Negara: The Theatre State in 19th Century Bali

by Clifford Geertz

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400843381
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/11/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

Table of Contents

	Illustrations	ix
	Preface	xi
	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	137
	Glossary	259
	Bibliography	267
	Index	289

Editorial Reviews

"The main purpose of Geertz's study is to delineate the general structure of the Negara by focusing on one particularly well-documented case, that of Bali in the era preceding the Dutch invasion of 1906. The outcome is a fascinating and remarkable book."

The New York Review of Books

"The main purpose of Geertz's study is to delineate the general structure of the Negara by focusing on one particularly well-documented case, that of Bali in the era preceding the Dutch invasion of 1906. The outcome is a fascinating and remarkable book."—The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher