Negara: The Theatre State In Nineteenth-Century Bali

NEOARA

NEGARA � The Theatre State in � � Nineteenth-Century Bali � CLIFFORD

GEER TZ

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1980 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Geertz, Clifford. Negara: the theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1.

Bali (lsland)-Civilization.

-Politics and government. DS647·B2G38

I.

320.9598'6

2.

Bali

(Island)

Title. 80-7520

ISBN 0-691-05316- 2 ISBN 0- 691-00778 -0 pbk. This book has been composed in Linotype Baskerville Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America 9

8

For Lauriston Tardy, George R. Geiger, and Talcott Parsons, teachers

CONTENTS

Illust rations

ix

P ref ace

xi

INTRODUCfION

Bali and Hi storical Method

CHAPTER 1 Polit ical Defini tion : The Sources of Order The Myt h 01 the Exemplary Center GeograPhy and the Balance of Power

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11

2 Poli tical Anatomy: The I nternal Organization of the R uling C lass

CHAPTER

Descent Groups and Sinking Status Clientship Alliance CHAPTER

3 Politic al Anatomy: The Village and the State

The Village Polity The Perbekel System The Politics of Irrigation The Forms of Trade CHAPTER

26 34 39 45 54 68 87

4 Political Sta' tement: Spectacle and Cerem ony

The Symbology of Power

98

The Palace as Temple

109

Cremation and the Struggle for Status

1 16

CONCLUSION

Bali and Poli tical Theory

Not es Glossary Bibliography I ndex

121

ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps 1. Bali 2. Royal Houses of Tabanan and Allied Houses in the Capital, ca. 1900 3. Royal Houses of Tabanan and Alli ed Houses in the Count ryside, ca. 1900 4. The Kuta Port of Trade

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57 90

Figures 1. M od el Dadia Structure 2. Gentry Descent: The Principle of Sinking Status 3. The Tabanan Royal Lineage 4. Sch ematic D iagram of Prel iminary Waterworks for a "Typical" Tabanan Subak 5. A Model Irrigation Grid for the Subak. 6. Extreme Lowland Subaks 7. Mid-Lowland Suhaks 8. H igh Low land (or low-highland) Subaks 9. Mid-Highland Subaks 1 0. Ex treme High land Subaks 1 1. Plan of Palace of the King of Klungkung, ca. 1905 -

The

illustration on the paperback cover is a twentieth­

century painting by a Balinese artist of a traditional cre­ mation procession

ix

29 31 59 71 73 78 78 79 79 79 110

PREFACE

This study is intended to reach several audiences, and, in the hope that i t might in fact do so, it has been constructed so that i t may be read in several ways. In particular, the notes have been set off from the text much more sharpl y th·an is common in monograp'h ic works; are keyed to it onl y very loosely by page and line rather than through numbered super­ script s; and take a rather expansive form, many of them being general com: ment ari es on subjec ts rai sed i n the text, fairly extensi ve critic al reviews of the literature bearing on one point or another, or even mini- essays on matters somewhat tangential to the central narrative. As a resul t, the t ext h' as been written so t hat someone­ schol ar, student, or general reader-in terested in traditional states, political theory, anthropological analysis, or whatever, but not espe­ ci ally concerned with ,the ins and outs of Indonesian studi es, can read i t wi th l ittl e or no reference to the notes. The argument is al l there in the text, together with the essential empirical material su p­ porting it, un cluttered by asides, references, or i n-group qualifica­ tions. On the other hand, someone-Indol ogist, So ut heas t Asianist, B'a linese special ist-interes ted in a circumstantial view of the basi s upon whi ch t he argumen t has been built or in t he further devel op­ ment of specific tec hnical points will find the notes of critical im­ portanc e, p· artic ul arly since t he subjec t of the traditional Bal inese state has never been i ntegrally treated before-i nd eed hardly treated at al l as such-and since t he materials rel evant t o it are so widel y scat tered and o f such varying type and uneven qu· ality. Most readers will position themselves somewhe re alon g thi s conti nuum between the generalist and the specialist, and the somewhat unusual a rrange­ ment of narra ti ve and co mmentary has been designed to make it e asy for · them to attend to as much or as little of t he sc holarly apparatus as their purposes woul d seem to dic tate. A work' as long in the making a s this one prod uces a l arg e number of debts. My main Balinese informan·ts are cited in th e n ote s a nd my gra titud e t o them i s immeasurable. O f those who have read t he manusc ript, I must thank specifica lly H ild red Ge ertz, who a lso helped gather the m· at eri al, Ja mes Boo n, Sh el ly E rrington, F. K. L ehm an, and Peter C arey, -though they are but rep resentative of th e man y w ho have helpe d me and assume no spe cial li ability by b eing na med. Mrs. Amy J acks on provided u nu sually ext ensive secr etarial a ssista nce, for which I a m most gratefu l. I should also like to than k xi

PREFACE

Mr. William Hively of Princeton University Press for his editorial assistance and counsel. Finally, this work has been 'assisted at various points by t�e Rockefeller Foundation, the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations of the University of Chicago, and the Institute for Advan'ced Study, Princeton. Princeton A ugust I979

xii

NEGARA

--- � --INTRODUCTION

Bali and Historical Method To ask questions you see no prospect of answering is the fundamental sin in science, like giving orders which you do not think will be obeyed in politics, or praying for what you do not think God will give in religion. R. G. Collingwood

When one looks panoramically at Indonesia tod·ay i t seems to form a dateless synopsis of its own past, as when the artifacts from differ.. ent levels of a l ong occup ie d archaeological site, scattered along a ta­ ble, summarize at a glance thousands o f years of human history. All the cultural streams that, over the course of some three millennia, have flowed, one after the other, into the archipelago-from India, from China, from the Middle East, f rom Europe-find their con­ temporary representation somewhere: in Hindu Bali; in the China­ towns of Jakarta, Semarang, or Surabaya ; in the Muslim stronghol ds of Aceh, Makassar, or the Padang Highlands ; in the Calvinized re­ gions of Mi nahassa and Ambon, or the C atho li cized ones of Flores and Timor. T'he range of social stru'ctures is equally wide, equally recapitulative: the Malayo-Polynesian tribal systems of interior Borneo or the Celebes; the trad itional peas ant vi l lages of Bali, west J ava, and p·arts of Sumat ra 'and t he C elebe s; t he c ·pos t tradi tional rural p ro le tari a n villages of the cen'tral and east J av a river plains; the market minded fishing and smugglin g vill ages of the Borneo and Celebes coasts; the faded provincial cap itals and small towns of interior J ava ·and the Outer Islands; and the huge , dislocated, half­ modernize d me tro poli se s o f J akarta, Medan, Surabaya, and Makas­ sar. The range of e·conomic forms, of sys' te. ms of strati fication or of kinship organi zatio n is as great: shifting cultivators in Borneo, caste in Bali, ma triliny in West Sumatra. Y et, in t his w hole v ast array of cul tural and social patterns, one of the most important institutions (perhaps the most important) in shaping the basic character of Indonesian civilization is, for all intents and purposes, ab sen t, vanished with a comple teness that, in a perverse way, attests its -

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I N T R O D U C TI O N

historical centrality-the negara, the classical state of precolonial Indonesia. Negara (nagara, nagari, negeri), a Sanskrit loanword originally meaning "town," is used in Indonesian langu-ages to mean, more or less simultaneously and interchangeably, "palace," "capital," "sta'te," "realm," -and again "town." It is, in its broadest sense, the word for (classical) civilization, for the world of the traditional city, the high culture that city supported, and the system of superordinate political authority centered there. Its opposite is d es a also a Sanskrit loan­ word-meaning, with a similar flexibility of reference, "-country­ side," "region," "village," "place," and sometimes even "depend­ ency" or "governed ·area." In its broadest sense desa is the word for the world, so variously organized in different parts of the archi­ pelago, of the rural settlement, of the peasant, the tenant, the po­ liti'cal subject, the "people." Between these two poles, negara and desa, each defined in contrast to the other, the classical polity de­ veloped -and, within the general context of a transplanted Indic cosmology, took its distinctive, not to say peculiar, form. -

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How many negaras there have been in Indonesia is completely be­ yond record, but that the number runs well into the hundreds is certain, into the thousands likely. From the time of the earliest Sanskrit inscriptions in the first half of the fifth century onward, kingdoms of various dimensions and durability rose, intrigued, fought, �nd fell in a steady, broadening stream. The more illustrious names-Mataram, Shailendra, Shrivijaya, Melayu, Singasari, Kediri, Majapahit, and, -after the Islamic conversion, Demak, Bantam, Aceh, Makassar and neo-Mataram-are but the more prominent partici­ pants in a continuous process of state formation and dissolution that only Dutch domination finally brought to an end (in some parts of the archipelago, only in the present century). The political development of precolonial Indonesia does not consist of a relent­ less unfoldment of a monolithic "Oriental despotism," but of an expanding cloud of localized, fragile, loosely interrelated petty prin­ cipalities. A tracing of ·,that development-a fund·amental 'task for anyone who is concerned to understand the pattern of politics not only of the Indic phase of Indonesian civilization, but of the Islamic, co­ lonial, and republican phases ,that succeeded it-is beset, however, wi,th a profusion of difficulties, a good many of them artificially 4

B ALI A ND HI S T O R I C AL M E THOD

manuf.actured. Not only are the data scattered, equivocal, and all too often p oorl y presented; but the mode of interpreting t'hem, a matter largely in the hands of philologists, has been, with a few out­ standing except io ns , sociologically unrealistic in the eXltreme. Anal­ ogies, usually to classical, feudal, or even modern Europe, fabricated chronicles, unprovable in principle, and a priori specu lations about the nature of "Indonesian though t " have led to a p i cture of the Indic period which, though not without its elements of plausibility, pe rhaps even of truth, has about it that unmistakable air of fantasy systematized which derives from attempting to know what one has no way of knowing. Mos,t scholars of Indic Indon es ia have sought to write the sort of history for which they have not had, and in all likelihood never will have , the material and have neglected to write precisely that sort for which they have, or at least might obtain, -the material. The history of a great civilization can be dep ic ted as a series of major events­ wars, reigns, ·and revolutions-which, whether or not they shape it, at least mark majo r changes in its course. Or it can be depi cted as a succession not of dates, places, and prominent persons, but of gen­ eral p'hases of sociocultural development. An emphasis on the first sort of h is to riography tends to present history as a ser ies of bounded periods, 'more or less distinct units of time characterized by some special significance of their own : they represen t The Rise of the Shailendras, T-he .D ispl acement of J avanese Civilization Eastward, or The Fall of Majapahit. The second app roach, 'however, presents historical change a'S ·a relatively continuous social and cultural process, a process wh i ch shows few i f any sh arp -breaks, but rather displays a slow but patterned alteration in whioh, though develop­ mental phases may be discerned wh en the entire course of the process is viewed as .a whole, it is nearly always very difficul, t, if not impossi bl e, to put one's finger exactly on the p o i nt at which things stoP'ped being what they were and became instead something else. This view of change, or process, stresses not so much the annalistic chronicle of what peop le did, but rather the formal, or structural, patterns of cumulative activity. The period ·approach distributes clusters of concrete events along a time continuum in which the ma­ jor distinction is earlier or later; the developmental approa