Custodians of the Sacred Mountains is the first comprehensive ethnography of the Bali Aga, a large ethnic minority that occupies the island's central highlands. The Bali Aga are popularly viewed as the indigenous counterparts to other Balinese who trace their origin to invaders from the Javanese kingdom of Majapait, who have ruled Bali from the fourteenth century A.D. Although Bali remains one of the most intensely researched localities in the world, the Bali Aga have long been overshadowed by the more exotic courtly culture of the south. A closer analysis of the changing position of the Bali Aga within Balinese society provides a key to understanding the politics and social process of cultural representation in Bali and beyond. The process is marked by a blend of representational competition and cooperation among the Bali Aga themselves, among the Bali Aga and southern Balinese, and later among the island's aristocratic elites and foreign colonizers or scholars, and state authorities. The study of this process raises important issues about the establishment and maintenance of status and power structures at regional, national, and global levels. Custodians of the Sacred Mountains explores the marginalization of the Bali Aga in light of a critical theory of cultural representation and calls for a morally engaged approach to ethnographic research. It proposes an intersubjective and communicative model of human interaction as the foundation for understanding the relative significance of cooperation and competition in the cultural production of knowledge.

Sacred Natural Sites are the world's oldest protected places. This book focuses on a wide spread of both iconic and lesser known examples such as sacred groves of the Western Ghats (India), Sagarmatha /Chomolongma (Mt Everest, Nepal, Tibet - and China), the Golden Mountains of Altai (Russia), Holy Island of Lindisfarne (UK) and the sacred lakes of the Niger Delta (Nigeria). The book illustrates that sacred natural sites, although often under threat, exist within and outside formally recognised protected areas, heritage sites. Sacred natural sites may well be some of the last strongholds for building resilient networks of connected landscapes. They also form important nodes for maintaining a dynamic socio-cultural fabric in the face of global change. The diverse authors bridge the gap between approaches to the conservation of cultural and biological diversity by taking into account cultural and spiritual values together with the socio-economic interests of the custodian communities and other relevant stakeholders.

Nature conservation planning tends to be driven by models based on Western norms and science, but these may not represent the cultural, philosophical and religious contexts of much of Asia. This book provides a new perspective on the topic of sacred natural sites and cultural heritage by linking Asian cultures, religions and worldviews with contemporary conservation practices and approaches. The chapters focus on the modern significance of sacred natural sites in Asian protected areas with reference, where appropriate, to an Asian philosophy of protected areas. Drawn from over 20 different countries, the book covers examples of sacred natural sites from all of IUCN’s protected area categories and governance types. The authors demonstrate the challenges faced to maintain culture and support spiritual and religious governance and management structures in the face of strong modernisation across Asia. The book shows how sacred natural sites contribute to defining new, more sustainable and more equitable forms of protected areas and conservation that reflect the worldviews and beliefs of their respective cultures and religions. The book contributes to a paradigm-shift in conservation and protected areas as it advocates for greater recognition of culture and spirituality through the adoption of biocultural conservation approaches.

This collection of papers is the sixth volume in the Comparative Austronesian series. The papers that comprise this volume examine the concept of precedence as a form of local discourse and as a mechanism for ordering status, at different levels, within specific Austronesian-speaking societies. This is the first volume of its kind to focus entirely on precedence and to provide an explication of its social uses and the way in which it is contested. Each paper is ethnographically-focused and offers its own distinctive approach to the examination of precedence. The papers, however, relate closely to one another and are thus able to proffer a variety of comparative reflections.

Indonesia has experienced a quick succession of new governments and fundamental reforms since the collapse of Suharto's dictatorial regime in 1998. Established patterns in the distribution of wealth, power and knowledge have been disrupted, altered and re-asserted. The contributors to this volume have taken the unique opportunity this upheaval presents to uncover social tensions and fault lines in this society. Focusing in particular on disadvantaged sectors of Balinese society, the contributors describe how the effects of a national economic and political crisis combined with a variety of social aspirations at a grass roots level to elicit shifts in local and regional configurations of power and knowledge. This is the first time that many of them have been able to disseminate their controversial research findings without endangering their informants since the demise of the New Order regime.

Ritual language, wild and domestic animals, and objects of material culture like houses, palaces, and works of art, are often loaded with symbolic meaning. Reading the landscape , or giving meaning to the natural environment, is a cultural act as well, and one must discover what mountains, coastlines, and islands mean to different groups of people. In this book, written on the occasion of Professor Reimar Schefold s retirement from the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University, colleagues and former students from the Netherlands and abroad demonstrate the variety and wealth of the field of symbolic anthropology. The regional focus of the book is Indonesia. The studies presented range from small island communities in western, northern, and eastern Indonesia to urban settlements in Java and Sumatra. All the contributions are in one way or another related to Reimar Schefold s work over the past thirty-five years, work that includes extensive studies on material culture, rituals, and the use of symbols in the expression of ethnicity among the various cultural groups of Indonesia.

The fields of cross-cultural and cultural psychology both acknowledge the role of `culture' for the constitution of a meaningful practice. There are notable differences as well as remarkable commonalities between nomologically oriented cross-cultural psychology on the one hand and interpretive cultural psychology on the other. Contributions to this book discuss recent theoretical and methodological approaches from both fields in order to explore their joint potential for an advancement of the concept of culture, for the theoretical conceptualization and methodical completion of comparative cultural studies and the scientific understanding of cultural difference. This volume includes contributions by Ernest E. Boesch, Kenneth J. Gergen, Rom Harré, Gustav Jahoda and Jaan Valsiner.

Food systems in Indonesia and worldwide have experienced major transformations in the wake of agricultural modernisation. Once intact eco-systems have declined dramatically, along with human diets, long term food security and social cohesion. Using long-term ethnographic research, we documented this loss of traditional food systems in Java, Bali, East Timor and India, but also a recent revival and reinvention of sustainable production methods and community-based distribution systems. A growing movement of small farmers now reject the dominant paradigm of aggressive capitalist development, and are re-creating food systems based on moral ecology – a new concept we introduce to characterise food systems that regenerate the natural environment and serve the common good, rather than maximise profit. Small farmers like these already feed two thirds of humanity using only a third of agricultural land. With proper support, we argue, they could feed the entire world, using sustainable and socially responsible approaches to eradicate world hunger.

One of the world's most intensively studied societies, Bali has hosted scholars and writers as renowned as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Miguel Covarrubias, Fred Barth, and Hildred and Clifford Geertz. Staying Local in the Global Village is part of a continuing tradition in which Balinese and foreign scholars reflect on the processes of transformation that link Bali to Indonesia and the world beyond. The chapters in this volume are based on research carried out in the early 1990s, when Suharto's New Order still enjoyed widespread legitimacy in Indonesia. Even then, political consensus in Bali was weakened by the inhabitants' view of themselves as an exploited minority of Hindus in a nation dominated by Islamic Javanese. As this book reveals, the ambivalent positioning of Balinese vis-à-vis the national and the global in recent decades has been played out in many different spheres of life. Contributors take up a number of themes that reflect different articulations of the local throughout the twentieth century. Early chapters provide a bird's-eye view of the public culture, local history, definitions of "Balinese-ness," and political struggles over land and sacred space. Later chapters explore specific aspects of Balinese participation in the transformations associated with the tourism-dominated provincial economy, the growth of communications and mass media, and the incursions of the nation-state trough its imperatives of economic development and rationalist discourses. New forms of traditional hegemony, status struggles over the priesthood, contestation about cultural authenticity by marginal groups within the island itself, women's work, the performing arts, and television watching, are all considered in this light, providing a highly nuanced and "local" perspective of global processes in Bali. Contributors: Linda Connor, Mark Hobart, Brett Hough, Graeme MacRae, Ayami Nakatani, Michel Picard, I Gde Pitana, Thomas Reuter, Raechelle Rubinstein, Putu Suasta, Margaret Wiener