Annotated Bibliography for Study Grant on Highland Southeast Asia
Gerald Sullivan
Baldick, Julian (2013) Ancient Religions of the Austronesian World: From Australasia to
Taiwan. London: I. B. Tauris.
Barth, Frederik (1993) Balinese Worlds. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Creese, Helen (2004) Women of the Kakawin World: Marriage and sexuality in the Indic Courts
of Java and Bali. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Geertz, Clifford (1980) Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali. Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press.
Hefner, Robert (1985) Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam. Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press.
Kammerer, Cornelia Ann and Nicola Tannenbaum, eds. (1996) Merit and Blessing in Mainland
Southeast Asian Comparative Perspective. New Haven: Yale Southeast Asian Studies.
Kirsch, A. Thomas (1973) Feasting and Social Oscillation: Religion and Society in Upland
Southeast Asia. Ithaca: Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University
Mus, Paul (1975) India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa, I. W.
Mabbett, trans. Melbourne: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University.
Reuter, Thomas A. (2002a) The House of Our Ancestors: Precedence and Dualism in Highland
Balinese Society. Leiden: KITLV Press.
(2002b) Custodians of the Sacred Mountains: Culture and Society in the Highlands of
Bali. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Schaareman, Danker (1986) Tatulingga: Tradition and Continuity. Basel: Ethnologisches
Seminar der Universität und Museum fűr Vőlkerkunde.
Symonds, Patricia V. (2004) Calling in the Soul: Gender and the Cycle of Life in a Hmong
Village. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Tannenbaum, Nicola and Cornelia Ann Kammerer, eds. (2003) Founders’ Cults in Southeast
Asia: Ancestors, Polity, and Identity. New Haven: Yale Southeast Asian Studies.
Wessing, Robert (2006) A Community of Spirits: People, Ancestors and Nature Spirits in Java,
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In Crossroads 18(1):11-112.
My research project, considered most broadly, concerns the scientific projects of
Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson between 1932 (when they met) and 1949 (when they
divorced) with special attention to their research among the Balinese between 1936 and 1939.
Most of my recent work has sought to understand Mead and Bateson’s relations with pertinent
western human sciences—anthropology (obviously), developmental or dynamic psychology and
various subsections of biology. Mead and Bateson’s projects also bore significant relations with
Balinese ways of living, especially that of the people of their primary fieldsite, the highland
community of Bayung Gedé.
I intended this study grant to renew and expand my familiarity with the requisite
literature. I was particularly interested in comparing highland Balinese society (Reuter a & b)
with other communities of Bali Aga/Bali Mula (original Balinese) of the north coast (Barth,
Schaareman), the worlds of the southern Balinese courts (Creese, Geertz), nearby portions of
Java (Creese, Hefner) and some appropriate segments of highland life in mainland Southeast asia
(Kammerer and Tannenbaum, Kisch, Symonds). I also sought out work which might provide
broadly regional comparisons (Baldick, Mus, Tannenbaum and Kammerer, Wessing).
Baldick:
As demonstrated in much of the literature, there is significant difference between the
mainland, linguistically primarily Sino-Tibetan populations and largely island, linguistically
primarily Austronesian societies. One apparent exception aside, mainland societies have not
practiced headhunting. For those societies, there can therefore not be a connection, significant or
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otherwise between head hunting and guardian spirits. Baldick painstakingly reviews the
literature concerning various relatively small, horticultural (gardening) societies found from
Taiwan down into modern Indonesia and out into the Pacific. His review does not consider those
larger, agricultural societies of Java and Bali. Baldick suggests an early (and in some places
almost contemporary) broadly Austronesian consensus connecting headhunting, social manhood,
punishment for adultery and the capture of guardian spirits. He does not concern himself with
the fecundity of the land (see Wessing below) or transformation of life into death into life as
such.
Barth (note, I taught this book at Collin):
A prolific ethnographer who has studied in several societies, Barth (along with his then
wife, Unni Wikan) set out to work among the otherwise little described communities of the north
shore of Bali. These communities are organized variably, as noted by V. E. Korn in the as yet
untranslated Het Adatrecht van Bali (Customary Law of Bali). Much of this variable
organization follows from the pronunciations of spirits (including in one case Siwa, better known
in English as Shiva). Barth treats such matters as an extension of what he calls an anthropology
of knowledge and not, as most of his Balinese interlocutors would have, as interactions within
what Wessing (see below) has called a community of spirits including, perforce, humans
understood as spirits. Barth also takes of a community of Muslims called Pagatepan. Unlike
their Hindu-Balinese neighbors, the inhabitants abjured relations with local spirits. They,
therefore did not take part in local subak (agricultural cooperatives associated with specific
sources of water). Women from Pagatepan did not marry Hindu-Balinese men, though men from
Pagatepan could marry women from outside assuming those women then converted to Islam.
Additionally the people of Pagetepan displaced an orientation to Muslim schools on Lombol and
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in Mekka. Barth’s analysis might have made an interesting comparison, albeit an inversion of,
Hefner’s (see below) earlier description of Tengger society. But Barth shows no awareness of
Hefner’s work.
Creese:
Helen Creese provides insight into pre-Islamic Javanese and pre-colonial Balinese states
(Negara) through an analysis of one of their major artistic productions, a poetic form known as
kakawin. These poems show aspects of the courtly lives of women and men as developed in
tales taken from the Mahabharata and that Indian epic’s Javano-Balinese elaborations. She does
not so much focus on the men (Bima, Arjuna, Gadokaca etc.) as warriors or priests but rather on
the women and the refractions of male characters as these appear from the vantage of female
characters. Creese’s, therefore, is an exploration of ideals and gender. Her subjects, arranged
according to a model of female life cycles, include female chastity and longing before marriage
(kawin, literally joining through intercourse, though in courtly settings accompanied by
ceremony), marriage with the accompanying genesis of love and suicide upon the battlefield
after a wife searches for and finds her dead husband’s body.
Geertz (note, I taught this book at Collin):
This is one of the classic studies of pre-colonial Southeast Asian states. Geertz explicitly
sets himself against Korn (see the discussion of Barth above). Rather than looking to the variety
of Balinese social organization, Geertz proposes a model of negara, literally centers from which
powers emanate rather than sovereignties with clear and definable borders. Such polities were
organized through relations between various noble houses according to a pattern of generally, but
not always, descending status indicated, in part, by ranked titles. Underlords commanded
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peasants and traders, but not territories, their clients being spread out across the landscape. Key
to Geertz’s understanding of the operations of the Negara, large scale rituals, especially
cremations, brought together people from all levels of society as an audience for splendor and
thereby manifest power (sakti, closer to spiritual potency than military might).
Hefner (note, I taught this book at Collin):
The people of the Tengger highlands, unlike most other Javanese, are not Muslims. They
possess no political nor economic unity, living in villages scattered across the highlands and part
of four kabupaten (roughly counties). Rather they share a priesthood and an orientation towards
Gunung Bromo, a volcano into which they cast offering at appropriate times; this pilgrimage to
the mountain and the sacrifice there are the only time Tenggerese gather in such a way that the
community becomes physically manifest to itself. Descendants of rebels and scions of the
negara of Majapahit (the last of the great Hindu states of Java before the peaceable coming of
Islam), Tenggerese are recognized by other Javanese as an old if somewhat rural and bumpkinish
Javanese. Tenggerese also maintain a complicated relation with the Islam practiced by their
more lowland neighbors.
Kammerer and Tannenbaum:
This is a collection of essays. The authors take up in turn societies in what are now
Myanmar, Thailand and Laos. Broadly, persons performing acts earn or lose merit in accordance
with local understandings of that which is auspicious for the flow of life. Two essays, F. K.
Lehman’s “Can God Be Coerced? Structural Correlates of Merit and Blessing in Some Southeast
Asian Religions” and Richard O’Connor’s “Blessings and Merit: Elementary Forms and
Religious Complexes in Comparative and Historical Perspective,” flank a set of more
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ethnographically explicit studies. Lehman suggests a range of views in which divinities may not
be omnipotent. O’Connor takes of the relations between curses and blessings.
Kirsch:
Inspired by the oscillation between gumsa and gumlao, more hierarchical and more
egalitarian, social forms among the Kachin as described by Sir Edmund Leach in Political
Systems in Highland Burma. Kirsch takes up the related matters of feasting and matrilateral
cross-cousin marriage (a mother’s brother’s daughter preferentially marries her father’s sister’s
son). Broadly, he suggests that where feast giving and marriage are more restricted to small
groups, society takes more hierarchical forms. Conversely, where more people give a wider
variety of smaller feasts and where marriage rules are somewhat looser, highland mainland
Southeast Asian societies take more egalitarian forms (for an example, see Symonds, below).
This arrangements are not permanent, but ebb and flow, as in the Kachin case, from one to the
other and back again. This oscillation need not correspond to relative control of material goods.
Mus:
Mus was a leading scholar first in Hanoi and later in Paris. This is one of only two
portions of his work currently translated into English; the other is a portion of his study of
Borobudor, a Buddhist site in Central Java. In this shorter work, Mus takes as his initial point of
departure a statue in a now ruined Champa site in what is now Vietnam. His larger point is to
suggest a religious unity to what he calls monsoon Asia, a region dominated by a wind bringing
rain from the central Pacific and stretching from southern China into India and down into
Indonesia. This region is linguistically diverse. It has been home to great negara (see Geertz
above; examples include Angkor in Cambodia, Majapahit in Java, Ayudya in Thailand, Ava in
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Myanmar) whose courts adopted Hindu and Buddhist notions of kingship and excellence as well
as very small polities, some well described as villages. Within this diversity Mus discerns a
common attention to guardian spirits, sometimes identified as Gods (Siwa, for example), other as
founders engaged with the Earth’s fecundity. Wessing (see below) takes Mus as an important
starting point.
Reuter (a & b):
Reuter identifies a series of banua or ritual domains across the landscape of highland
Bali. He notes in passing one such domain centered on Bayung Gedé. But the center of his
studies is another focus on the village of Sukawana and Gunung Tulisan (the Mountain of
Writings), the geographically highest village in all of Bali high on the slopes of Gunung Batur, a
volcano with a crater lake. Reuter attends carefully to the sociology of these various banua,
discerning what he describes as several types. Within these types he notes patterns of duality
(those who sit on the left or on the right in the temple meeting hall; those who sit uphill or who
sit downhill). These patterns of duality reveal a system of precedence in which those who came
to reside in a given community first also come to perform ritually more important tasks and in
which some communities in a banua (Sukawana and Bayung Gedé) are examples have
precedence over newer communities within the domain. For all that this is a major contribution,
especially as he develops the notion of precedence, Reuter treats spirits very much in the way
that Barth (see above does), that is he treats spirits and their utterances through entranced priests
of various sorts as convenient sociological fictions rather than as part of a community of spirits
of which currently incarnated humans are but a part.
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Schaareman:
Tatulingga is a Bali Aga village in the eastern region of Bali known as Karengasem.
Schaareman describes its political organization as a part of the modern Indonesian state.
Symonds (note, I have taught this book at Collin):
Symonds first made the acquaintance of Hmong women in Providence, Rhode Island.
Her interest in these women’s reluctance to take advantage of western medicine during
pregnancy lead her to undertake field research in northern Thailand. In the first half of her book
Symonds struggles with the local notion of “Hmongness as maleness” in her examination of
marriage and labor. From this perspective, Hmong appear quite patrifocal, if not patriarchal. In
the second half of her book, Symonds turn to Hmong notions of reproduction within Hmong
cosmology. For this vantage, Hmong women produce two very important sorts of jackets, the
after birth which all person wear into this world and the woven cloth which adorn the bodies of
the dead as they travel into the dark afterworld. From this afterworld, Hmong call souls into the
bodies of newborns. Gender is, however, not a property of the soul as women return to life as
men and men do so as women.
Tannenbaum and Kammerer:
Like the earlier volume edited by the same scholars (see Kammerer and Tannenbaum,
above), this is a collection of essays. Largely focused on the mainland, it does contain essays
about the Toraja of Sulawesi (formerly the Celebes) in northern Indonesia. Again Lehman and
O’Connor contribute framing essays, including O’Connor’s essay on the relation of founders’
cults and cities in the political ecology of modern Thailand.
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Wessing:
I began by reading this essay (rereading better put as I edited the number in which this
appeared). Wessing, building on Mus (see above) and paying careful attention to a wide variety
of ethnographic materials, suggests that the societies of monsoon Asian have been organized,
and some, if not many, cases still are organized, by human orientation towards three sources of
blessing (i.e. life). The first of these is the fecundity of the earth, often manifest as a guardian
spirit or a Lord of the land. The second of these were the first tillers of the fields who entered
into a ritualized and reciprocal relation with the Lord of the Land. These tillers were allowed to
open the land (mebabad in Javanese) in exchange for accepting a set of responsibilities towards
the Lord of the Land, the most important of which would be to maintain a proper and proscribed
set of sacrifices. The third were the source of spouses, usually what are called wife givers
especially where social relations are reckoned patrilineally (inheritance and descent, sometimes
clan membership understood through ties between men) and patrilocally (residence among the
husband’s people after marriage). This makes currently incarnated humanity part of a
community of spirits, some human and some, at least at the moment, not co-extensive with what
might also be termed an ecology. Details vary from locality to locality. F. K. Lehman, Richard
O’Connor, Nicola Tannenbaum (all mentioned above, and myself were among those who
contributed discussions to Wessing’s extended essay and to whom Wessing in turn responded.
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