Negara : the theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali / Clifford Geertz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Geertz, Clifford

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bali Island (Indonesia)--Civilization.

Bali Island (Indonesia).

Bali Island (Indonesia)--Politics and government.

Physical Description:

xii, 295 pages, 1 unnumbered leaf of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, [1980]

Summary:

Bali, owing to its relative isolation and to a long tradition of observation and scholarship, has become a rich source of information about the traditional Indic state in Southeast Asia. Here Clifford Geertz applies his well-known cultural analysis to the social organization of nineteenth-century Bali. He offers a vivid portrait of the symbols, myths, rituals, and ceremonies -- in short, the drama -- that essentially constituted the precolonial negara, the Balinese state.

The negara was neither a tyranny nor a hydraulic bureaucracy, nor even very much of a government. It was instead an organized spectacle, a theatre state designed to dramatize the ruling obsessions of Balinese culture: social inequality and status pride. Nowhere is the theatre state more clearly displayed than in the master image of political life, namely, the kingship. The author shows how the king, as both a ritual object and a political actor, was a paradox of active passivity, forceful stillness, violent benevolence. The closer he came to being an image of power, the further removed he was from the machinery that controlled this power.

Professor Geertz finds, therefore, that the Balinese state defies easy conceptualization by any of the familiar models or commonplace terms of Western political theory. To reduce it to such categories allows most of what is uniquely interesting about it to escape from view. By analyzing the organizational principles of the Balinese state, through its various levels and functions, he demonstrates the limitations of any attempt to distinguish the "practical" from the ritual character of this organization. In this way the author remedies the deficiencies and distortions of modern Western notions that reduce "politics" simply to "power," the state to an organizational device understandable in purely instrumental terms, and symbolic or cultural processes to an incidental role in statecraft.

Contents:

Introduction Bali and Historical Method 3

Chapter 1 Political Definition: The Sources of Order

The Myth of the Exemplary Center 11

Geography and the Balance of Power 19

Chapter 2 Political Anatomy: The Internal Organization of the Ruling Class

Descent Groups and Sinking Status 26

Clientship 34

Alliance 39

Chapter 3 Political Anatomy: The Village and the State

The Village Polity 45

The Perbekel System 54

The Politics of Irrigation 68

The Forms of Trade 87

Chapter 4 Political Statement: Spectacle and Ceremony

The Symbology of Power 98

The Palace as Temple 109

Cremation and the Struggle for Status 116

Conclusion Bali and Political Theory 121.

Notes:

Includes index.

Bibliography: pages 269-288.

ISBN:

0691007780 :

0691053162 :

OCLC:

6486615