Staying Local in the Global Village: Bali in the Twentieth Century.

Publication: SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia

Publication Date: 01-APR-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS)

Staying Local in the Global Village: Bali in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Linda H. Connor and Raechelle Rubinstein. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999. 353 pp.

This book grew out of the papers presented at the Third International Bali Studies Workshop held in Sydney and Wollongong in July 1995. It is the third book in this series of international Bali Studies Workshops; after the first one, State and Society in Bali: Historical, Textual, and Anthropological Approaches (edited by Hildred Geertz in 1991) based on papers presented at the first international workshop in 1981, and the second one, Being Modern in Bali (edited by Adrian Vickers in 1996) based on papers presented at the second international workshop in 1991. It is edited by two Australian Baliologists, Linda H. Connor from the University of Newcastle and Raechelle Rubinstein from the University of Sydney.

Despite their anthropological background, Connor and Rubinstein have used the sociological dialectic between "structure" and "agency" in balancing the book's chapters on the social structures in which Balinese people live with chapters focusing on "agency"; namely, on how several categories of Balinese people -- students, farmers, Bali Aga, and village women -- deal with those structures.

Also, in the various chapters focusing on structures the authors have exposed how those structures emerged and developed from interactions with Balinese agents who constantly confronted the challenges faced by them; first by the East Javanese refugees who established their Hindu kingdoms in Bali, then by the Dutch colonial forces who annexed Bali...

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