestras that can be described as wind gamelans also play. In these gamelans the instruments are bamboo segments that are struck with padded wooden mallets. Some of these bamboo instruments are ten feet long and have large diameters.

Gamelan band playing outside a temple.

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The gamelan music uses a five-tone scale (sometimes a seven-tone scale), which is not one that Westerners are familiar with. Colin McPhee, in an essay titled “Children and Music in Bali” (in Belo, 1970), offers an excellent description of gamelan music. He writes: The swift, aerial music of the Balinese orchestra, or gamelan, fills the open air with chiming resonance. Innumerable little gongs, large and small, xylophone-like instruments with ringing bronze keys blend in an intricate polyphony that floats above the throbbing drums and periodic accents of deep and vibrant gongs. The air is shattered with a continuous shower of bright, percussive sound as the difficult music is performed by thirty or forty carefully rehearsed musicians. (Belo, 1970: 296) He adds, some pages later, that this music never has a climax, never has a melodically set up conclusion the way Western music does. Gamelan music may be structurally complex and very sophisticated, but it doesn’t have the kind of resolutions that we find in Western music. It was this notion that gamelan music has no climax that may have induced Gregory Bateson to suggest that Balinese art, in general, had no climaxes. In their book The Balinese People: A Reinvestigation of Character, the psychiatrists Gordon D. Jensen and Luh Ketut Suryani (1992) attempt to refute Bateson on gamelan music by quoting McPhee, who wrote that he could determine various patterns in this music and could recognize when certain sections of a gamelan piece concluded (Belo, 1970). But their citation from McPhee does not, to my mind, really refute Bateson. Since the gamelan players, similar to many of the artists in Bali, are just ordinary citizens, the lack of a climax in the music would tie in with Balinese culture, for Bateson, which has no climaxes in its dances or other aspects of daily life. Bali is an island where an unusually high proportion of the population is engaged in one form of artistic endeavor or another. It is only logical to assume that the values and beliefs of the people would be reflected in their arts, which indirectly help reinforce these beliefs. People wish to avoid cognitive dissonance, that is, exposure to ideas or works that attack and challenge their beliefs (whether articulated

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or not), so artistic texts can be studied to gain insights into a people’s values, beliefs, and character. Bateson used his notions about a lack of climaxes in Balinese music and art to draw some inferences about Balinese culture and national character, inferences that may be, and most likely are, unwarranted. It is the inferences that Bateson and Mead (1942) drew that are so roundly attacked by Jensen and Suryani. If the Balinese are “charming schizophrenics,” as Bateson and Mead (1942) seemed to suggest, their alleged schizophrenia doesn’t seem to prevent them, from what I observed during my visit there, from functioning well in society and creating wonderful music in their gamelan bands. I asked a psychiatrist whether it is possible for schizophrenics to function well in society and be charming and he said it was possible. The notion that the Balinese are, collectively, schizophrenics is, I would suggest, a highly questionable matter. NAMES IN BALI The fifth son of a woman in Bali has the same name as the first son and the sixth son has the same name as the second son. This is because of the system by which Balinese commonly give their children names. The explanation of this rule is somewhat complicated. We must realize, to begin with, that four castes exist in Bali—a system that can be traced back to the fifteenth century. In order of rank these castes are: Rank

Typical Names

Brahmins: priests

Ida Bagus (males) or Ida Ayu (females) Anak Agung, Dewa, Cokorda, Prebagus, (Dewi Ayu, Anak Agung Isti for women) I Gusti, Pregusti (I Gusti Ayu for women) Named according to birth order

Satriya: higher nobility Wesia: merchants Sudra: farmers

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The Sudra represent some 97 percent of the Balinese populace. They typically follow certain commonly accepted rules for naming children, according to their birth order. What’s interesting, as I pointed out previously, is that after the fourth male child, the fifth male child is given the same name as the first child, so it is possible to have two Wayans in a family. Order

Son

Daughter

First Second Third Fourth

Wayan, Putu, Gede Made, Madek Nyoman, Komang Ketut

Same, prefaced by Ni

The caste system doesn’t prohibit members of different castes from holding any jobs, with few exceptions, but it does have implications for marriages, since it is not considered desirable for a high caste women to marry someone from a lower caste, since wives take on the caste of their husbands. Thus, when the Balinese tell someone their names, they inform that person about their caste and their birth order—matters of considerable importance in Bali since the Balinese speak in different ways to people from different castes. In America, by contrast, our names don’t reveal very much; perhaps our ethnicity or race, and maybe our religions, but not much more. What meaning might this custom of naming children among the Balinese have? One thing that comes to mind is Bateson’s notions about a lack of closure in Balinese arts and culture, in general. The naming practices, it might be suggested, mirror, to some extent, the structure of gamelan orchestras, whose music has no conclusions, and the Barong dance, in which there is no final resolution. The naming system also has to do with the place of the individual in Balinese culture. A society in which millions of Balinese have the same names suggests that the individual plays a somewhat different role than individuals play in societies in which parents are free to name their children whatever they want to name them. Their names, their clans, their castes, their banjar all give Balinese a sense of their place in a community. Balinese children are “imprinted” with Balinese cultural values, and these imprints are constantly reinforced by the various rituals and ceremonies that take place in Bali. Their

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names, then, are signifiers of the entire Balinese cultural system that envelops them in a comforting, but in some ways, suffocating embrace. In the index of Jensen and Suryani’s (1992) The Balinese People: A Reinvestigation of Character, they offer the following topics as “character traits”: conformism continuity controlled emotionality cooperation-devotion hierarchical orientation hypnotizability industrious creativity

nonverbal expression of emotion passive acceptance suppression of emotion tranquility or peace trust-belief wish for a son vulnerable

This list offers a capsule picture of Balinese character as these two psychiatrists see it. Although it reveals a great deal about Balinese culture and character, it doesn’t capture the feeling you get when you are in Bali and find yourself often greeted by friendly, smiling, and joyful people, most of whom have one of only four given names, based on their caste. What is distinctive about Bali is the degree to which the hierarchist culture there, which I discussed earlier, dominates society. In most countries, we find all four cultures, with the individualist and hierarchist cultures generally dominant, the egalitarians offering critiques of the other two cultures, and the fatalists surviving as best they can. In Bali, with its caste system, it is easy to classify it as a hierarchist dominated one, but it is the degree to which is it hierarchist that is so striking. In many societies, people are able to move from one culture to another based on various circumstances in their lives, but in Bali, there doesn’t seem to be any other cultural group to which a person can move. BALINESE TEMPLES (PURA) It has been estimated that Bali has 20,000 public or community temples, and temples are found in every family compound as well, so

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however you want to count, a tremendous number of temples exist in Bali. Some books, such as the Bali Handbook by Bill Dalton (1997), say as many as 50,000 temples exist in Bali, including all the temples on the island—in family compounds, on mountains, in fields, and other places. If we take the figure of 30,000 temples in Bali, and since approximately 3 million people live in Bali, this means, roughly speaking, one temple stands for every 100 people. If the number of temples is 60,000, approximately 1 temple stands for every 50 people. Public temples generally have three walled-in sections: 1. An outside temple or jabaan, which is used for social gatherings. One enters through a split gate, generally with a wall behind the gate barring the way. This is because the Balinese believe evil spirits can move only straight ahead 2. An inner courtyard or jaba tengah, which consists of shrines, towers, and other religious buildings 3. The third and most sacred courtyard, the jeroan, where the religious dances and ceremonies are held Some temples contain small “satellite” temples, representing other, larger and more important temples. Temples, Dalton (1997) explains, are always oriented toward sacred mountains, and when the Balinese worship, they always face these sacred mountains. The Balinese believe the mountains are sacred and that the sea is full of danger, a rather curious matter for an island people. What is important to remember is that every 210 days, to celebrate its founding, a temple has an odalan, a religious celebration, that often lasts for a few days. When these ceremonies occur, the temples are full of people and religious passion. The women bring their towers of fruit, cockfights are held, ceremonial processions take place, gamelan music is played, and, of course, religious services are led by priests. Since so many temples exist in Bali, wherever you are, you probably are very close to some odalan, and most likely to be a lot of excitement will generated by the celebration. Some scholars have described Bali as a ceremonial and theatrical culture because of the numerous religious ceremonies that are held there. During these odalan you find religious processions with men,

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generally in white clothes; women, often in beautiful costumes; little children tagging along; the Barong being carried about; and people carrying poles with banners and large umbrellas—all in a very festive manner. Tourists who wish to visit certain temples, when no odalan is taking place, are often required to wear sarongs and sashes, which can be rented for nominal fees at the temples. Women cannot enter a temple or participate in religious services if they are menstruating, due to the Balinese notion that menstrual blood is a contaminating agent. When no celebrations are occurring in the temples, they are rather inert, and most of them are not terribly interesting. Given that Bali is a theatrical culture, an analogy might be made with plays. A written play conveys a great deal, but it is much more when the play is performed by actors and actresses. In a similar manner, the temples in Bali are not architecturally interesting, but when the odalan take place, they become the stages for exciting performances. And it is the festive celebrations that take place at the odalan that gives tourists an insight into Balinese, for the Balinese welcome people into their celebrations. Thus, tourists feel, if they wish to do so, that they are actually participating in Balinese culture and that they are not only observers. UBUD Ubud is generally considered to be the cultural center of Bali, the town where tourists interested in exploring the Balinese arts and Balinese culture stay—in contrast to beach towns such as Kuta, which is where those interested in the four “Ss” of tourism locate: sea, sand, sex, and shopping. Many tourists who stay in Kuta take day trips to Ubud to see what it’s like. In Ubud dances are held every night at a palace that is at the junction of Jala Raya and Monkey Forest Road— the center of town, for all practical purposes. The Ubud general market is on the right-hand corner of Monkey Forest Road as you face the palace. A large temple sits near the palace, and it is in this area that you often find gatherings of Balinese preparing for a procession celebrating an odalan in a nearby temple. Two excellent museums, the Neka museum and the Agung Rai Mu-

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seum of Art, are not far from the center of town. These museums provide a wonderful overview of the development of painting and the visual arts in Bali. Ubud has two important streets—Jalan Raya, which is the main street of Ubud, and Monkey Forest Road, also known as Jalan Wanara Wana, which is vertical to Jalan Raya and which leads to the famous Monkey Forest, perhaps a mile away, an area full of nasty and often unpleasant monkeys. (Some other monkey forests have more congenial monkeys.) Ubud has approximately 250 restaurants and an enormous number of bungalows, hotels, homestays, and other kinds of places for tourists to stay. Monkey Forest Road was rice fields some twenty or thirty years ago. Now it is a street full of trendy (and some not so trendy) shops, massage parlors, tourism agencies, and restaurants. What’s interesting is that although Monkey Forest Road generally has a decidedly upscale feel to it, the sidewalks on either side of the street are all broken up, and the Balinese shop owners there do not seem to have any sense that they should do something about their sidewalks. So walking up and down Monkey Forest Road, with its fancy shops and restaurants, is rather perilous, and you have to watch where you walk lest you trip over some broken piece of sidewalk. This prevents tourists from doing serious shopping because they have to expend so much effort in not tripping that it is difficult to look at what is being shown in shop windows and displayed in stores. In some respects certain parts of Monkey Forest Road are not that much different from sections of many other similar streets found in Sausalito, California, or Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, or any other important tourist destination. Monkey Forest Road has, I would suggest, an international upscale style for malls, shops, and restaurants, and wherever you are, they are all more or less the same. And, of course, many of the shops found on these streets are branches of international companies. A Prada shop on Monkey Forest Road isn’t that much different from a Prada shop in San Francisco or anywhere else. These upscale shops and restaurants all have a certain aesthetic designed to appeal to their patrons, based on their restrained use of color, their spatiality, the kind of lighting they have, decorations, etc. In the outskirts of Ubud are rice fields, and you can even see them here and there, in small patches, off of Monkey Forest Road. You

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don’t see beggars or children seeking handouts in Ubud, and this seems to be the case all through Bali. The Balinese, relatively speaking, are affluent and make a good deal more money, on average, than most Indonesians. Our guide made occasional reference to the various problems created by Javanese, who are on an island only thirty minutes by ferry, from Bali. The Balinese, from what I was able to observe, do not like people from Java and other Indonesian islands who are Muslims. It was Muslims who set off the bombs in Kuta that killed hundreds of people and devastated the tourism industry in Bali. This set off a chain of events that hurt the Balinese people, since Bali survives by tourism; approximately twenty percent of the tourists who visit Indonesia go to Bali, we must remember, and I’ve seen figures higher than twenty percent. The second night we were in Ubud a truly ferocious storm and the rain came down in torrents. The left side of Monkey Forest Road was full of rushing water, perhaps a foot deep. My wife and I ventured out in the middle of this storm to get some dinner. We wanted to cross the street, where the water wasn’t a problem. As we stood there, a young Balinese male in a motorbike backed his bike into the water near where my wife was standing and offered to ferry her across. But she is terrified of being on a motorbike, even for a twenty foot trip, and refused, thanking the young man effusively. We found a dry patch where we could cross the street and made our way to the restaurant. The little episode is a wonderful evocation of the friendliness, kindness, and hospitality of the Balinese people. Fortunately, after that rain, which ended after an hour, we had no need to use our umbrellas during the remainder of our stay in Ubud.

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Coda

Bali Coda: on BaliMy on MyMind Mind My remembrances of Bali are very fond ones, but, like all memories, somewhat jumbled. Our thoughts don’t generally follow a logical and coherent pattern, so when I think about Bali, a number of different experiences come to mind—but they are random and skip around from one thing to another. I remember, when we landed in Depensar, that I was surprised by the officiousness of the agents who inspected our passports. It wasn’t congruent with the paradise image that surrounds Bali. When we got our suitcases, guards were present and guard dogs were sniffing around. Indonesia is very strict about drugs, and a case in which an Australian woman with some drugs had been caught with them and had been given a very long jail sentence had been highly publicized. But as we were leaving the building, we passed a gamelan orchestra—our first touch of Balinese culture—and in the parking lot there were many smiling people, with names on signs. We quickly found the guide and driver who had been sent to ferry us to Ubud and soon were on our way. I noticed a huge McDonald’s by the side of the road and saw large numbers of Balinese with carts selling various food items along the side of the road. My wife and I had purchased an individual package tour to Bali—it involved transportation to Bali and five nights in a small hotel in Ubud, transportation to the hotel and back to the airport, and a half-day tour. Our hotel was located in the middle of Monkey Forest Road, in the middle of a beautiful garden. We were in a bungalow that had a small porch with two chairs and a coffee table with two cups and saucers and a small plate with packages of sugar. Many of the hotels in Ubud had the same design—they were bungalows with porches in front, where people could sit and drink tea. 137

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The huge French doors to our room were ornately carved. I noticed, then, a certain aesthetic sensibility at work. A large lock kept the doors shut. A porter opened the doors, placed our suitcases on the floor, and left. The room was a large room with big picture windows. We had a king-size bed, which was in the center of the room. A huge rectangular painting hung over the bed, and above the painting was an air conditioner. A fan was in the middle of the thatched straw ceiling and ran continually. On either side of the bed was a table. On the right-hand wall, as you faced the bed, was a large armoire for our clothes. The floor was tiled. We also had a small refrigerator stocked with water and soda, a phone, and a small desk with a chair. The bathroom was large and very simple. It didn’t have a shelf under the mirror so you had to store toiletries on top of the six-foot wall separating the toilet from the shower area. My wife described our room as “primitive,” in that it was austere, and yet it displayed a certain aesthetic sensibility. We were, it turned out, in the most expensive room in the hotel. I had occasion to look at a room in a much more expensive hotel and it was very similar to our room, except that the room was more luxurious and the bathroom was fancier. But the rather formal design of the room and its contents displayed the same aesthetic sensibility as I found in our room. The Balinese are an artistic people, and a large numbers of painters, sculptors, mask-makers, musicians, and dancers live on the island. Many Balinese, who work in various jobs, also are members of gamelan orchestras or are dancers or participate in Balinese cultural life in various ways. I had been told by some people I met at our hotel about the owner of a secondhand bookstore who knew a great deal about Balinese culture. I tried a number of times to meet with him, but he was always dancing at some temple celebration, it turned out, though eventually we did meet and had a very interesting conversation about Balinese culture. He has a son who had been a student in a school in Mill Valley, where I live, and he knows Mill Valley very well. In the course of my stay in Bali I took a number of tours and saw most of the tourist sites of interest in the country. One guidebook I read about Bali said that Tanah Lot Temple wasn’t worth bothering with, but I thought it was quite a wonderful experience watching the sun set on the temple—set, as it is, in the sea. There are any number of

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beautiful places to visit in Bali, and as you ride around Bali you see many spectacular rice fields or mountain scenarios. Many of the temples are placed in lovely areas—by lakes, on mountains, and so on. I recall that the ARPA Museum about a fifteen minute walk from our hotel in Ubud, was in a large field and the setting was very beautiful. So being a tourist in Bali involved a kind of immersion into a place where a very refined aesthetic sensibility was continually making itself felt. Someone asked me, “how many days is Bali worth, if you’re not a beach person?” I found it hard to answer that question. Being in Bali is an opportunity to see, and become part of, in some cases, an unusual culture, one that is very different from American culture or, in truth, most cultures. Being in a culture that is so different from ours enables us to see ourselves more clearly. But it also opens us to recognizing and appreciating the different ways that cultures organize themselves. The fashionably dressed saleswomen in some of the shops on Monkey Forest Road look like saleswomen you might see anywhere, but these women, who seem so modern and hip, believe in demons and witches, and follow highly prescribed rules from their religion that shape much of their lives. This is one of the enigmas that Bali presents to tourists—modern hotels, classy restaurants, and yet, lurking beneath the surface, a belief system that strikes Westerners as bizarre and perhaps even medieval. I would imagine many tourists puzzle over this matter, but then forget about it as they become immersed in their activities—visiting temples, watching religious processions, going to museums, and attending dances. It is at the dances that the artistic brilliance of Balinese culture is most commonly observed by tourists, in the fantastic costuming, the hypnotic gamelan orchestras, and the remarkable ability of the Balinese dancers. The male dancers, especially the king figure, often make rather spastic movements, and I sensed a comedic aspect to the Barong dance. In this book I have offered data (whose accuracy must in some cases be questioned) from the tourism industry in Bali and, using cultural studies approaches, have also tried to make sense of many of the experiences that tourists have—which I’ve dealt with in the section on signs and symbols of Balinese culture. The question that tourism

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scholars ask about Bali still remains: will Bali be able to maintain its unique and distinctive culture, or will its culture be diffused by the forces of modernism? In an article, “The Recalcitrant Tourist in Bali,” by Paul Luchessa (in his book Squalor and Splendor: Expat Tales of East and West) sums up this dilemma: Can it last—this culture plucked out of an Indian epic and set down on that magical island? Can it withstand the onslaught of videos, Sony walkmans and the rest of the so-called civilization? I regret to say I saw a Kentucky Chicken restaurant on the road to Kuta beach. Can McDonald’s be far behind? Covarubbias said the Balinese had no interest in movies, and yet all the towns have lurid sex and violence posters advertising the usual Hollywood trash as well as the locally produced variety. Wham and Whitney Houston can be heard in the depths of the pristine jungle. No place is safe from McLuhan’s global village. Bali has one thing in its favor—the world does not seem to want anything more from it than its culture. We can only hope the world does not kill that culture in the process of buying it. (Luchessa, 2000: 141) Luchessa’s question is one that tourists to Bali must continually confront. Will tourism destroy what Bali has to offer to tourists and the world—its distinctive and remarkable culture?

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Index Page numbers followed by the letter “t” indicate tables. Arnold, Matthew, 10 Asia Times, 37, 40 Asiaweek, x, 32 Australia, 43 Authenticity debate about, 57 tourism and, 56-58 Bahktin, M.M., 58-61 Bali ambivalence of Balinese to tourists, 36 are Balinese schizophrenics, 128-129 artistic nature of Balinese, 138 as Asian hotbox, 19-20, 23 as exotic destination, 70-72 as mainstream destination, 22 as “steady state” culture, 117 as tourist destination, 12 as tropical paradise, 51-52 blogs about, 32 bombing in 2002, 37, 40 carnivalesque and, 58-61 ceremonies, xvii cockfights, 114-118 cultural studies approach to, 12 dilemma of exotic cultures and, 70-72 Disneyfication of, 24 ease of going into trances, 122 foreign tourist arrivals 1973-2003, 37-38 foreign visitors, 38t Geertz on cockfights in, 69 icons, xvii

Bali (continued) image in guidebooks, 12-23 imagined versus real, 3-6 importance of tourism for, 40-43 increase in number of tourists, 20 in “surfie” mythology, 1 is it postmodern?, 72-73 Japanese tourists in, 7 lack of climaxes in culture, 116-118 lack of emotions in Balinese people, 123 “last paradise,” xvii magical quality of, 21 McDonald’s restaurants in, 137 names of people in, 129-131 number of religious holidays per year, 119 on Internet, 27-33 overwhelmed by tourists, 5 paradisical image of, 3, 5, 24, 46 purge of communists in 1965, 66 refined aesthetic sensibility of people, 139 relative affluence of inhabitants of, 135 rituals, xvii suppression of emotion by Balinese, 120 symbols, xvii synthesizing culture, 21 temples in, 131-133 theatrical and ceremonial culture, 22 tourism statistics about, 37-43 tourists by nationality, 39t tourists by nationality 2005, 39t “Travel Talk” critical entry about, 29

145

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Bali and Beyond: Explorations in the Anthropology of Tourism, 7, 47 Bali: A Paradise Created, 5, 126 Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture, 47 Bali Discovery Tours, 41 Bali Handbook, 19-20, 118, 133 Bali: Indonesia, 21, 37 Balinese People: A Reinvestigation of Character character traits of Balinese, 131 gamelan music, 128 Mead’s theory about Barong, 105 on Balinese view of good and bad sides to everything, 113 symbolic significance of Rangda, 111-112 Balinese temples (pura) design of, 132 tourists visiting, 133 number of in Bali, 131-132 odalan (celebrations), 132-133 Bali Tourism Board, 38, 39 Ballinger, Rucina, 107 Banjar, 130 Barnouw, Victor, 81-82 Barong, 100, 101-106 (See also Rangda) as loving father figure, 111 battles with Rangda never resolved, 104, 106-113 dancers in trances stab selves, 104 description of, 103-104 different kinds of Barongs, 102-103 hero of Balinese mythology, 102 Mead’s theory about Barong, 105, 111 unresolved battle between good and evil, 106 Barong dance, 102-113, 133 Barthes, Roland, xvii, 95-96 Bateson, Gregory, 1, 81-83, 88-91, 112, 116, 129 Baudrillard, Jean, 54 Bedugul, 100 Belo, Jane, 81, 128

Besakih temple, 99 Boorstin, Daniel, 73 Bowen, James, 83

Camus, Albert, 63 Canang, 100, 101 Carnival Bakhtin’s theory of, 58-60 Bali and, 59-61 Balinese ceremonial culture and, 60-61t characteristics of, 59-60 medieval asceticism and, 60 Cathay Pacific, 43 Celuk, 7 Certeau, Michel de, 69 “Children and Music in Bali,” 128 Chon, Kaye, xiv Cockfights, 114-118 analysis of by Jensen and Suryani, 116-117 as sublimated orgasms, 118 description of by Geertz, 116 held in kalangan pits, 114 identification of Balinese men with cocks, 115-116 only held during Odalans, 114 sexual aspects of, 117-118 Cohen, Erik, 79 Course in General Linguistics, 70 “Creating a New Version of Paradise,” 23 Cultural studies (See also Culture) and experiences of tourists in foreign lands, 96 approach to tourism, 96 multidisciplinary nature of, 96 Cultural Theory, 76 Cultural Tourism, 47 Culture carnivalization hypothesis, 58-60 definition of, 49-50 monocultures and, 50 problems dealing with, 10

Index Culture (continued) relation to tourism, 47-50 Yamashita on, 49

Dalton, Bill, 19-20, 82, 118, 125, 132 Delaware, 40 Dewi Kunti, 105 Dictionary of Sociology and Related Terms, 49 Disneyland, 47, 52-56 Bali and Disneyland comparison, 53t Bali’s similarities to, 47, 52t, 53t boring nature of, 53 degrees of fakery and, 54 postmodernist thought and, 56 problem of authenticity and, 54 Disneyworld, 54 Douglas, Mary, 77-80, 84

Eliot, T.S., 10 Ellis, Richard, 76 Emmanuelle II, 126 Empire of Signs, 96 as useful model, 95 Japanese passion for raw food, 95 on “flashes” of Japanese culture, 95 semiotic analysis of Japan, xvii Engels, Friedrich, 65, 66 England, 41 Escapes Unlimited, 3, 43 Ethnography defined, 13 participant observation and, 13 Exotic Bali as exotic destination, 70-71 opposite of everyday life, 71

Fairchild, H.P., 50 Financial Times, 10 Fiore, Q, 87 Fjellman, S.M., 54

147

Fleck, Ludwig, 80 France, 41 Frankenstein, 112 Freud, Sigmund dreams as “slide shows,” 11 secondary elaboration in dreams, 11 Frommer’s “Travel Talk,” 29-32

Gamelan orchestras, 126-129, 137 kinds of instruments in, 127 reflection of Balinese cultural ethos, 127 Garden of Eden Adam and Eve in, 40-52 Expulsion of Adam and Eve from, 51-52 Geertz, Clifford, xiv, 40, 69, 73, 104, 115-116 Germany, 41 Google, 27 Grid-group theory, 76-81

Hanoman, 124 Hawaii, 43 Hindu religion, 58, 73 Hong Kong, 3 Howe, Jean, xiv

“Ideal Village: Interactions through Tourism in Central Anatolia,” 67 Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 73 Indonesian government, 47, 54 Ingram, William, xiv, 114 Insight Guilds: Bali, 125 Insight Pocket Guide: Bali, 20-21 Internet Googling Bali on, 27-29 Web sites on Bali, 27-29 Interpretation of Cultures, 13, 40, 58, 115 Italy, 41

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BALI TOURISM

Japan, 41, 43 Jensen, Gordon D., 90-91, 104-105, 111-113, 116, 119-120, 129, 131 Kecak dance description of dance, 124-126 designed for tourists, 124 Korompia, Diana Elizabeth, xiv Kotler, Philip, 83 Kuper, Adam, 10 Kuta beach, 6, 11

Laksamana, 124, 125 Laskewicz, Zachar, 89 Leak (leyan, lejak), 112 Lee, Denny, 83, 85 Legong dance, 96, 121-124 dancers falling into trances at end, 122 fear of menstrual blood, 123 modification of sacred dance, 121 role of prepubescent girls in, 121-123 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 50 Little Bit of One O’Clock, 114 Los Angeles, 54 Loveard, Keith, ix-xv, 32, 35 Luchessa, Paul, 140

MacCannell, Dean, xiv, 11, 47, 63 Mahendratta, 107, 112 Makens, James, 83 Mapeed, 100 Marx, Karl, 65 McDonald’s restaurant, 140 McLuhan, Marshall, 87 McPhee, Colin, 89, 128 Mead, Margaret, 1, 81-83, 87, 89-91, 105, 111-112, 129 Meganada, 125 Mount Batur, 99

Ngurah Rai Airport, 1, 41 Nuarta, I Nyoman, 35

Odalans, 114 Oey, Eric, xix, 21, 25, 45, 102 Orlando, Florida, 54

“Paradise Paradox,” 32, 35 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 11, 14-15 Picard, Michel, 45, 55, 75 Practice of Everyday Life, 69 Psychology of Consciousness, 11-12

Rabelais and His World, 58 Rahwana, 124, 125 Rama, 124, 125 Ramayana, 124 Rangda, 104-113 (See also Barong) and elderly women in Bali, 112 as reconstituted murderous mother figure, 111 battles with Barong, 104, 107-113 description of, 107 mythological significance of, 109 origins of, 107 significance of being a widow, 112 Road to Bali, 5 Rough Guide to Bali & Lombok 4th Edition, 21-22

Sadewa, 110-112 San Francisco, 3 Sanur, 1 Satan, 112 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 14-15, 70-71 Semiotics Barthes analysis of Japanese culture, xvii concepts are relational, 70 exotic and everyday contrasted, 71, 72t science of signs, 10-11, 11, 13-15

Index Signs conventional meanings and, 14-15 Saussure on, 14 signifier-signified relationship, 14-15 Singapore, 20, 21 Singapore Airlines, 3, 43 Sita, 124, 125 South Korea, 43 Squalor and Splendor: Tales of East and West, 140 Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 116 Sugriwa, 125 Suryani, Luh Ketut, 90-91, 104-105, 111-113, 119-120, 129, 131 Sutawa, I. Gusti Kade, 41

Taiwan, 43 Tanah Lot temple, 86, 99, 138 Thailand, 68 Thailand Tourism, xvii Thompson, Michael, 76, 77 Tourism as work, 7 authenticity and, 56-57 Bali and, 65-66 base/superstructure relationship, 65-66 Boorstin on tourists, 75 Boorstin on tourists and natives, 76t carnival theory and, 58-60 colonialism and, 68-70 highly segmented industry, 8 important aspect of culture, 47-50 International Expenditures 2004, 42t largest industry in world, xvii male gaze and, 67-68 per capita tourism expenditures, 42t per capita tourism expenditures 2007, 42t scholarly discussions of, 12 semiotic nature of, 9-15 tourist attractions as pseudo-events, 74-75 Tourism and Modernity, 56

149

Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 11 Tourists Visits in Major Destinations 2005, 40t Tours of Bali Karangasem, 98 Kintamani Besakih, 97 Singahara, 97 Tanah Lot, 98 Trijata, 124 Tucker, Hazel, 67 Turkey, 67

Ubud, 7, 43, 73 ARPA museum, 139 broken sidewalks on Monkey Forest Road, 134 hotel designs, 137 main streets, 133-134 number of restaurants in, 134 upscale shops in, 134 Udayana (King), 107 United Kingdom, 41 United States, 41, 56, 68 Usman, Murdani, 100

Vickers, Adrian, 1, 126, xiv Vietnam Tourism, xvii

Wang, Ning, 56-57 Wijaya, Made, 20, xiv Wildavsky, Aaron, 76, 77, 79 Wineko, Agus, xiv World Tourism Organization, 40, 41

Yamashita, Shinji, 47, xiv

Zeman, J.J., 15