page_title: Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali
section_title: The Village and the State
hierarchical_section_title: Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali / Synopsis / The Village and the State
caption_attribution_description: English: Candi kurung of Pura Dalem (lower temple) at Sidan, Sidan, Gianyar, Bali, Indonesia Deutsch: Candi kurung (gedecktes Tor) des Pura Dalem (unterer Tempel oder Totentempel) in Sidan, Sidan, Gianyar, Bali, Indonesia Bahasa Indonesia: Candi kurung di Pura Dalem di Sidan, Sidan, Gianyar, Bali, Indonesia
context_page_description: Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali is a 1980 book written by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Geertz argues that the pre-colonial Balinese state was not a "hydraulic bureaucracy" nor an oriental despotism, but rather, an organized spectacle. The noble rulers of the island were less interested in administering the lives of the Balinese than in dramatizing their rank and hence political superiority through large public rituals and ceremonies. These cultural processes did not support the state, he argues, but were the state.
  It is perhaps most clear in what was, after all, the master image of political life: kingship. The whole of the negara - court life, the traditions that organized it, the extractions that supported it, the privileges that accompanied it - was essentially directed toward defining what power was; and what power was what kings were. Particular kings came and went, 'poor passing facts' anonymized in titles, immobilized in ritual, and annihilated in bonfires. But what they represented, the model-and-copy conception of order, remained unaltered, at least over the period we know much about.
context_section_description: The Balinese ruling classes seemed fragmented, internally torn by intrigues within dadia, and weakly allied between kingdoms. This poor political integration was aggravated by the political independence of the villages under royal dadia rule. The Balinese state was composed of institutions that cross-cut villages. Villages were not independent, self-contained "village republics" but were cross-cut by membership in three separate locally based political institutions that organized local life: the hamlet (banjar), the irrigation society (subak), and the temple congregation (pemaksan). Villages were also crosscut by tax obligations to different lords.
caption: Pura Dalem Sidan (temple)
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