The anthropologist Clifford Geertz was for decades one of the most perceptive Western scholars of Indonesian culture and society. In the second part of his career, he outgrew Indonesian studies and in fact became one of the most important anthropologists of the second half of the twentieth century. Geertz was interested in many aspects of Indonesia: some of his more widely read work dealt with social relations in Javanese village, with the acculturation of Islam in the archipelago, and perhaps most famously, with the "status bloodbath" of the Balinese cockfight. In this section, Negara: The Theatre State in Bali, he dwells on the intimate connection between status and power in classical Bali, as exhibited through the grandeur of public ceremony. The spectacular rituals of local life, explains Geertz, mirrored what the Balinese believed to be the cosmic order: everyone had their place on earth, and this worldly station directly correlated with a person's status in the larger universe.
The ceremonial life of the classical negara was as much a form of rhetoric as it was of devotion, a florid, boasting assertion of spiritual power. Leaping alive into flames (and, so it was thought, directly into godhood) was only one of the grander statements of a proposition that royal tooth filings, royal temple dedications, royal ordinations, and, in the puputans, royal suicides made in other, no less categorical ways: there is an unbreakable inner connection between social rank and religious condition. The state cult was not a cult of the state. It was an argument, made over and over and again in the insistent vocabulary of ritual, that worldly status has a cosmic base, that hierarchy is the governing principle of the universe, and that the arrangements of human life are but approximations, more close or less, to those of the divine.
Other aspects of Balinese ritual life had other statements to make, some of them in partial conflict with the point that the state ceremonies made: Status is all. As the negara was but one among many social institutions in classical Bali, so its obsession, rank, was only one among many obsessions. But that obsession, and the cluster of beliefs and attitudes that grew up around it, was about as pervasive in the general population as it was in that small part of it immediately absorbed in the affairs of the negara as such. "The king was the symbol of the peasantry's greatness," Cora Du Bois has written about Southeast Asian Indic monarchs generally; and, somewhat more carefully phrased, the comment applies with special force to Bali. The ritual extravaganzas of the theatre state, its half-divine lord immobile, tranced, or dead at the dramatic center of them, were the symbolic expression less of the peasantry's greatness than of what its notion of that greatness was. What the Balinese state did for Balinese society was to cast into sensible form a concept of what, together, they were supposed to make of themselves: an illustration of the power of grandeur to organize the world.
The Balinese, not only in court ritual but generally, cast their most comprehensive ideas of the way things ultimately are, and the way that men should therefore act, into immediately apprehended sensuous symbols -- into a lexicon of carvings, flowers, dances, melodies, gestures, chants, ornaments, temples, postures, and masks -- rather than into a discursively apprehended, ordered set of explicit "beliefs." This means of expression makes any attempt to summarize those ideas a dubious business. As with poetry, which in the broad, poiesis ("making") sense is what is involved, the message here is so deeply sunk in the medium that to transform it into a network of propositions is to risk at once both of the characteristic crimes of exegesis: seeing more in things than is really there, and reducing a richness of particular meaning to a drab parade of generalities.
But whatever the difficulties and dangers, the exegetical task must be undertaken if one wants to be left with more than the mere fascinated wonderment -- like a cow looking at a gamelan orchestra, as the Balinese put it -- that Helms, for all his responsiveness and powers of description, displays. Balinese ritual, and most especially Balinese state ritual, does embody doctrine in the literal sense of "teachings," however concretely they are symbolized, however unreflectively they are apprehended. Digging them out for presentation in explicit form is not a task in which the Balinese, aside from a few modernists nowadays, have ever had any interest. Nor would they feel, any more than a translated poet ever feels, that any such presentation really gets to the heart of the matter, gets it really right. Glosses on experience, and most especially on other people's experience, are not replacements for it. At the very best they are paths, twisted enough, toward understanding it.
Practically, two approaches, two sorts of understanding, must converge if one is to interpret a culture: a description of particular symbolic forms (a ritual gesture, an hieratic statue) as defined expressions; and a contextualization of such forms within the whole structure of meaning of which they are a part and in terms of which they get their definition. This is, of course, nothing but the by-now-familiar trajectory of the hermeneutic circle; a dialectical tacking between the parts which comprise the whole and the whole which motivates the parts, in such a way as to bring parts and whole simultaneously into view. In the case at hand, such tacking comes down to isolating the essential elements in the religious symbolic suffusing the theatre state, and determining the significance of those elements within the framework of what, taken as a whole, that symbolic is. In order to follow a baseball game one must understand what a bat, a hit, an inning, a left fielder, a squeeze play, a hanging curve, or a tightened infield are, and what the game in which these "things" are elements is all about. In order to follow the cremation of a Balinese king, one needs to be able to segment the torrent of images it generates -- cloth snakes, arrows turning into flower, lion shaped coffins, pagodas on litters, doves rising from the brows of suiciding women -- into the significant elements of which it is composed; and one needs to grasp the point of the enterprise to begin with. The two sorts of understanding are inseparably dependent upon one another, and they emerge concurrently.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz was for decades one of the most perceptive Western scholars of Indonesian culture and society. In the second part of his career, he outgrew Indonesian studies and in fact became one of the most important anthropologists of the second half of the twentieth century. Geertz was interested in many aspects of Indonesia: some of his more widely read work dealt with social relations in Javanese village, with the acculturation of Islam in the archipelago, and perhaps most famously, with the "status bloodbath" of the Balinese cockfight. In this section, Negara: The Theatre State in Bali, he dwells on the intimate connection between status and power in classical Bali, as exhibited through the grandeur of public ceremony. The spectacular rituals of local life, explains Geertz, mirrored what the Balinese believed to be the cosmic order: everyone had their place on earth, and this worldly station directly correlated with a person's status in the larger universe.The ceremonial life of the classical negara was as much a form of rhetoric as it was of devotion, a florid, boasting assertion of spiritual power. Leaping alive into flames (and, so it was thought, directly into godhood) was only one of the grander statements of a proposition that royal tooth filings, royal temple dedications, royal ordinations, and, in the puputans, royal suicides made in other, no less categorical ways: there is an unbreakable inner connection between social rank and religious condition. The state cult was not a cult of the state. It was an argument, made over and over and again in the insistent vocabulary of ritual, that worldly status has a cosmic base, that hierarchy is the governing principle of the universe, and that the arrangements of human life are but approximations, more close or less, to those of the divine.Other aspects of Balinese ritual life had other statements to make, some of them in partial conflict with the point that the state ceremonies made: Status is all. As the negara was but one among many social institutions in classical Bali, so its obsession, rank, was only one among many obsessions. But that obsession, and the cluster of beliefs and attitudes that grew up around it, was about as pervasive in the general population as it was in that small part of it immediately absorbed in the affairs of the negara as such. "The king was the symbol of the peasantry's greatness," Cora Du Bois has written about Southeast Asian Indic monarchs generally; and, somewhat more carefully phrased, the comment applies with special force to Bali. The ritual extravaganzas of the theatre state, its half-divine lord immobile, tranced, or dead at the dramatic center of them, were the symbolic expression less of the peasantry's greatness than of what its notion of that greatness was. What the Balinese state did for Balinese society was to cast into sensible form a concept of what, together, they were supposed to make of themselves: an illustration of the power of grandeur to organize the world.The Balinese, not only in court ritual but generally, cast their most comprehensive ideas of the way things ultimately are, and the way that men should therefore act, into immediately apprehended sensuous symbols -- into a lexicon of carvings, flowers, dances, melodies, gestures, chants, ornaments, temples, postures, and masks -- rather than into a discursively apprehended, ordered set of explicit "beliefs." This means of expression makes any attempt to summarize those ideas a dubious business. As with poetry, which in the broad, poiesis ("making") sense is what is involved, the message here is so deeply sunk in the medium that to transform it into a network of propositions is to risk at once both of the characteristic crimes of exegesis: seeing more in things than is really there, and reducing a richness of particular meaning to a drab parade of generalities.
But whatever the difficulties and dangers, the exegetical task must be undertaken if one wants to be left with more than the mere fascinated wonderment -- like a cow looking at a gamelan orchestra, as the Balinese put it -- that Helms, for all his responsiveness and powers of description, displays. Balinese ritual, and most especially Balinese state ritual, does embody doctrine in the literal sense of "teachings," however concretely they are symbolized, however unreflectively they are apprehended. Digging them out for presentation in explicit form is not a task in which the Balinese, aside from a few modernists nowadays, have ever had any interest. Nor would they feel, any more than a translated poet ever feels, that any such presentation really gets to the heart of the matter, gets it really right. Glosses on experience, and most especially on other people's experience, are not replacements for it. At the very best they are paths, twisted enough, toward understanding it.
Practically, two approaches, two sorts of understanding, must converge if one is to interpret a culture: a description of particular symbolic forms (a ritual gesture, an hieratic statue) as defined expressions; and a contextualization of such forms within the whole structure of meaning of which they are a part and in terms of which they get their definition. This is, of course, nothing but the by-now-familiar trajectory of the hermeneutic circle; a dialectical tacking between the parts which comprise the whole and the whole which motivates the parts, in such a way as to bring parts and whole simultaneously into view. In the case at hand, such tacking comes down to isolating the essential elements in the religious symbolic suffusing the theatre state, and determining the significance of those elements within the framework of what, taken as a whole, that symbolic is. In order to follow a baseball game one must understand what a bat, a hit, an inning, a left fielder, a squeeze play, a hanging curve, or a tightened infield are, and what the game in which these "things" are elements is all about. In order to follow the cremation of a Balinese king, one needs to be able to segment the torrent of images it generates -- cloth snakes, arrows turning into flower, lion shaped coffins, pagodas on litters, doves rising from the brows of suiciding women -- into the significant elements of which it is composed; and one needs to grasp the point of the enterprise to begin with. The two sorts of understanding are inseparably dependent upon one another, and they emerge concurrently.
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