Beyond Bali: Subaltern Citizens and Post-Colonial Intimacy 9789048530038

Table of contents :
Table Of Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
1. Kebalian, Long-Distance Nationalism, And The Balinese Left In Exile
2. Balinese Post-Colonial Pedagogies And Contested Intimacies
3. ‘Shared Cultural Heritage’ And The Visible And Invisible World Overseas
4. A Balinese Colonial Drama Without The Balinese?
5. My Home Is Your Home
Anxieties About Marginality
Bibliography
Author’S Biography
Index

Citation preview

Beyond Bali

Asian Heritages The Asian Heritages series explores the notions of heritage as they have evolved from European based concepts, mainly associated with architecture and monumental archaeology, to incorporate a broader diversity of cultural forms and value. This includes a critical exploration of the politics of heritage and its categories, such as the contested distinction ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ heritages; the analysis of the conflicts triggered by competing agendas and interests in the heritage field; and the productive assessment of management measures in the context of Asia. Asian Heritages is a series published in cooperation with the International Institute for Asian Studies. Series Editor Adele Esposito, Research Fellow, CNRS-AUSSER (Architecture Urbanisme Société Savoirs Enseignement Recherche) Editorial Board Sadiah Boonstra, Postdoctoral Fellow, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Chiang Min-Chin, National University of the Arts, Taiwan Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University Hui Yew-Foong, Hong Kong Shue Yan University Aarti Kawlra, Indian Institute of Technology Ronki Ram, Panjab University

Beyond Bali Subaltern Citizens and Post-Colonial Intimacy

Ana Dragojlovic

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: ‘Dream-land’, 2005, by Komang Suaka Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 94 6298 064 8 e-isbn 978 90 4853 003 8 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462980648 nur 761 © Ana Dragojlovic / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2016 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



For Erin



Table of Contents

Foreword, by Michael Herzfeld 11 Acknowledgments 13 Preface 15 Tension-Ridden Proximity 15 Naming and Research Language 19 The Book Outline 20 Introduction 23 Method of Inquiry 24 A Glimpse at History 27 Kebalian and Foreigners 30 Balinese Subaltern Citizens: Translocal Belonging 32 Foreigners, Foreignness, and the Post-Colonial State 36 Corrective Citizenship: Foreigners and Technologies of Cultural Integration 37 Citizens with a Background in the Dutch Former Colonies 40 Terms of Discussion: Foreignness and Intimacy in Post-Coloniality 42 ‘Shared’ Heritage 46 Home and ‘Homing’ 47 ‘Menjajah kota den Haag’ – Colonizing the City of The Hague 48 1 Kebalian, Long-Distance Nationalism, and the Balinese Left in Exile 51 The Events of 1965-68 and Exilic Migratory Trajectories 56 Kebalian and Long-Distance Nationalism 59 Mourning, the Aesthetics of Loss, and a Shift in Political Orientation 63 Post-Coloniality, Exiles, and Home-Making 68 2 Balinese Post-Colonial Pedagogies and Contested Intimacies Active Citizenship The Historical Positioning of Balinese Arts Balinese Long-Distance Cultural Specialists Lessons in Balinese Culture An Ethnic Dutch Family’s Balinese Shrine and Balinese LongDistance Cultural Specialists

73 75 79 82 86 88

Post-Colonial Pedagogies and the Authentication of Balineseness 89 The Normalization of Ethnicized Service Labour and the ‘Intention to Resist’ 92 3 ‘Shared Cultural Heritage’ and the Visible and Invisible World Overseas 101 The Colonial Collection, ‘Shared Cultural Heritage’, and ‘History Turn’ 103 The Exhibition: Indonesia, The Discovery of the Past 108 The Colonial Conquest and the Visible and Invisible Worlds Overseas 112 The Kris 114 ‘To me, you are not an allochtoon’: Citizens’ Integration and ‘Appropriate’ Ways of Knowing 117 ‘Shared Cultural Heritage’ and Translocal Kebalian 124 4 A Balinese Colonial Drama without the Balinese?

Interethnic Dynamics in Post-Colonial Commemorations

Post-Colonial Politics of Remembering The Performance: Puputan, Val van Bali Intentionality and Struggles over Representation Balinese Reception Interethnic Dynamics in Post-Colonial Commemorations 5 My Home is Your Home

The Possibilities, Challenges, and Failures of Home Making

I Komag Suaka – Balinese Artist in Dutch Post-Coloniality Foreignness, the Arts, and Citizenship The Installation My Home is Your Home

127 128 132 137 142 146 149 153 162 165

Anxieties about Marginality 173 ‘Being Balinese Opens Many Doors’ (Balinees zijn opent vele deuren) 177 Bibliography 181 Author’s Biography

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Index 199

List of Illustrations Image 1 Image 2 Image 3 Image 4 Image 5 Image 6 Image 7 Image 8 Image 9

Balinese dancers at the performance of Puputan, Val van Bali 134 Balinese dancers at the performance of Puputan, Val van Bali 135 Komang Suaka in his studio 152 ‘The origins’ (De oorsprong), My home is your home installation 165 ‘The beginning’ (Het begin), My home is your home installation 166 ‘The road’ (De weg), My home is your home installation 167 ‘The day’ (De dag), My home is your home installation 168 ‘The fantasy’ (De fantasie), My home is your home installation 169 ‘The memory’ (De herinnering), My home is your home installation 170

Foreword What happens when a minority group in a fraught, conflict-ridden colony finds itself a distrusted entity within the new nation-state, its sacrifices in the cause of national independence swept aside by suspicions that its members are not loyal to the emergent realities of majority rule? What happens when its members intermarry with the hated colonizers, or flee to the colonizers’ European land in search of work? What do terms like heritage and history mean to them, against the background drumbeat of an increasingly fierce nationalism? Ana Dragojlovic’s richly recounted, lovingly written, and often intensely moving ethnography explores the transnational anxieties of identity, using the concept of “post-colonial intimacy” to bring to the fore the conflicted situation of these doubly alienated transnational islanders in search of the assurance of familiar roots. Using a simple vignette of a film viewing, she brings us immediately into a visceral realization of the enormous emotional charge that accompanies any reminder of how much the Dutch enemy and the Balinese patriot found themselves sharing – an especially poignant realization, moreover, for those many Balinese who embraced the colonial society for the somewhat compromised security it offered them, and even more for the children of mixed marriages. What was this extraordinary sense of commonality that so many Balinese experienced in the Netherlands, a commonality that still generates a crisis of conscience for every Balinese who encounters it? Rather than giving us an easy answer, Dragojlovic puts into play the concept of kebalian – of Balineseness – as something that changes shape and content as it moves from the Indonesian context to the Dutch. This is important because so often concepts of identity are presented, at least in official discourse, as rigid, clearly defined, and unchangeable. Think, for example, of the Thai projection of khwampenthai, “Thainess,” a concept that has been put massively to work in the service of national integration. For the Balinese, a defensive but proud minority amid a predominantly Islamic state, such a reification would make no sense. The cultural intimacy these deracinated people appreciate transcends the boundaries that they traverse, to merge in a sense of encompassing empathy with their former colonial masters – a guilty love, ruefully acknowledged, and with social and political consequences that today transcend geographical borders and the gaps between generations.

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These Balinese occupy a space in the Indonesian world analogous to that of the Parsis in India, and Dragojlovic effectively uses that parallel, citing Tanya Luhrmann’s fine study to show that the Balinese experience, while distinctive, raises larger questions about the fate of those who, having found some degree of mutual accommodation with their colonial masters, then find themselves unable (or perhaps unwilling) to disentangle themselves from those entailments. The outcome can be crippling anxiety, defensiveness, and estrangement. But these are negatives not unmixed with the pride of once having been, in the colonizers’ esteem, the best of the native population – a psychologically and politically burdensome heritage, as the Parsis also discovered. Dragojlovic gives us a moving and at the same time incisive account of how the colonial hierarchies have leached into the postcolonial world. In an age of increasing xenophobia in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, the Balinese migrants look to that sense of shared culture as their reassurance that they will not be destroyed or humiliated. They have little choice but to cling to a sense of their position at the top of the colonial hierarchy of native populations -- but for how long, one wonders, will it protect them from the new brutality of racial and religious hostility? In Dragojlovic’s account, their anxieties seem entirely reasonable, the dilemmas that created them virtually inescapable, the affective dimension of their post-colonial intimacy at continuing risk – all of which lends poignancy to Dragojlovic’s narrative. The telling itself conveys a sense of Dragojlovic’s intense engagement with these people – of her appreciation of their dilemmas and of their aesthetic pride. The grace of her prose is a fitting frame for the story of a people who face uncertain futures with the elegance and poise for which their heritage has long been famous. Above all, she reminds us that nation-states do not have a monopoly of ethnic heritage. Kebalian is a challenge to such simplistic assumptions, and Dragojlovic has given us a remarkably affecting account of the fears, the strains, but also the fulfilling attachments that mark the entanglement with their former colonizers of those who were once their most-favored subjects. Michael Herzfeld Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.

Acknowledgments There is no way I can do justice to all that I have been given. While for reasons of confidentiality I do not name any of my interlocutors besides I Komang Suaka, it is they who made this book possible. I extend my deepest gratitude to all of them who contributed their time, knowledge, and patience to this project. This project started as a PhD thesis at the Australian National University. My PhD supervisor Margaret Jolly supported this project with generosity and enthusiasm from the very beginning. Her intellectual inspiration, support, and encouragements are too great to numerate. From the very beginning of this study, Henk Schulte Nordholt has been a supportive and inspiring colleague, always being there when I needed him. Throughout the years I have been fortunate to have had many colleagues whose insights helped shape this book. This includes Lila Abu-Lughod, Sara Ahmed, Wayan Arka, Michiel Baas, Niko Besnier, Marieke Bloembergen, Tom Boellstorff, Alex Broom, Michelle Carnegie, Ashley Carruthers, Jamie Coates, Freek Colombijn, Robert Cribb, Nyoman Darma Putra, Assi Doron, Daive A. Dunkley, Yolanda van Ede, Alex Edmonds, Jane Ferguson, Peter Geschiere, Ghassan Hage, Sabine Hess, David T. Hill, Melinda Hinkson, Gerhard Hoffstaedter, Leo Howe, Tamara Jacka, Edwin Jurriens, Kumiko Kawashima, Helen Keane, Rosanne Kennedy, Gaik Cheng Khoo, Andrew Kipnis, Jacqueline Lo, Francesca Merlan, Antje Mißbach, Howard Morphy, Mark Mosko, Fuyubi Nakamura, Lyn Parker, Remco Raben, Kalpana Ram, Thomas Reuter, Kathryn Robinson, Cristina Rocha, Alan Rumsey, Yatun Sastramidjaja, Ken Setiawan, Rikardo Shedden, Patricia Spyer, Rupert Stasch, Alice Street, Marata Tamaira, Nicholas Tapp, Philip Taylor, Jaap Timmer, Eveline Tonkens, Adrian Vickers, Ara Wilson, and Rosemary Wiss. This book was finalized during my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Queensland in Brisbane and my affiliation with the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden. In Brisbane, I greatly benefited from conversations with David Trigger, Sally Babidge, Anna Cristina Pertierra, Richard Martin, and Fernanda Claudio. In Leiden, I enjoyed stimulating discussions with Nira Wickramasinghe, Swargajyoti Gohain, Việt Lê, Shrawan Kumar Acharya, Siobhan Campbell, Rom Dittgen, Rohit Negi, and Bernardo Summerbell. Hilbrand W.S. Westra encouraged me to look at the world otherwise and to write more. During the final stage of writing this book, Natalie Scholz

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provided me with much support and many lively conversations over dinners in Leiden. Dunja Cvjeticanin has been a supportive friend and a careful editor over the years. Tyrell Haberkorn always makes me want to do more about the many injustices in the world. Over the years, Marina de Regt made Amsterdam feel like my second home, and our friendship shaped my thinking more than it might seem. Sue Frohlick has been a great colleague, always inspiring me to think more about the intricacies of cross-border desires and transnational intimacies. Paul van der Velde and Adèle Esposito provided great editorial support. Many conversations about postcoloniality with Philippe Peycam shaped this project in more ways than one. Michael Herzfeld provided encouragement when it was needed the most. My parents Grozdana and Dragan Dragojlovic have provided me with their love and undivided support over the years. My brother Radovan and my sister-in-law Kan have been the most loving and caring family, and my nephews Stefan and Dushan have been a continuous source of love and fun. Dejan Stevanovic was my partner during the first stage of this project. His generosity and wisdom made the initial years of transnational living both possible and enjoyable. Philip Grundy, a dear friend and a teacher of Dutch language, passed away during this project. His good humour and love for the Dutch language have remained with me. I dedicate this book to Erin Pugh. Her love, generosity, humour, and unfailing support made this book possible.

Preface Tension-Ridden Proximity In early 2004, at the beginning of my long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Balinese migrants in the Netherlands, Ibu Mariani, who went on to become one of my main interlocutors, generously shared her time with me to explain the intricacies of her everyday life. In order to understand Balinese migrants in the Netherlands, she argued, I first needed to understand the relationship between Indonesians and the Dutch. In her opinion, the best starting point was to watch the film Oeroeg (1993), so she decided to arrange a film screening in her house. She invited two other Balinese friends who she knew would enjoy seeing the film again. On a cold January afternoon, we gathered at her house to watch the film over delicious Balinese food. Set in the Dutch Colonial East Indies, the film is based on a novel by the same name written by Hella Haasse in 1948. The film focuses on Johan ten Berghe, the son of wealthy Dutch plantation owners, and his unusual friendship with Oeroeg, the son of Deppoh, an indigenous worker. A pivotal moment in their childhood was the death of Deppoh, who drowned while saving Johan. Johan and Oeroeg develop a close friendship during their high school years, but this ends when Oeroeg becomes involved with Indonesian nationalists and rejects his Dutch friend who, for his part, goes to the Netherlands. Johan joins the Dutch army in the aftermath of the Second World War when the Dutch East Indies declares independence. Finding himself in the middle of the Indonesian war for independence, Johan learns that his father has been killed and is soon caught and imprisoned by Indonesian freedom fighters. In the prison he meets his former nanny, now working for the Indonesian independence movement, and learns the truth about how Deppoh had died. His old nanny explains that it was Johan’s father who rescued Johan from the river. While doing so, however, he dropped his pocket watch into the water. Noticing what happened, Deppoh dove into the river to salvage the watch but drowned in the process. While I was carefully trying to follow the plot that was unfamiliar to me, I could not but notice how the atmosphere in the room was becoming increasingly emotionally charged as my three interlocutors followed the plot that they knew so well. As the film approached its end, the conversation, which had been animated throughout, suddenly became tense, culminating in my interlocutor Ibu Mariani bursting into tears at the final scene of the film. The final scene, which is also the dramatic climax of the film, occurs

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on a bridge during the exchange of prisoners of war between the Dutch and Indonesian forces. Johan notices Oeroeg amongst the Indonesian prisoners he is passing on the bridge and walks towards him. The two men engage in the following conversation: Johan: Are we still friends? (Zijn wij nog vrienden? in Dutch) Oeroeg: Only if we are equals. (Alleen als we aan elkaar gelijk zijn, in Dutch) Johan: Aren’t we equals now? (Zijn we dat nu niet? in Dutch) Oeroeg: Not if twelve Indonesians are worth as much as you. (Niet zolang twaalf Indonesiers net zoveel waard zijn als jij, in Dutch)

The guard shouts ‘Keep moving!’ (Doorlopen!) in Dutch, and the two men turn away from each other and walk in opposite directions. Just before reaching the end of the bridge, Johan screams ‘Oeroeg!’ and runs back. He takes his father’s pocket watch out of his pocket (the same pocket watch Oeroeg’s father had saved before he drowned in the river), places it in Oeroeg’s hand, and says: Johan: Take care of it. (Wees ze zuinig op, in Dutch). [He places his hand on Oeroeg’s shoulder, then continues.] Stay safe. (Semoga kamu selamat, in Malay) Oeroeg: Near or far, we will always be brothers. (Tawalatu tawalana, Jauh dekat tetap saudara, in Javanese and Indonesian) Johan: Right. (Betul, in Indonesian)

Through tears, Ibu Mariani whispered: ‘It has been like this for a long time … we Indonesians and Dutch have a special bond. We are like brothers.’ Her friends agreed. The deep emotional effect that the film has on Ibu Mariani is firmly situated in the long, convoluted history of Dutch and Indonesian encounters as a deep sense of tension-ridden proximity. Her strong self-identification with the narrative in Oeroeg stands in contrast, however, to that of Rob Nieuwenhuys and Tjalie Robinson. As Indo (Indonesian-Dutch) writers, Nieuwenhuys and Robinson dismissed Haasse’s book for inaccuracies and generalizations, claiming that as a white Dutch woman who was born and raised in the Dutch East Indies, Haasse did not truly understand indigenous life (Nieuwenhuys 1999). Yet, as Pamela Pattynama (2012a), an Indo scholar of postcolonial literature, has suggested, there are important differences between the novel and the film that reflect the broader changes that occurred

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in Dutch cultural memory from the late 1940s to the 1990s. She argues that while the novel is specifically focused on ‘the loss of friendship and beloved colony’ (2012a: 181), the film focuses on the ‘guilt-ridden’ discourse of white racism and the massacre of an indigenous village. Ibu Mariani and my other Balinese interlocutors, who praise both the book and the film, relate to them as visual and narrative texts that articulate their own positionality in post-colonial Dutch society. I use the term ‘positionality’ here in the sense developed by Linda Alcoff (2005), that is, as an account of subjectivity, which stresses that gender, race, class, and other aspects of subjectivities are markers of relational positions rather than essential qualities and need to be situated in particular social and historical contexts. In line with critical historical anthropology (Sahlins 1976; Wiener 1995), I have tried to attend to my interlocutors’ interpretations of the past, though they were never explicitly articulated as a pronounced and direct criticism of Dutch colonialism in Bali. Ibu Mariani’s reaction resonates with that of many of my other interlocutors who employ the language of proximity, familiarity, closeness, kinship, and intimacy to position themselves within the long history of Balinese and Dutch encounters. My interlocutors, many of whom are former workers in the tourist industry who are well versed in the early history of tourism in Bali, frequently refer to the Dutch as the first foreigners to recognize the uniqueness of Balinese cultural and religious traditions. In Balinese emigrants’ renditions, early twentieth century Dutch and other Euro-American scholars and writers are credited with the capacity to recognize the uniqueness of Balinese culture as better than the cultures of other ethnicities in the colonial society. The violent colonial conquests, on the other hand, are most often described through language that not only normalizes the violence as an integral part of different ethnic and national histories but also does not approach colonial violence as something that needs to be ‘revealed’ or commemorated in Dutch post-coloniality. Yet this is by no means a confirmation of Dutch superiority – indeed, quite the contrary is the case, as this book will demonstrate. I argue that Balinese claims to commonality, proximity, and intimacy with the Dutch are based on what the Dutch were able to recognize (i.e. Balinese culture as better than others) and what they did for the Balinese, both of which are crucial for the production of kebalian (Balineseness) and Balinese diasporic formations in Dutch post-coloniality. Balinese subaltern citizens take on the Dutch colonial classification of themselves (later celebrated through the global tourism industry) as essentially peaceful Hindus and carriers of ancient culture, as compared with the Islamic traditions of the rest of the Indonesian archipelago. This understanding of

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the Balinese collective ‘we’ as best-of-all-the-rest 1 is reiterated in the postcolonial context in relation to other foreigners and in particular to those of Muslim faith. These understandings of the collective self are the basis for Balinese claims to post-colonial intimacy. Balinese claims of proximity with the Dutch and their sense of cultural uniqueness and superiority are neither given nor stable; in order to maintain them, Balinese subaltern citizens engage in various forms of authenticating practices, as this book discusses. Moreover, subaltern citizens’ claims to intimacy and proximity would not be durable or even possible without an active appreciative engagement by those with whom the intimacy is claimed. Since the early twentieth century, a large body of scholarly work has been dedicated to Westerners’ travels to Bali and their personal, artistic, and political engagements with Balinese people and culture on the island (Vickers 1994). Many of the early travellers were artists and anthropologists whose ethnographic and popular accounts celebrated the uniqueness of the island and its people, examining how the culture played an important role in the establishment of paradisiacal images of Bali as having a timeless and essentially artistic culture. Throughout its long history of tourism, Bali has been formed in the imaginations of non-Balinese people as culturally unique – the last paradise – and Balinese people themselves have reflected this image, for various reasons (see Vickers 1989). These imaginaries have been perpetuated well into the twenty-first century by the global tourism industry, and as this book demonstrates, by Balinese subaltern citizens. My intellectual curiosity about contemporary encounters between Balinese people and foreigners was inspired by Adrian Vickers’ brilliant historical account (1989) of the often controversial historical events that led to the development of paradisiacal images of Bali, its people, and culture, and by Michael Picard’s fascinating study (1996) of the dynamic relationship between tourism and Balinese culture from colonial times until the early 1990s. Unlike Vickers and Picard, however, my interest is in the ethnographies of everyday encounters between the Balinese and foreigners outside of the immediate sphere of the tourist industry. I am interested in exploring how social relationships between Balinese people and foreigners came to be and how these are maintained over time and lead to the establishment of transnational relationships. Finally, I have an intellectual curiosity about Dutch colonial history in Bali and the colonial government’s attempts to institutionalize the preservation and promotion 1 Luhrmann (1996) uses the phrase ‘best-of-all-the-rest’ to describe the Parsis – the Zoroastrian people in India who thrived under British colonial rule.

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of Balinese culture through the tourist industry in the early twentieth century. This latter curiosity opens up two themes of inquiry about the present: first, Balinese migration to the Netherlands, and second, the modalities of kebalian and home-building in Dutch post-coloniality. These themes lead to various questions such as when, how, and under what socio-economic and political circumstances have the Balinese people historically undertaken their journeys to the Netherlands? What kinds of interactions took place between the Balinese exiles who were stripped of their Indonesian citizenship in the 1960s and the migrants who intentionally moved to the Netherlands thereafter? What kinds of spaces exist for Balinese visual and performing arts in post-colonial Dutch society, and what are the interactions between professional artists and Balinese migrants who engage in the production of Balinese visual and performing arts? All of these questions narrow my initially broad question about the interaction between Balinese people and Westerners into a careful consideration of Balinese diasporic formations today, with the goal of understanding how and under what circumstances kebalian and a sense of home is produced in Dutch post-coloniality.

Naming and Research Language All personal names used in this book are pseudonyms, except for those of I Komang Suaka in his capacity as an artist and public figure, director Johnny Rahaket, and author Inge Dümpel. The details of all other persons, places, and situations have been altered. In doing this, I have retained the use of Indonesian and Balinese names, using them interchangeably, and have maintained the use of the polite prefix ‘Ibu’ for women and ‘Pak’ for men. The Balinese naming system in the Netherlands differs from that in Bali.2 In familiar contexts, people are most commonly referred to by their friends and Dutch spouses by their birth order names or, less commonly, their nicknames; when talking about others, birth order names and the name of the city in which the person lives are used. In this way, there is Wayan Amsterdam, Gede Zandvoort, Komang Rotterdam, and so on. While this new naming practice is important in Balinese diasporic formations in establishing relationships between person and place, I have not used this common pattern throughout the book, in an attempt to disguise individual identities. 2

For details about the naming system in Bali, see Geertz 1973.

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During my research I used the Dutch, Indonesian, and English languages, as all are used by my interlocutors in everyday life, depending on the context. In general, the language mostly spoken at home is Dutch, as Dutch spouses and children rarely understand more than a few phrases of either Indonesian or Balinese. Balinese people who have recently moved to the Netherlands and do not have a high level of proficiency in Dutch use English to communicate with their spouses. Indonesian is spoken with those who understand the language, regardless of their national or ethnic affiliations. It is not uncommon for many of my Balinese interlocutors to use English when communicating with people who are immigrants to the Netherlands rather than Dutch. While this gives a sense of worldliness, it also implies a deep-seated resentment toward the forceful cultural integration policies that were introduced in the Netherlands in the early 2000s, as explored in this book.

The Book Outline This book is an ethnography that explores Balinese subaltern citizens’ production of post-colonial intimacy – a complex reification of claims to proximity and mutuality between themselves and the Dutch during colonialism – and its echoing effects in the present. It is structured around five chapters. The introduction offers a brief glimpse at Balinese-Dutch historical encounters and details my method of ethnographic inquiry. A discussion about foreigners, technologies of cultural integration, and the Dutch postcolonial state serves as a background for the introduction of the two main theoretical contributions this book offers – post-colonial intimacy and the home-making practices in the Netherlands. Chapter one locates Balinese communities and networks in the Netherlands and explores how the notion of kebalian in the post-colonial diasporic context has been inexorably linked with the Balinese left wing and a specific form of long-distance nationalism. For many Balinese subaltern citizens, the Netherlands, unlike any other country in which the Indonesian left found refuge, provided sufficient financial and institutional support for the legacy of the Indonesian left. Here, I explore how Balinese people struggle with their own self-representation as an essentially peaceful people in contrast to their memories of the violence that took place in Bali during the 1965-66 killings. I argue that associating representations of Bali with violence risks undermining popular images of the Balinese people and

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endangering their claims to be the ‘best-of-all-the-rest’ within the matrix of post-colonial differences. Chapter two discusses debates about Dutch and broader European concerns with active citizenship, ethnic diversity, and anxieties about social disintegration through an analysis of ethnographic material in which Balinese subaltern citizens engage in what I have termed ‘Balinese postcolonial pedagogies’. I suggest that this is a specific form of trained intimacy that occurs in everyday encounters between the Balinese people and their non-Balinese others. It is through these interactions that Balinese people reiterate their ethnic affiliation, which is neither obvious nor visible to those who do not know them personally. These actions have the dual purpose of educating others and authenticating themselves as carriers of the unique, peace-loving Balinese-Hindu culture that ought to stand above the cultures of other foreigners. My concern is in exploring how the knowledge that is generated through these encounters simultaneously serves to reiterate common representations and imaginations about Balinese culture and forms new claims to Balinese translocality. The modalities of kebalian that emerge in everyday encounters evoke colonial classifications of Balinese people as the best-of-all-the-rest but also limitations and interethnic tensions that such claims bring about in the present. Kebalian here emerges as Balinese self-production through the performances of long-distance cultural specialists. These engagements are central to the creation of a personal sense of belonging and ongoing processes of home-making. Chapter three further explores the notion of post-colonial intimacy enacted by Balinese subaltern citizens by detailing how the Balinese experienced a major exhibition featuring Balinese royal regalia looted during the Dutch colonial conquest. Problematizing the conceptualization of ‘common cultural heritage’ under which the exhibition was funded, I explore Balinese claims to historical proximity between the Balinese and the Dutch, which is best understood through the Balinese delineation between the visible and invisible (sekala and niskala) worlds and their emanation in post-colonial Dutch society. The chapter offers a critique of the separation of ‘object-centred’ philosophy – advocated by Bruno Latour – from Michel Foucault’s humanist philosophy and instead uses both approaches as the most relevant way of analyzing the ethnographic material at hand. Chapter four analyzes the production and reception of a commemorative performance of De Puputan, Val van Bali (Puputan, The Fall of Bali), which marked the centenary of puputan, an event during which in 1908 the entire royal family of the last independent Balinese kingdom of Klungkung, dressed all in white, walked in front of the Dutch army and found their

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death. A detailed analysis of ethnographic material demonstrates a set of complex interethnic dynamics in post-colonial commemorative practices. The chapter further charts discourses about kebalian in relation to colonial history and considers the rise of Balinese debates over the collective ‘we’ in relation to other ethnic groups of Indonesian background. Chapter five focuses on the artistic endeavours of Balinese multidisciplinary artist I Komang Suaka in a further exploration of personal and collective struggles over kebalian and home-building practices in Dutch post-coloniality. I situate the artist’s work within discussions about art and citizenship, aiming to broaden debates about ‘ethnic art’ and what it means to be a long-distance cultural specialist. A detailed reading of Suaka’s installation My Home is Your Home explores the tension-riddled sense of intimacy and proximity pertinent to Balinese home-making-practices in post-colonial Dutch society.

Introduction This book is an ethnography that charts reconfigurations of kebalian (Balineseness) – a notion that encompasses the personal, social, and cultural complexities involved in being persons and collectives of Balinese ethnicity in post-colonial Dutch society. I explore how Balinese subaltern citizens engage in discourses and materialities of the colonial in the present by asserting claims of proximity between themselves and the Dutch on the basis of colonial history through an active production of what I call postcolonial intimacy. My understanding of Balinese subaltern citizens’ claims of proximity that emerged so prominently in my ethnographic material urges me not to see them through the binary oppositions of remoteness and proximity, of harmony and disorder. Rather, I argue that post-colonial intimacy generated by Balinese subaltern citizens is produced relationally and needs to be situated within the following contexts: the specificities of Dutch colonialism in Bali and Balinese understandings of historical agency; wider understandings of Balinese culture as paradisiacal and Balinese people as peace-loving; the Balinese and Dutch common sense of threat from and vulnerability to radical Islam; and the existence of the Indies cultural landscape in the Netherlands, which is characterized by its rich and complex colonial inheritance that has been developing since the 1950s. Thus, post-colonial intimacy here should be seen as a wide spectrum of dynamic relationships that are experienced as familiarity, proximity, and closeness and are generated through a continuum of dis-harmony and tensions. In analyzing the production of kebalian, I draw on a large body of scholarship that discusses Balinese identity politics in Bali. Michael Picard (1996a, 1999, 2000) conceptualizes kebalian as a ‘transcultural discourse’ by stressing its historically constructed, interactive character. His discussion focuses on the Balinese intelligentsia’s investment in the production of discourses which take religion (agama), custom (adat), and culture (budaya) to be the central features of Balinese identity politics. Drawing on the work of Picard (1996, 1996a) and other scholars who approach Balinese culture and identity politics as an ongoing process of becoming (e.g. Vickers 1989; Howe 1999, 2004; Connor and Vickers 2003; Jennaway 2002; Ramstedt 2004; Schulte Nordholt 2007; Fox 2011), I study the production of kebalian in the context of Balinese diasporic formations.

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Method of Inquiry This book is based on data collected and developed over a ten-year, threephase period (2003-2004, 2006, 2009) of participant observation in the Netherlands and Bali, and shorter visits to each place in 2011, 2012, and 2014. Supplemented by textual analysis of travel writings, film, fiction, and magazines concerned with Balinese interactions with Euro-American foreigners, my methods were principally centred on participant observations and the collection of life narratives in multi-sited settings (Marcus 1995). My focus on Balinese subaltern citizens and their Balinese-Dutch families meant that I participated in their everyday lives, observing and talking to Balinese men and women and their children. As an ethnographer living with and amongst my interlocutors, I travelled with them as they moved within their national and transnational networks and stayed in contact with key interlocutors through email and phone conversations. Over the course of the last ten years, some of my interlocutors have changed their place of residence either within the Netherlands and/or in Bali or between the two countries. These local and transnational movements were largely determined by socio-economic and political conditions, as for example in the period following the economic crisis of 1997 and around the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005, when several families that had lived in Bali decided to move permanently to the Netherlands. For centuries, people, objects, and ideas have continuously moved between the Netherlands and the Indonesian archipelago, influencing the private, political, and religious spheres. In his seminal work on Balinese colonial society, Henk Schulte Nordholt (1986: 1-13) outlines Dutch attempts to transform the Balinese political system from what he referred to as being in ‘a state of flux’ into a ‘fixed order’, emphasizing the important political and societal changes that took place during the less than forty years of Dutch colonialism.1 The colonial government’s project of ‘traditionalizing’ Balinese society through the ‘cultural-cum-educational’ policy named ‘Balinization’ (Baliseering) was launched in the 1920s and was expected to bring about a ‘renaissance’ of Balinese culture (Picard 2000: 89). This policy aimed to find the singularity of Balinese-Hindu heritage, perceiving it to be made in opposition to Islam and Christianity. While the policy had long-lasting consequences for Balinese identity discourses, I think 1 Dutch intervention in Northern Bali commenced in 1846, but it was only in 1908 that the entire island was subjugated. The Imperial Japanese Army occupied Bali in 1942, along with the rest of the colonial Dutch East Indies.

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it is important to consider the encounters through which interactions between the colonized people and the colonizers occurred as ‘an active process of appropriation’ (Jolly 2005: 138); a ‘colonial dialogue’ (Kelly 1991) in which the boundaries between the two were contested rather than determined. Cautioning against crediting the ‘colonial gaze’ (Kelly 1997) with too much power in the Balinese context, Picard (1999: 23) has stressed the importance of considering the active agency of colonized people. It is similarly important, as Vickers (1996) has persuasively argued, to take into account the mutual connections between the Dutch (and other Westerners2) and Balinese people rather than solely focus on intentions made by Dutch colonial officials and the Balinese political elite. This approach allows us to acknowledge the role of Euro-American artists and anthropologists in the colony and their mutual interaction with Balinese intellectuals, artists, leaders, and peasants. These interactions gave rise to novel forms of interaction and creative production within Balinese visual and performing arts circles at the beginning of the twentieth century (Geertz 1994; Vickers 2002). Approaching these and other encounters between colonized and colonizer through the lens of an active appropriation is important not only for understanding colonial interactions in Bali or elsewhere but also to foreground Balinese subaltern citizens’ claims and engagements, through which post-colonial intimacy is generated. Drawing on Gyanendra Pandey’s work (2008: 276-277), I utilize the notion of the subaltern citizen, acknowledging its political potential of subalternity. The term subaltern is derived from Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci’s work on cultural hegemony. He uses the term subaltern to describe ‘history told from below’ by social groups that have been excluded from society’s political representations. The term subaltern was brought to postcolonial studies by a group of South Asian historians who called themselves the Subaltern Studies Group and who were interested in the political role of mass populations in South Asian history. Since the 1970s, the term has gradually begun to denote colonized people in South Asia but is also used as a term of reference for colonized peoples more generally. The subaltern conceptualization allows us to take into account the historical agency of individuals and collectives and the echoing effect of this agency in the present by taking into consideration all their potentialities and limitations. Furthermore, the term prevents the simplistic 2 I use the term ‘the West’ and Westerners ironically, with the understanding that it ‘refers to the effects of hegemonic representations of the Western self rather than its subjugated traditions’ (Gupta 1998: 36).

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compartmentalization of ‘us’ (citizens and people with history) versus ‘them’ (the subalterns, without history) and of ‘our’ time/place (of equality and democracy) versus earlier times/places (lacking democracy and equality). In a broad sense, this book explores citizenship-making and home-making processes by focusing on the Balinese perspective rather than discussing the technologies of government, which, according to Michel Foucault (2000), are a set of organized practices (techniques and rationalities) through which all subjects are governed. Drawing on Foucault’s work, Aiwa Ong (1999, 1999a, 2003) has argued that all migrants are subjected to specific processes of governmental subject-making designed to turn them into ‘good enough’ citizens. Remaining mindful of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, which he derived from his conception of biopower to discuss how state power operates over both the physical and political bodies of a population, my analysis is predominantly focused on the Balinese people and their projects of personal and collective self-making. It is important to reiterate here that I take the power of biopolitics seriously but believe that focusing the analytical lens on citizens’ processes of self-making allows us both to engage with individual responses to states’ regulatory norms and to consider a wider spectrum of engagements, perspectives, and interpretations. This spectrum would remain largely marginalized if we were to focus only on governmental institutions and their effect on migrant populations, or indeed if we focused solely on how migrants respond to institutional regulatory norms (Ong 2003). The latter phenomenon is particularly significant in the case of refugees, who are often exposed to extreme classificatory measurements through the biopolitics of otherness (Fassin 2001). While I agree that otherness remains an important conceptualization in the regulation of migrant populations in general, I want to stress that we need to pay closer attention to dynamic aspects of othering and the production of otherness that occur among citizens in everyday interactions. In particular, I am interested in how certain foreigners might be perceived as more threatening than others by state bureaucrats and autochthonous citizens but also how subaltern citizens engage in othering processes to generate their own ethnicized and racialized hierarchies of value (Herzfeld 2007). In the case of Balinese subaltern citizens, othering is situated within historical contingencies but always in dialogue with state discourses and contemporary geopolitics. In other words, historical memory and an understanding of colonial relations are as crucial as colonial classifications of people and cultures in current dynamics of otherness, both in everyday interactions and within governmental regulation.

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Through comparative analyses of European bureaucratic structures, a number of scholars (Jordan et al. 2003; Olwig 2011) have shown that bureaucrats have a significant amount of discretionary power when applying immigration policies to individuals or families because the specific circumstances of particular immigration cases are frequently ‘too complicated to fit into the standard formats of policy provisions’ (Jordan et al. 2003: 213). Because of this, the treatment of individual cases may be influenced by the individual administrative officer’s attitudes towards various cultures. It is in the interaction between Balinese people and different state administrators – including immigration officers, those in charge of integration procedures, marriage celebrants, and social workers – that Balinese culture and ethnicity are (re)produced not only as non-threatening but also as possessing desirable social and cultural capital. As my ethnography demonstrates, the presence of Balinese migrants in the Netherlands serves as confirmation that the autochthonous Dutch self is willing to accept difference as long as it is perceived as non-threatening. In this way, Balinese migration offers an exotic allure that helps to alleviate the Dutch nation’s fast-fading self-image of tolerance. Before I proceed further, it is necessary to briefly reflect on the development of prevailing paradisiacal images of Bali and Balinese-Dutch historical encounters.

A Glimpse at History Balinese people and culture have often been imagined as authentic, pure, and geographically undifferentiated (Vickers 1989). However, Balinese identity formation is, in fact, highly varied and has historically been deeply affected by transnational trajectories. Interactions between the Balinese and the Dutch go back to the the first Dutch voyages to the Indonesian archipelago in 1597, when the Dutch fleet first stopped at Bali in search of food and water. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dutch references to Bali appeared only occasionally in the registers of the Dutch East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC), mainly in relation to the slave trade which was at the time the VOC’s main commercial activity in Bali (Wiener 1995: 25). The Dutch made their first efforts to colonize Bali in the early nineteenth century, when Bali was composed of nine kingdoms – Klungkung, Karangasem, Buleleng, Jembrana, Tabanan, Mengwi, Badung, Gianyar, and Bangli. These kingdoms had, from time to time, been caught up in battles amongst themselves for regional power and domination (Bakker 1993; Schulte Northolt 1996). The first kingdom conquered by the Dutch was Buleleng, in 1849,

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followed by Jembrana in 1853. The kings of Karangasem and Gianyar made timely peaceful agreements with the Dutch in 1895 and 1900 respectively, while the kingdoms of Bandung and Klungkung, which refused to recognize Dutch colonial rule, were subjugated by military force in events known as puputan (finishing, ending). The first puputan occurred in 1904, when the entire royal family of Bandung and their retainers – unarmed and dressed in white – walked up to the colonial army to meet their death. The Dutch took Klungkung in 1908, when the Dewa Agung chose the same death for himself, his family, and his retainers in another puputan (Wiener 1995). These events ‘sent shock waves through some of the capitals of Europe and led to vigorous protests’ (Vickers 1989: 92). The puputan had a profound influence on Dutch-Balinese relations (Picard 1996a: 19-20; Vickers 1989: 92). The overwhelmingly negative response of foreign diplomats to the mass deaths of unarmed royal courts posed a potential threat to Dutch colonial control in the East Indies. To mitigate the negative effect of their actions, the Dutch government attempted to cultivate a better image of their colonial policies within the international community by promoting the preservation of Balinese culture. In 1908, the colonial government opened tourist offices in Batavia and Bali. The latter was at the time described as ‘the Gem of the Lesser Sunda Isles’ (Picard 1990: 4). Dutch colonial policy was strongly influenced by a specific image of Bali according to which Java had ‘degenerated’ under the impact of Islam while Bali had flourished because it had remained Hindu. Thus, Bali was incorporated into the Dutch colonial state as a ‘living museum’ of HinduJavanese civilization – the one and only surviving heir to the Hindu heritage displaced from Java by the invasion of Islam (Vickers 1989). Bali was also seen as ‘little India’ because it possessed a caste system with ‘despotic’ rulers, and Balinese aristocrats were perceived as oppressors who imposed themselves on an essentially democratic indigenous people who lived in ‘independent village republics’ (Covarrubias 1937; Howe 2001: 21). These views were significantly influenced by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who served as the British Lieutenant-Governor in Java for five years. Raffles’ five years in Java had profound consequences for colonial policies as well as for European representations of Balinese culture and society. A passionate Orientalist, Raffles brought with him from India a keen interest in the ancient Hindu-Buddhist culture. In his understanding, the Balinese were preserving elements of the glorious Javanese past (Wiener 1995: 26), and Dutch colonial officials were accordingly setting out to ‘simplify the village administration and return it to its original state’ (Assistant Resident H.J.E.F. Schwartz, quoted in Schulte Nordholt 1986: 32; and Picard 1999:

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20). This view is best illustrated in a statement written by G.P. Rouffaer, former officer at the Bali Instituut, founded in 1915 as part of the Koloniaal Instituut: Let the Balinese live their own beautiful native life as undisturbed as possible! Their agriculture, their village life, their own forms of worship, their religious art, their own literature – all bear witness to an autonomous native civilization of rare versatility and richness. No railroads on Bali; no Western coffee plantations; and especially no sugar factories! But also no proselytising, neither Mohammedan (by zealous natives from other parts of the Indies) nor Protestant nor Roman Catholic. Let the colonial administration, with the strong backing of the Netherlands government, treat the island of Bali as a rare jewel that we must protect and whose virginity must remain intact. (cited in Robinson 1995: 41)

What Dutch colonial officials however wanted to present as a policy preserving the indigenous culture from foreign influences was in fact a new policy introduced by the colonial power in the 1910s and 1920s, known as the ‘Balinization of Bali’ (Baliseering). Dutch scholars and colonial officers – particularly F.A. Lietrinck (whose research was based in North Bali and represented a regional variation) and Rudolf H.T. Friederich (whose knowledge of Balinese customs and religion came from palm-leaf manuscripts) – had established Bali as a field of scholarship through a series of studies conducted from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s (e.g. Robinson 1995: 5). The texts of another scholar – V.E. Korn – were particularly influential in the reinforcement of Bali as fragile and unique and a place that needed to be protected from foreign influences and the impact of modernity (Picard 1999: 21). Herman Neubronner Van der Tuuk, whom Adrian Vickers describes as an eccentric intellectual, was also crucially important in this regard. Van der Tuuk was born in Malacca (Malaysia), spent much of his life in the colonies (Vickers 1989), and travelled to Bali in 1870 to study Balinese culture. Van der Tuuk argued fervently against missionary presence in Bali, fearing that conversion to Christianity would slowly erode the unique culture of the island (Vickers 1989: 83). His emphasis on Bali’s cultural ‘uniqueness’ continues to echo in contemporary discourses about Balinese identity by Balinese people and foreigners alike. During the colonial period, certain Balinese people – former rajas and others who could afford education – obtained access to European education, enabling them to become colonial bureaucrats. European education, which was a requirement for work in the colonial administration, played a profound

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role in the formation of an indigenous intelligentsia (Howe 2001; Picard 1999). The intelligentsia became the first to promote the idea of Balinese ethnic cohesion and of Balinese people as an autonomous ethnic group based on the notion of kebalian (Balineseness) and the claimed uniqueness of Balinese religion and tradition (kebalian kita berdasar agama dan adat) (Picard 1999: 27). According to Michael Picard, the beginnings of debates about kebalian can be traced back to colonial Balinese publications initiated by members of the Dutch-educated Balinese elite in North Bali in the 1920s. Through these publications and the debates that surrounded them, Balinese intellectuals developed a concept of Balinese ‘culture’ (kebudayaan). It is important to mention that in its early formulation, the concept of ‘culture’ was predominantly associated with forms of ‘high art’, reinforcing class-based assumptions concerning ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ cultural forms seen in Euro-American contexts (Picard 1999: 16). The intelligentsia played a crucial role in the development of Balinese nationalism through the celebration of Balinese cultural distinctiveness and homogeneity. While Dutch colonial rule ended with the Japanese occupation in 1942, memories of the Dutch colonial period and interpretations of the importance of the puputan events in Balinese history reverberate through to the postcolonial period, receiving varied interpretations in new contexts that have arisen in the twentieth century (Wiener 1995). Balinese diasporic formations in the Netherlands and the notion of kebalian they generate are constituted within a convoluted relationship between the past and the present, making it significantly different from Balinese diasporic formations in other parts of the world.

Kebalian and Foreigners The notion of kebalian has been vigorously discussed in the longstanding entanglements between Balinese people and Euro-American foreigners throughout history, particularly since the 1970s and the development of mass tourism in Bali. The large number of tourists that began flocking to Bali at that time created anxieties about Western influences on Balinese culture, producing discourses in which Westerners were constructed as the ‘other’. Processes of globalization were seen as threatening and in need of repudiation (Rubinstein and Connor 1999: 1-15). These concerns led to the development of ‘cultural tourism’ under the Indonesian New Order government, which aimed to limit the presence of tourists to particular enclaves from which they could pay daily visits to other parts of Bali. Perceiving

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Balinese culture in essentialist terms, cultural preservationists aimed to limit the influence that foreign tourists were presumed to exert on Balinese culture in order to protect it. Debates over foreign influences and cultural tourism in Bali have further strengthened the notion of kebalian in relation to Hindu religion (agama), custom (adat), and culture (budaya) (Picard 1996a). In the last several decades, Balinese interaction with foreigners has extended beyond the Balinese tourist industry, as many skilful Balinese workers have found jobs in different Asian cities (Connor and Vickers 2003) or on international cruise ships, using the employment opportunities as a way of travelling and increasing social mobility. Furthermore, through the island’s long history of tourism, Balinese people have developed personal relationships with foreign tourists, and some have formed families with foreign visitors. These relations have facilitated Balinese people’s temporary or permanent migration to different parts of the world (Dragojlovic 2016).3 Prior to their migration to the Netherlands, the majority of my interlocutors worked in the Balinese tourist industry as formal or informal cultural brokers and were familiar with Dutch, European, and American representations of Balinese visual and performing arts in the 1920s and 1930s. The perceived threat of radical Islam which arose after the terrorist attacks in Bali in 2002 and 2005 brought about new debates concerning the foreign presence in Bali and gave rise to a new form of Balinese nationalism referred to as ajeg Bali. While ajeg literally translates as ‘firm and strong’, in a broader context it encompasses different aspects of Balinese custom (adat), religion (agama), and culture (budaya) that are taken to represent stability in a contemporary world that has been labelled an ‘age of uncertainty’ (e.g. Creese 2004; Schulte Nordholt 2007). Thus, the notion of kebalian has entered a new phase of public debate in which Balinese identity and its complex relationship with foreigners and foreign influences have once again become a major concern. In 2004, these debates were eagerly taken up by Balinese subaltern citizens and their families, friends, and acquaintances when they found themselves equally threatened by radical Islam after the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a radical Islamist. These sentiments have not faded with time but have rather become an integral part of everyday life in which citizens of Islamic faith are positioned as potentially dangerous others. Thus, the threat of radical Islam has come 3 Leonard (2006: 160) makes a passing comment about Balinese surfers’ migration to Japan and Australia. Connor and Vickers (2003) make tangential comments about Balinese travels overseas.

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to stand for the vulnerability of both Bali and the Netherlands, in which the two are situated as ethnically pure and non-Islamic. Such claims serve to establish new conceptualizations of proximity between the two that find numerous articulations in the daily lives of Balinese subaltern citizens. ‘Being non-Muslim’ allochthonous figures as an important identification marker for Balinese people in everyday encounters, whether in the workforce, neighbourhoods, extended families, or circles of friends.

Balinese Subaltern Citizens: Translocal Belonging The present population of Balinese people living in the Netherlands consists of approximately 1,000-1,200 families, with numbers progressively increasing each year. It is impossible to estimate the exact number of Balinese people who have moved to live in the Netherlands, since they are classified as Indonesians in official statistics. Unlike migrants of Indies descent who left Indonesia as Dutch subjects immediately after decolonialization in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Balinese migration to the Netherlands began later. Persecuted Balinese leftists found refuge in the Netherlands in the early 1960s, and a much larger number of people moved for the purposes of family reunification following the expansion of mass tourism in Bali in the early 1970s. When talking about Balinese migration to the Netherlands, it is useful to make a broad distinction between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ mobility. Many instances of migration can be put into either of these two categories, and it is important to keep in mind the heterogeneity of both. I use the term ‘forced’ to highlight the constrained nature of mobility when referring to the experience of Balinese political exiles (eksils). These are people who were working or studying overseas when President Sukarno was replaced by President Suharto in 1965-66 in the largest massacre in Indonesian history. Most of those who found themselves overseas at this time were declared communists by the new Indonesian government and were, under mortal threat, disallowed from returning to Indonesia. In the light of this situation, I note that their circumstances do not constitute a forced migration per se but rather an inability to migrate back to Indonesia – a forced migrant status. ‘Voluntary migration’, on the other hand, describes the migration practices that began in the mid-1970s with the expansion of Balinese tourism and the formation of families between Balinese people and foreigners. Many of those who went to the Netherlands as exchange students in the 1980s became Dutch citizens either by getting a permanent job there or marrying

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a Dutch national. Additionally, several Balinese people were adopted as teenagers by Dutch families who had met them while holidaying in Bali. The broad distinction between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ migratory streams refers also to a migratory timeframe, with forced migration beginning earlier than voluntary migration. By settling in the 1960s, the political eksils paved the way for those who came later, providing a sense of continuity of Balinese presence in Dutch post-coloniality. Within Balinese organizations and networks, elderly members have a place of authority and respect, not only due to their age but also in recognition of the revocation of their Indonesian citizenship, their forced separation from their families in Bali, and their marginalization within Indonesian history. Balinese people living in the Netherlands today come mainly from the regencies of Karangasem, Buleleng, Badung, Gianyar, Tabanan, and Bangli.4 Most of them left their homes as young adults to work in the tourist sector, either close to their native villages or in different regencies. The majority of Balinese migrants are sudra, the lowest caste, with a minority belonging to the three upper castes – brahmana, satriya, and wesia – known together as triwangasa.5 Due to the nature of their migratory trajectories – as political refugees or on the basis of family reunification with a Dutch citizen – Balinese people live spread throughout the Netherlands rather than clustered in any one impoverished, socially marginalized, or migrantdense neighbourhood. Political exiles who found middle-class jobs in the 1970s (mainly because of their higher education) and Balinese migrants who married Dutch citizens live predominantly in middle and upper-middle class neighbourhoods. Many of those who migrated on the basis of family reunification underwent a process of re-education in order to gain jobs as administrators or professionals. Those with only middle school and high school diplomas from Bali predominantly work as labourers, shop assistants, or in the service and care industries. Either way, only a few lack permanent employment. As Indonesia does not allow dual citizenship, most Balinese people living in the Netherlands have Dutch permanent residency, choosing to retain their Indonesian citizenship in order to keep their right to inheritance and their ability to purchase property in Indonesia, the latter being almost impossible for non-Indonesian citizens. The right 4 Bali, one of 30 provinces of the Republic of Indonesia, is divided into eight regencies: Badung, Gianyar, Tabanan, Bangli, Karangasem, Jembrana, Buleleng, and Klungkung. 5 Triwangsa: the three upper casts; Brahmana: Brahman; Satria: member of the second caste; Wesia: member of the third caste. According to Howe (2001), 10% of the people in Bali belong to triwangasa. It is important to stress that the wesia group is presently almost non-existent (Conversation with Henk Schulte Nordholt, 10 June 2014).

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to purchase and own property in Indonesia is particularly important for many, as most Balinese-Dutch families have a holiday house, land, or small businesses in Bali, or have plans to obtain such property. Unlike Moroccan and Turkish citizens who tend to have dual nationality and who are continuously portrayed in public discourses as lacking loyalty to the Dutch nation, Balinese permanent residents do not seem to be exposed to such recriminations. Quite on the contrary, as my interlocutors frequently state, ‘Being Balinese opens many doors’ (Balinees zijn opent vele deuren). I began my fieldwork by recording life histories and conducting semistructured interviews as a way of introducing my research project and getting to know a large number of people. This generated material on 56 families, providing me with a broader picture about Balinese subaltern citizens in the Netherlands. This book is an ethnography that stays close to the narratives and everyday worlds of my interlocutors, and while my analysis is based on many open-ended interviews with various people, it is through ongoing participation in the networks of my two main interlocutors, Ibu Mariani and Pak Nyoman, that I have obtained the most insightful ethnographic knowledge. Both Ibu Mariani and Pak Nyoman migrated to the Netherlands on the basis of family reunification in the early 1990s and over time became informal leaders in their respective networks as well as the main organizers of social and cultural activities that incorporate Balinese men and women and their Balinese-Dutch families. Many Balinese people are adherents of the large network Banjar Suka Duka that convenes twice a year to celebrate Galungan-Kuningan, an important BalineseHindu festival that occurs once every 210 days according to the Balinese uku calendar. Additionally, there are many smaller, informal, fluctuating networks based on proximity of residence and/or common interests. The knowledge that I gained and the people with whom I associated during my fieldwork were largely determined by my main interlocutors’ circles of friends and acquaintances. My intensive contact with these networks, my attendance at Balinese public performances, and my in-depth interviews with leftist political refugees from the 1960s generated rich and divergent ethnographic material. Throughout this book, I engage with the most dominant concepts, practices, and concerns of Balinese subaltern citizens in the Netherlands without implying that being Balinese and living Balineseness (kebalian) in Dutch post-coloniality are thereby exhausted. This study falls outside of the epistemological scope of quantitative studies of ‘well versus poorly integrated’ immigrants (Vermeulen and Penninx 2001; Van Amersfoort and Van Niekerk 2006; Mugge 2011), which I see as an approach that a priori

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perceives migrants in light of criminality and cultural difference or as people who need to be ‘fixed’ (that is, integrated6) and whose culture is a barrier to integration (Bovenkerk 1990). While my methodological approach is firmly based in ethnography that values qualitative methods, it is important to say that in all spheres of public and private life, Balinese people are never associated with criminality – indeed, quite the opposite is the case. Balinese culture is without exception referred to in the celebratory light of exoticism, and Balinese people are perceived as well-meaning, peace-loving, smiling Hindus who were victims of radical Indonesian Islam. During my research, numerous Dutch partners, in-laws, neighbours, and acquaintances repeatedly stressed to me that Balinese people are not migrants (even if this was the case in legal terms). They made this statement in order to make a distinction between Balinese people and migrants associated with criminality and failed cultural integration. Nevertheless, as my detailed ethnographic material demonstrates, being Balinese in Dutch post-coloniality is situated in manifold modalities of pedagogical citizenship and trained intimacy. As this book closely follows the narratives of my interlocutors, I insist on the importance of understanding interlocutors’ articulations of their subjective selves as socially and historically constituted responses to being subaltern citizens and part of multiethnic and multiracial families in Dutch post-coloniality. My usage of the terms ‘multiethnic’ and ‘multiracial’ is primarily guided by my ethnographic material, where labels used for self-identification range from ‘Balinese’ and ‘Balinese with Javanese parentage’ to Dutch nationals with Danish, Spanish, Italian, Indies, or German backgrounds who identified themselves as Dutch, while most of the children from these unions identified themselves as ‘Dutch with a Balinese parent’ and occasionally ‘Indo’.7 Thus, the terms ‘multiethnicity’ and ‘multiraciality’8 provide a space for specificities and yet are broad enough to incorporate divergent self-identifications based on histories of mobility. Like my interlocutors, I try to think through rather than between Bali and the Netherlands. Thus, my analysis is translocal,9 building on anthropologi6 Essed and Trienekens (2008) as well as Essed and Nimako (2006) provide a particularly insightful criticism on policy-driven research that favours quantitative outcomes over qualitative ones and approaches the integration of immigrants in unproblematic terms. See also Rath (2001). 7 Indo is the term most commonly used by descendants of Indies people. 8 For a detailed discussion about multirace, see Haritaworn (2012). 9 Theories of transnationalism arise as important critiques of the concept of ‘rootednesses’, a term denoting the understanding that there is a firm relationship between identity and territory

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cal scholarship that gives attention to the translocal cultural processes and power relations that are often neglected in debates about globalization. This book contributes to a line of anthropological scholarship that takes translocality as an analytical strategy best suited for the ethnographic actualities that scholars discuss (Marion 2005; Peleikis 2003; Boellstorf 2005; Grewal 2005; Argenti and Röschenthaler 2006; Zhan 2009; Gottowik 2010). The concept of translocality offers an important critique of transnationality, which tends to be too focused on nation-states and national boundaries. A translocal perspective captures the varied and contradictory effects of interconnectedness between places and people. Furthermore, focusing on translocality has the potential to overcome a non-Eurocentric understanding of historical interactions and to approach them instead as processes of ‘entanglement and interconnectedness’ (Freitag and von Oppen 2010: 1). Drawing on this scholarship, my analytical orientation draws on the relations and processes on which claims to post-colonial intimacy and ‘shared heritage’ are sustained.

Foreigners, Foreignness, and the Post-Colonial State The early 2000s in the Netherlands was marked by the rise of the populist politician Pim Fortuyn (who was assassinated in 2002), who referred to Islam as a ‘backward’ religion and to multiculturalism as a ‘Trojan horse’ the Dutch had invited into their own society. In the midst of Fortuyn’s campaign, Balinese dancer Ni Wayan Sukerti was frequently photographed at Fortuyn’s public appearances as an example of a foreigner who was not seen as threatening to Dutch society.10 As this book demonstrates, we do not need to see a Balinese dancer at the centre of right-wing political campaigns to understand how Balinese subaltern citizens see themselves and are perceived by others – as foreigners far removed from public discourses of (e.g. Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Malkki 1992). These theorizations are primarily concerned with processes of de-territorialization and emerged as a critique of ideas of spatially bound communities (Appadurai 2003; Hannerz 1996). However, more recent studies have drawn scholarly attention to the re-emergence of ethno-nationalist movements and claims to territorialized belonging (Geschiere 2009), urging us to think in translocal terms. 10 Balinese dancer Ni Wayan Sukerti was born and raised in the colonial Dutch East Indies and is supported by and often featured with Pans Schomper. A prolific writer of colonial memories and a participant in the Indo-Dutch cultural landscape, she was featured with Schomper at the Pasar Malam in 2004 next to the enlarged picture of the two of them with Pim Fortuyn. See http://home.kpn.nl/niwayansukerti20/prive12groot.htm

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problematic migrants. Careful attention to how Balinese people navigate their personal and collective notions of kebalian provides important insights into how notions of historical and contemporary (dis)continuities are generated.

Corrective Citizenship: Foreigners and Technologies of Cultural Integration The Netherlands has long been viewed as a country of tolerance, and for many years it cultivated a strong multicultural orientation. This began to change with the rapid weakening of the welfare state towards the end of the twentieth century, which shifted the multiculturalist tendency to relegate ethnic minorities to separate ‘ethnic worlds’ towards the ideal of civic integration and migrants’ active participation in civic institutions (Joppke 2007: 249). The move towards cultural integration began in the late 1980s when transnational families of mainly Turkish and Moroccan descent began to be characterized as ‘on the verge of social disintegration’ and were perceived to pose a major threat to the already weakened Dutch welfare state. These concerns subsequently led to the establishment of a novel categorization for non-ethnically Dutch citizens. The category of allochtoon (plural: allochtonen) was introduced in 1989 as part of the Minorities Policy and was adopted as a common term to identify ‘those who are not originally from here’, in contrast to ‘autochthonous’ people (autochtoon), meaning indigenous, native, or authentic. Allochtoon is, however, distinguished from vreemdeling (alien), which is used to denote those who do not have Dutch citizenship. Allochtonen have Dutch citizenship, but they and their children remain allochtonen. A citizen is considered allochtoon as long as one of his or her parents is foreign born. Note, however, that the offspring of an ethnic white Dutch diplomat or expatriate born and partly raised overseas are not considered allochtonen (Essed and Trienekens 2008). The categorization allochtoon thus reproduces cultural hierarchies and racial thinking. This regulation of ethnic minorities, driven by the presumed probability of immigrants’ dependency on the welfare system, makes a further distinction, namely between rich and poor allochtonen. The category overig arm (remaining poor) consists of first- and second-generation migrants from Turkey, Morocco, Eastern and Southern Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as Central and South America. Overig rijk (remaining rich) includes those from North and Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the former Dutch East Indies (Denktas 2001: 4).

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In 1998, the Dutch government introduced a new set of policies known as integration programmes (inburgeringsprogrammas) implemented through civic integration courses (inburgeringscursussen) which are still in operation today. The word inburgering contains the word burger (meaning ‘citizen’), but note that this does not refer to the legal status of being a citizen but rather to a set of values, norms, and skills that must be adopted by those seeking to become Dutch citizens. These programmes are fully subsidized by the state, and newcomers can be required to sign a contract with the Dutch government that obliges them to attend a course that takes up a total of 600 hours (Vermeulen and Penninx 2001: 22). Besides information on the Netherlands’ demographics, national history, constitution, and political parties, particular attention is paid to the importance of learning the Dutch language; understanding Dutch values ascribed to everyday sociality; and adopting family norms, gender relations, and appropriate pedagogical methods to be applied in childrearing, employment, and work ethics. This is done through the visual representation of an immigrant who is completely oblivious to Dutch and Western values, thus positioning a non-Western immigrant in opposition to modern Western subjects. Since the late 1990s, the discourse surrounding these ‘common norms and values’ as measures towards which non-Western allochtonen need to progress has entered the sphere of everyday life. The fact that Western allochtonen are not required to take integration courses upon moving to the Netherlands reflects the understanding that citizens of those nations are not only well off but also possess adequate cultural and social competency to allow them to avoid being categorized as problematic foreigners. These changes have raised concerns that Dutch national self-representations are becoming predominantly homogenous and monocultural (Duyvendak 2004; Duyvendak et al. 2009). Furthermore, the 2005 Law on Integration from Abroad made the granting of a provisional residence permit (machtiging tot voorlopig verblijf – MVV) to family migrants conditional upon their demonstration of a sufficient level of knowledge of Dutch language and society. The Netherlands was the first country in the world to introduce such integration requirements for foreign family members and thus became the country with the most restrictive family migration policies in the European Union. The tests are conducted through an oral exam at a Dutch Consulate which does not provide courses itself but offers practice packs for purchase (Groenendijk 2005; Groenendijk et al. 2007). The perceived need to protect the integrity of the Dutch ethnic identity has resulted in the regulation of family reunification in the case of nonWestern migrants, leading to the inclusion of those foreign family members

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who are viewed as ethnically similar to the autochthonous Dutch and the segregation of those who are not. Furthermore, the Civic Integration Act, introduced in 2007, requires not only new migrants (nieuwkomers) but also permanent residents who are non-Western allochtonen (oudkomers) to successfully pass the latest civic integration course, allowing state institutions to identify, mobilize, and police the country’s entire permanent resident population in order to determine who needs to undergo the integration exam regardless of the number of years they have lived in the Netherlands as permanent residents. Balinese people who as oudkomers have had to take the course and the integration exam rarely speak about it, but when they do they use language that expresses disappointment, frustration, and a sense of shame at having been singled out. This is also seen as a failure on the part of the ethnic Dutch spouse and extended Dutch family to facilitate their non-ethnically Dutch family member integration into Dutch society. These uncommon but highly shameful events are examples par excellence of situations in which Balinese claims to the status of ‘best-of-all-the-rest’ within the matrix of foreignness in the Netherlands fail. The possibility of such a failure is a source of collective anxiety and a main motivating force for the perceived need to continuously authenticate oneself as being Balinese – that is, an active long-distance cultural specialist of Balinese culture who is agreeable, peace-loving, anti-Islamic, and fluent in Dutch. Lauren Berlant has pointed out that citizenship is a relationship among strangers who, through training in politicized intimacy, learn how to claim a common identity based on shared legal, historical, and familial geopolitics (2007: 37). While the aspects of trained intimacy are central for both autochthonous and allochthonous subjects, in the Dutch context it has particular significance for the latter, as they are obliged to undergo normative pedagogies of citizenship through civic integration courses which train new migrants and re-train old migrants and permanent residents away from what is perceived as ‘backward’ and ‘ignorant’ outsiders towards the goal of becoming acculturated ‘insiders’. Scholars (e.g. Seidman et al. 1999) have convincingly argued that the liberal conception of good citizenship requires that citizens’ autonomy be understood as independence, hard work, commitment to monogamy, family values, economic self-sufficiency, and consumption. In this book, I build on Berlant’s notion of citizenship as a trained intimacy not so much to talk about specific state policies that are designed to train and retrain migrants into becoming acceptable subjects but to chart how Balinese subaltern citizens actively employ what I refer to as post-colonial pedagogies as an active, didactic process of authentication. This process relies on the understanding of the self as a long-distance

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cultural specialist who engages in the production of Balineseness as a specific kind of belonging to the internationally celebrated Balinese culture and, in so doing, positions oneself above migrants who are perceived to be troublemakers. These engagements are simultaneously central to Balinese practices of home-building and of feeling at home in post-colonial Dutch society. Balinese post-colonial pedagogies are a specific form of knowledge production informed by the biopolitics of otherness (Fassin 2001) but not overtly determined by them. The issues of foreignness and otherness in relation to the migrant population have been on the agenda of scholarly inquiry for some time, particularly in relation to refugees and asylum seekers. Building on the Foucauldian analysis of a suffering body, Didier Fassin coins the term ‘biopolitics of otherness’ to argue that ‘the body has become the site of inscription for the politics of immigration’ (2001: 4). The body politics of disadvantaged groups have been discussed in different ways by Arendt (1958), Agamben (1998), and Fassin (2001), but my intention here is not to discuss the suffering body but to examine the complex interplay of processes of inclusion and exclusion through practices of ‘othering’ – produced through the institutionalized apparatus of the nation-state and the ways in which allochthonous and autochthonous subjects articulate and produce otherness both through conformity and subversion. I am interested in examining how these practices are connected to the textures of everyday experiences and how an examination of the everydayness of allochthony allows us to see processes of otherness as they emerge outside of the extreme circumstances of marginalization experienced by asylum seekers and refugees. Far from being of lesser significance, allochthonous citizens’ everyday experiences of otherness provide insights into its pervasiveness. Furthermore, this book scrutinizes how Balinese people create and imagine their own hierarchies of otherness in these processes through interpretations of other cultural aesthetics, religiosity, processes of racialization, and everyday sociality.

Citizens with a Background in the Dutch Former Colonies Dutch debates about foreigners and the related crises of national identity and multiculturalism are primarily focused on Dutch citizens of Muslim faith (Scheffer 2000a, 2000b, 2007; Buruma 2006; Sniderman and Hagendoorn 2007) rather than on those who came (at various stages) from the former Dutch colonies. Thus, those labelled as most problematic have no historical connections with the former Dutch East Indies (Boehmer and

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Gouda 2012: 26; Oostindie 2012: 43).11 Following the trend in public policy and political and scholarly debates about ‘immigrant integration’, Hans van Amersfoort and Mies van Niekerk have attempted to determine to what extent a particular colonial history leads to migrants’ success – or failure – in integrating (Van Amersfoort and Van Niekerk 2006). While scholarly and popular debates about the crisis of Dutch national identity do not specifically refer to immigrants from the former colonies, this specific social and political climate brought about a ‘history turn’ in the Netherlands and with it extensive scholarly studies about Dutch colonialism and citizens with backgrounds in the colonial Dutch East Indies. It is important to stress that all of the studies were generously funded by the Dutch state research resources12 and mainly focused on the former Dutch East Indies, which scholars have argued (Boehmer and Gouda 2012: 26-27) stands as a source of pride in Dutch national memory, being remembered as a model colony. For a discussion about Balinese subaltern citizens in the Netherlands, it is necessary to introduce into Dutch post-coloniality what I refer to as the Indies cultural landscape. Indies immigrants from the Dutch East Indies who arrived after Indonesia’s independence was granted to Indonesia in 1949 have continuously been celebrated as a model minority (Boehmer and Gouda 2012; Pattynama 2000), regardless of the initial discrimination and difficulties in finding employment and in adjusting socially they experienced. Paradoxically, while the history of the colonial Dutch East Indies has never occupied a significant place in the formal history curriculum of the Dutch education system (Pattynama 2000; Gouda 1995), the Dutch media has been saturated with fiction films, TV series, documentaries, and travel and fiction writing about the former colony since the early 1960s (Pattynama 2000, 2012). Similarly, several major and many regional museums have significant collections of art and artefacts from the Dutch East Indies alongside numerous private collections of people who themselves or whose relatives once lived in the Dutch East Indies. In the late 1950s, people of Indies descent started organizing regular pasar malam (night market) events across the country, creating a cultural landscape in which the geographical places and cultures of the former colony were far from foreign.

11 Dutch historical surveys about ethnic minorities offer lengthy reviews about migrants from the former colonies (Lucassen and Penninx 1994; Obdeijn and Schrover 2008; Laarman 2013). 12 This discussion is beyond the scope of this book. For more information, refer to Bosma, Raben, and Willems 2006; Bosma 2009; Van Leeuwen 2008; Oostindie 2012; Legêne 2011.

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Terms of Discussion: Foreignness and Intimacy in PostColoniality To the best of my knowledge, this book is the first and only extensive discussion about Balinese diasporic formations and the production of kebalian overseas.13 I arrive at the notion of diasporic formations drawing on scholarship that approaches diasporas as sites where ‘new geographies of identity’ (Lavie and Swedenburg 1996) are negotiated across multiple terrains of belonging, creating what Avtar Brah (1996) calls a ‘diaspora space’. Based on detailed ethnographic analysis, this book develops the notion of post-colonial intimacy and offers a new perspective on how ‘shared heritage’ might be understood as an integral part of Balinese homing practices in Dutch post-coloniality. Before I turn my focus to these post-colonial intimacy and home-building practices, it is important to situate my approach within the broader field of post-colonial debates. Some scholars have approached the ‘colonial and post-colonial world’ not as geographical locations but rather as historical epochs (Memmi 1991; Fanon 1963; Bhabha 1994). In my view, seeing post-colonialism in a simplistic, chronological sense is highly problematic, primarily because of its universalizing attempts to grasp a variety of colonial histories as inadequate temporalities and to make colonialism a marker of historical difference (McClintock 1995; Hall 1996a; Ahmed 2000). My approach to post-colonialism owes much to Sara Ahmed’s insistence that post-colonialism should be seen as a set of complex and changing relationships between present and historical encounters (2000: 11) – in this case, between Balinese and Dutch people. I look at how these are understood, interpreted, appropriated, and enacted in the practice of everyday life. Balinese subaltern citizens’ daily encounters evoke and reopen colonial histories and the unequal power relations within them, continuously producing and subverting imaginations of people and places. These interwoven past-present relationships inform everyday and future claims to intimacy and proximity. In this way, postcolonialism is about the complex relationships between the past and the present, European colonization, and contemporary forms of globalization. As Frankenberg and Mani (1996) have argued, the ‘post’ in post-colonial does not stand for ‘after’ but instead ‘mark[s] spaces of ongoing contestation enabled by decolonization’ (1996: 275). This approach to post-colonialism allows for the analysis of how colonial encounters resonate in the present 13 Bagus’ 1998 MA thesis analyzes ‘Balinese-Australian’ marriage practices through the lens of acculturation in Bali and multiculturalism in Melbourne, Australia.

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but does not overtly determine them.14 Equally instructive here is Inderpal Grewal’s discussion (2005) about ‘transnational connectivities’, which she develops in order to re-historicize transnationalism. Her specific concern is in emphasizing multiple processes of knowledge production which move through webs of connections ‘along historicized trajectories’ (2005: 22). This is important, as it avoids the pitfalls of seeing colonialism and postcolonialism through the lens of radical rupture. In this book, I offer a framework for the conceptualization of postcolonial intimacy. Intimacy is varied and can stand as both associations and familiarity with people, places, and things but it can also be a synonym for sexual relationships. A good example of a study of intimacy chiefly associated with sexual relations in or outside of the conjugal setting (and not problematized any further) is a collection entitled Intimacies: Love and Sex Across Cultures (2008) edited by anthropologist William Jankowiak. Another example is British sociologist Anthony Giddens’ The Transformation of Intimacy (1992), in which he analyzes intimacy between partners as the pinnacle of modernity. As a transformation of ‘romantic’ to ‘confluent’ love, Giddens associates intimacy primarily with autonomy and trust between two individuals and completely neglects the possibility that intimacy can be convoluted and tension-ridden. Taking intimacy to the cultural sphere, anthropologist Michael Herzfeld conceptualizes ‘cultural intimacy’ as a counterpoint to official nationalism. In his seminal work Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (2005), Herzfeld stresses the centrality of ‘rueful self-recognition’ (2005: 6) as much as ambiguities and tensions, within what Benedict Anderson refers to as the ‘imagined community’ of a nation. Herzfeld defines ‘cultural intimacy’ as ‘the recognition of those aspects of cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality’ (Herzfeld 2005: 3). The crucial point in his conceptualization of intimacy is the presence of an outsider whose opinion is vital in determining the value of the ‘common sociality’. Herzfeld focuses his conceptualization of cultural intimacy on the example of the Greek government’s attempt to ban the breaking of plates in restaurants frequented by tourists. The argument was that this practice was not only ‘not Greek’ but also humiliating for some Greeks, who had to accept that Northern European tourists perceived this practice as quintessentially Greek. Thus, Herzfeld argues, breaking plates becomes a 14 Mercer (1988) refers to diaspora’s ‘syncretic dynamic’ as set in motion by de-colonization and global migration, in the aftermath of post-colonization/de-colonization.

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site of cultural intimacy for Greeks in relation to tourist observers, wherein the intimacy that emerges through self-recognition is decidedly Greek (Herzfeld 2005). In the 2005 revised edition of his book, which was originally published in 1997, Herzfeld broadened the scope of the concept of ‘cultural intimacy’ to emphasize its dynamic rather than static qualities and to argue for geographical plasticity rather than a strong focus on the nationstate. These revisions are highly relevant to my discussion of Balinese post-colonial intimacy. Rather than being conf ined to one particular nation-state at one particular time, the post-colonial intimacy discussed in this book is produced across colonial and post-colonial places and temporalities. Following Herzfeld’s argument that ‘[c]ultural intimacy is about alternative discourses – whether at the level of semantics … or of outward expression’ (2005: 54), I explore how claims to intimacy and proximity in the Balinese-Dutch context draw on Balinese understandings of historical agency and the tension-ridden sense of intimacy and proximity to the former colony. An approach to intimacy that goes beyond a narrow understanding of conjugal relations and intimacy, separated from their tension-ridden aspects, has been advanced by literary and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant (1998). For Berlant, intimacy is not only full of ambiguity but also belongs to the public rather than the private sphere. Intimacy in society, she argues, is ‘founded on the migration of intimacy expectations between the public and the domestic’ (1998: 284). For Berlant, intimacies create social, national, political, cultural, familial, and sexual spaces that define and constrain what forms of relationships and subjectivities are perceived as legal, viable, and ethical. In line with this, it is important to say that processes of otherness are also processes of intimation, which Svetlana Boym (1998: 499) convincingly argues does not stand in opposition to uprootedness but is rather constituted by it in the diasporic context. My aim here is not to work towards an analytical definition of intimacy in addition to those outlined above but rather to explore the divergent degrees of distance and proximity to the colonial that Balinese subaltern citizens employ in generating forms of knowledge and familiarity between the self and others in time and place. Through the ethnography of such engagements, I hope to map out the changing notion of kebalian and what it means to feel at home as a Balinese person and collectivity in Dutch post-coloniality. Building on the definitions outlined above, my aim is to further develop an understanding of post-colonial intimacy as generated

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by subaltern citizens. I recognize post-colonial intimacy as a relationship of proximity and mutuality between Balinese and Dutch people rather than as a relationship which demarcates Balinese people as those with extremely limited power (the colonized/migrants and allochthonous citizens) and Dutch people as those with the ultimate power (the colonizers/ autochthonous citizens). If the notion of post-colonial intimacy is a complex reification of claims to proximity and mutuality between the Balinese and the Dutch during colonialism, it is also a reaction to current debates about foreigners and foreign practices perceived as ultimately in disagreement with Dutch cultural values. Thus, post-colonial intimacy here stands in opposition to the imaginary figure of the undesirable migrant of Muslim faith but also to that of the most recent migrants from the Antilles and Afro-Suriname who are similarly designated as problematic (for a discussion of the latter, see Van Amersfoort and Van Niekerk 2006). Balinese claims to intimacy and proximity would not be durable or even possible without an active appreciative engagement by those with whom the intimacy is claimed – the Dutch. While a discussion about Dutch collective memory of the Dutch East Indies is beyond the scope of my current discussion, it is important to stress again that the Dutch cultural landscape has a long and rich Indies tradition and has produced a sphere in which the geographical places and cultures of the former colony are far from foreign. In order to tackle these questions, it is useful to turn to Alison Landsberg’s notion of ‘prosthetic memory’ (1995). Interested in ‘memories of events through which one did not live’, Landsberg advances the notion of prosthetic memory wherein mediated memories are crucial in constituting subjectivities in the present. In the Dutch postcolonial context, it is useful to include ongoing public representations of cultures and people from the former colony through festivals and the visual and performing arts. These events – organized mainly by people of Indies and Dutch descent whose ancestors once lived in the Dutch East Indies – are attended by many and serve processes of intimation whereby the cultural landscapes of the former colony and present-day Indonesia are continuously inscribed into the contemporary Dutch cultural landscape. In a broad sense, they serve the process of internalization, and thus normalization, of the wider Indonesian cultural aesthetic. Thus, I argue, in order to understand Balinese subaltern citizens’ production of post-colonial intimacy in Dutch post-coloniality, it is not enough to look only at current geopolitics (Jansen 2009) and how migrant populations are both regulated by them and rely on them for self-positioning; we must also pay attention to historically based connectivities.

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‘Shared’ Heritage The issue of national identity and colonial heritage are deeply contested in the Netherlands and have been on the political and research agenda since the late 1990s.15 In general, they have been referred to as ‘common’, ‘shared’, or ‘mutual’ heritage, and ‘heritage overseas’ (Fienieg at el. 2009: 26). In the mid-1990s, the Dutch government began to create a political infrastructure to ensure the funding of projects that would help the preservation of Dutch colonial heritage. The term ‘common’ was adopted to describe policies that encompassed joint conservation by the Dutch state and other nation-states in which such heritage was located (ibid.: 24). Starting from the presumption that cultural heritage from the Dutch colonial period was formed under reciprocal cultural influence, it was assumed that the nation-states listed as priorities in the project by the Dutch (such as Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Brazil, and Ghana) would have similar attitudes and interests (ibid.: Oostindie 2009). ‘Shared heritage’ as discussed in this book is not related to the Dutch Common Cultural Heritage Policy (DCCH), although that policy is discussed in chapter three of this book. Chapter three examines the DCCH-funded exhibition entitled Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past, with a focus on how it was received by Balinese subaltern citizens and how it played an important role in the configuration of kebalian. Not being familiar with the DCCH or its policy objectives, my interlocutors made their own claims to shared heritage that were not intended or even envisaged by policymakers. As will be discussed in chapter three, a close reading of the Balinese reception of this exhibition is important, as it urges us not only to approach cultural heritage as a dynamic process but also to appreciate subaltern citizens’ claims to shared history and ensuing post-colonial intimacy. In this book, I take particular Balinese interpretations of the shared past to show how specific understandings of colonial materialities serve to authenticate post-colonial intimacy. This ethnography is firmly based on an analytical orientation towards relations and processes in which knowledge is produced through anticipated connectivities but also through disjunctures and the surprising linkages and associations people make between the past and the present. While Balinese cultural narratives are couched in the language of proximity to the Dutch and saturated with 15 Funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the KITLV (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde) ran a research programme entitled ‘Migration and culture in the Dutch colonial world’ (see Oostindie 2009).

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a sense of pride and superiority over other foreigners, this is not to say that Balinese people are not aware of the various forms of inequalities, marginalization, and everyday forms of racism which surround and affect them. In order to better understand Balinese interpretative understandings of a shared colonial heritage in which they do not position themselves as colonized people with no or very limited agency, we also need to attend to the production of knowledge, realities, and fields of power that have been marginalized, discarded, or, in Foucault’s words, ‘disqualified’ (2003).

Home and ‘Homing’ In addition to extending the notion of cultural intimacy, a key theoretical innovation in this book is thinking about the processes through which migration and life in multiethnic, multiracial families are experienced in relation to home, and how senses of home and belonging are made, reimagined, and sustained over a period of time in relation to both the individual and the collective. I build on scholarship concerned with ‘homebuilding’ for migrants of common ethnic backgrounds (Hage 1997, 2010; Olwig 2007; Korac 2009) but challenge the assumption that mobility as ‘detachment’ stands for ‘liquidity’ (Bauman 2000; Urry 2000), ‘nomadic’ identities (Braidotti 1994), or the ‘creolization’ of global culture (Hannerz 1996; Featherstone 1995). Rather, I explore how ‘roots’ and mobility do not stand in opposition to each other but are instead mutually constitutive, ongoing processes (Hall 1990, 1991; Clifford 1997; Fortier 2000; Ahmed et al. 2003; Korac 2009). Beyond Bali explores the ways in which people move in and inhabit the world as situated in historical contingencies. It also looks at the circulation of materiality through diverse social worlds and processes of moving and inhabiting the world in which national histories, objects, and the visual and performing arts are employed in processes of ‘homing’. As scholars of critical studies of diaspora and migration have shown (Clifford 1994; Brah 1996), ‘home’ in migration is not something that is left behind nor even necessarily something with which migrants can or wish to maintain an active relationship. Avtar Brah (1996: 180) refers to the ‘homing’ desire as ‘a desire to feel at home in migration’, while Ann-Marie Fortier (2003) stresses that ‘homing’ is also a longing to belong. Scholars of queer migration have importantly stressed that home in migration can be a destination rather than an origin (Fortier 2001, 2003). Seeing the notion of home and of ‘homing’ as processual allows us to explore the intricate relationships between

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senses of self, place, and belonging as imagined, shaped, and contested in different spheres of life. ‘Homing’ contains notions of working out, thinking, articulating, arranging, and dealing with divergent modalities of being and feeling at home in migration. If we think of my Balinese interlocutors as actively navigating their way through the major social transformations of post-colonial Dutch society by creatively dealing with the demands put forward by state policies that regulate integration, we arrive at a dynamic understanding of the post-colonial one that is not commonly found in analyses of public discourses about immigrants or integration policies. Importantly, the concept of ‘homing’ having processual qualities, therefore emphasizes Balinese interlocutors’ active, creative, and ongoing engagements with the many different values, imaginaries, and histories associated with Bali, Indonesia, and Balinese visual and performing arts. In a broad sense, colonial histories are actively appropriated to serve processes of ‘homing’ in the present. The concept of ‘homing’ thus enables us to recognize agency without uncritically adopting a notion either of individual or cultural autonomy, or of complete freedom, or indeed of the fixed constraints posed by the structures of power within which people live.

‘Menjajah kota den Haag’ – Colonizing the City of The Hague Geographically situated in the centre of the Randstad (a conurbation consisting of the four largest cities in the Netherlands: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht), the Dutch city of The Hague has the highest number of Balinese people in all of the Netherlands. Since 2010, when a group of Balinese people formed a gamelan orchestra and began rehearsing regularly in the Indonesian Embassy in The Hague, the city has become a regular site of sociality for Balinese people living all over the country.16 The social gatherings that take place around the city are often captured in photographs and distributed via social media, thus providing insights into Balinese social gatherings in the Netherlands for friends and 16 Since the nineteenth century, high-level civil servants from the Dutch East Indies used to spend their leave and holidays in The Hague. Following the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies, a sizable Indies population settled in The Hague, and many streets in the city were named after places in the Dutch East Indies. In Indies popular culture, the city is often referred as ‘the widow of the Indies’ (den haag weduwe van indie), and a well-known Indies singer and performer Wieteke van Dort has a song with the same title. See https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RfbTNVrMlfw

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family members living in Bali and across other Balinese diasporic spaces. These images are often accompanied with the caption, ‘colonizing the city of The Hague’ (Menjajah kota den Haag) and followed by a long thread of similar comments. This very specific reference to the colonial history stresses the physical presence of Balinese people in the Netherlands and shows an intention to actively invest in shaping Dutch post-coloniality. The phrase ‘colonizing the city of The Hague’ captures Balinese people’s understanding of themselves as subaltern citizens with historical agency but also highlights their limitations in the present. My ethnographic material leads me to engage with historically situated subjective interpretations of the self and ways of being in the world. Drawing on Foucauldian frameworks of subjectification (2000), my interest is in how subject positions and subjectivities, as lived experiences that are culturally and historically specific,17 are embraced and lived in relation to the experience of life in migration as well as to the production of Balinese cultural aesthetics and engagement in the commemoration of colonial atrocities in Dutch post-coloniality. Of further importance for my analysis is Stuart Hall’s classical approach to identities as constantly produced and reproduced through transformation and differentiation (see Hall 1990, 1991; Hall and Du Gay 1996). Thus, identities and selfhood are relational and emerge through contested and fluid processes: Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformations. Far from being externally fixed in some essentialist past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. (Hall 1990: 225)

Beyond Bali is a case study on how subjectivities come to be through complex processes of ‘articulation’. My approach to articulation follows Hall (1985), who defines ‘articulation’ as: […] a connection or link which is not necessarily given in all cases, as a law or a fact of life, but which requires particular conditions of existence to appear at all, which has to be positively sustained by specific processes, which is not ‘eternal’ but has constantly to be renewed, which can under some circumstances disappear or be overthrown, leading to the old linkages being dissolved and new connections – re-articulated – being forged. It is also important that an articulation between different practices does 17 See also Boellstorff 2005.

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not mean that they become identical or that the one is dissolved into the other. Each retains its distinct determinations and conditions of existence. However, once an articulation is made, the two practices can function together, not as an ‘immediate identity’ … but as ‘distinctions within a unity’. (1985: 113-114)

In a similar vein, Diane M. Nelson (1999), inspired by Hall, employs the notion of articulation in order to discuss relations that create new identifications and social connections. Building on this scholarship, my analysis approaches the process of articulation as a pursuit of meaningful subject positions; as ways of making sense, of making one’s home, and of feeling at home. In this way, processes of articulation foreground both the struggles and the pleasures involved in home-making processes in Dutch post-coloniality. My ethnographic material also urges me to incorporate into my analysis ‘person-object’ relationships which, as scholars have shown, have been crucial for migrant populations throughout history (Parkin 1999). In his critique of Foucault’s humanist philosophy, Bruno Latour (1993) proposes an approach that focuses on ‘non-human actors’, wherein tangible objects of different kinds are considered to have agency and can act in their own right, beyond what human beings might project onto them. Giving primacy to the objects in their critique of social constructivism, the actor network theory tends to completely devalue the usage of language, interpretation, and the subjective (see also Navaro-Yashin 2009, 2012). My employment of Foucault’s philosophy, which centres on subjects and subjectivities, and Latour’s and the actor network theory’s ‘object-centred’ philosophy might seem in opposition to each other. However, the analysis of my ethnographic material makes sense only if we adopt Navaro-Yashin’s position that ‘[o]bjects are … qualified through language. They could be neither pre- nor post-linguistic. Nor could they be non-symbolic.’ (2009: 9). Similar to Navaro-Yashin’s ethnography of Northern Cyprus (2012), my ethnographic data urges me not to make a sharp distinction between subject and subjectivities on the one hand and objects on the other but to use both approaches together in the service of a productive analysis of the ethnographic material at hand.

1

Kebalian, Long-Distance Nationalism, and the Balinese Left in Exile

Early Saturday morning on 24 January 2004, I took a tram to Slotermeer, a neighbourhood located in the western part of Amsterdam. For the first time in my fieldwork, I was on my way to attend the Galungan-Kuningan, a pan-Balinese festival that takes place once every 210 days according to the Balinese uku calendar.1 This festival celebrates the victory of virtue (dharma) over evil (adharma). In Bali, celebrations of Galungan-Kuningan take place at all temples, accompanied with particularly rich offerings. Galungan is the first day of the ten-day festival during which it is believed that deities and ancestral spirits descend to earth to be honoured and to receive gifts. The tenth day, known as Kuningan, is devoted to honouring the ancestral spirits. On Kuningan, special food is prepared, such as yellow rice (kuning), and new decorations are placed around the house, together with elaborate offerings. The focal part of the ceremony, besides prayers and elaborate offerings, is the communal slaughtering of pigs and the consumption of lawar – a cooked mixture of vegetables, spices, and pig’s blood. The celebration in Bali is accompanied by numerous Barong performances. Leo Howe (1980: 234) observes that Galungan is a bhuta yadnya – a sacrifice for demonic forces. Unlike in Bali, where the celebration runs for ten days, in Amsterdam it took place on one day over a weekend. This year it was on a Saturday, on the day of Kuninga, and was organized in a small building hired from a primary school in the suburb of Slotermeer on the day of Kuningan. The small building, commonly used for school celebrations and community events, consisted of one large room where, for the purpose of the festival, the Balinese people had built a portable altar, a kitchen, and a smaller area to serve as a changing room. This was an event organized by Banjar Suka Duka that was not publicly advertised but was open for non-Balinese attendees as long as they followed a dress code to allow them to participate in the Balinese-Hindu ceremony. Arriving at the venue, I paid the €12.50 entrance fee and was immediately instructed to proceed to the dressing room in order to change into a kebaya (blouse) and sarong (wrap-around skirt). The small room was crowded with large bags packed with attire for the ceremony, plastic flowers resembling those that grow in Bali, and make-up. Women, 1 The Balinese calendric system is complex and consists of several different calendars and conjunctions. For a detailed description, see Goris (1960: 114-129).

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men, and children were conversing loudly and debating how to tie up their sarongs over their bulky winter trousers and how to put the delicately made kebayas on top of the warm jumpers we were all wearing. Many Balinese attendees brought additional garments they planned not to wear themselves but to give to their extended family members and friends who did not have the necessary attire to allow them to attend the ceremony. The proper outfit for women consisted of a sarong¸ a kebaya, a sabuk (belt), and a selendang (a sash to go over the kebaya). For the men, it was a baju (shirt with sleeves), a sarong, a saput (over-skirt), an umpal (sash), and an udeng (head cloth). While keeping our winter clothes on was necessary because of the cold, the additional clothing significantly constrained our movements and created much laughter and joking. Many people took pictures, planning to send them to their families in Bali as a visual confirmation of Balinese tradisi baru (new traditions). Once appropriately dressed, I accompanied my friend Ibu Komang to the main room where two elderly men were working on the portable altar with the help of several younger men. A number of women were busily putting final touches on their banten offerings2 made of fresh fruits, sweets, and rice. Once the altar was ready, the offerings were respectfully placed on it, and I was invited by the women to join them in decorating the room with fresh flowers brought in abundance for the ceremony. The beginning of the celebration was scheduled for 1.30pm, and at its commencement all participants turned promptly to the main room for the welcoming words (kata sambutan) from Pak Englan, the banjar council head. This was followed by Ibu Yani’s performance of tari sambutan oleh (the welcome dance) and Pak Englan’s invitation to all guests to join in a 15-minute prayer. The welcome words and the invitation for prayer were said in Balinese. In later years, however, due to the vocal protests of Dutch spouses and children who, for the most part, do not understand Balinese or Indonesian, the event became bilingual (Balinese and Dutch). Holding printouts of the Puja Tri Sandya prayer, all attendees approached the open space in front of the altar and knelt into the prayer position. Pak Wiadnya, previously engaged in the instalment of the altar, led the prayer 2 Offerings are necessary components of Balinese-Hinduism, serving to ensure the success of a ritual. A major component of most offerings is food. Spirits and ancestors are expected to consume sari (the essence) of the offerings and consequently to reciprocate by protecting those who made them. There are five main types of offering: Dewa Yadnya for the gods and deities, Manusa Yadnya, for human beings’ life-cycle rituals, Resi Yadnya for the consecration of priests, Pitra Yadnya for the purification of the souls of the dead and for the ancestors’ spirits, and Bhuta Yadnya for demonic forces (see Howe 2001).

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and blessed the participants with holy water (which he had prepared prior to the ceremony) and rice. Following the prayer, many families took photographs in front of the altar, some of which later came to be displayed on the Banjar Suka Duka website. Three sets of Balinese dancing followed the initial prayer, starting with Tari Cendrawasih, followed by Tari Legong Kraton, and finishing with Tari oleg Tambulingan. The dances were performed by one of several Balinese dance groups who perform at various events organized by Indies people. The event was followed by an elaborate lunch with a large number of Balinese dishes brought by the attendees. The organizers were particularly proud of having a babi guling (suckling pig) and nasi kuning (yellow rice) as the most important ceremonial food for the occasion. I met many people at the event, including a number of elderly women and men, all of whom said that they had been living outside of Bali and Indonesia since the mid-1950s or 1960s. My questions about the circumstances of their migration were politely avoided and relegated to a faraway past that has not only been forgotten but was also not important. Instead, they were interested in talking about contemporary issues in Dutch society or in praising their offspring, many of whom, they considered, had become respectable Dutch citizens while still maintaining an interest in Balinese culture and religious practices. The surreptitious attitude of these elderly people was also present among more recent Balinese migrants who are members of the Balinese organization, some of whom quickly dismiss any connection with the elderly members, justifying this by the age difference. Others revealed to me, in a somewhat secretive fashion, that these elderly people were involved in ‘old politics’, possessing large libraries with forbidden books.3 Their homes, it was said, were filled with volumes on politics published in Indonesia in the period that President Sukarno was in power. Some asserted that these collections contained video material in addition to books, including footage of political speeches given by the president. While some were confused as to how these people were able to be in possession of these materials after so many years in exile, this was also ascribed to their complicated migratory trajectories and somewhat mysterious access to secret books and documents. My curiosity about the titles and contents of these books remained unabated as many argued that these books and videos had to be kept locked up and that ordinary library visitors were not allowed to use them. The elderly attendees’ interest in ‘old politics’, I was 3 Here, ‘forbidden’ refers to books and various other materials associated with the left that were banned in Indonesia during the New Order.

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told, derived from the fact that these people were ‘Sukarno’s students’; because they were sent to study overseas together with other Indonesians during the time of President Sukarno’s government. Much later into my fieldwork, as I began to establish close relations with several key interlocutors, stories about the glorification of President Sukarno began to emerge, and I soon learned that many Balinese people not only hold political exiles in high esteem but also see the Netherlands as a place that nourished the Balinese political left. The Netherlands allowed exiles not only to cultivate their political views (which had been persecuted in Indonesia) but also to actively participate in political activism by establishing large archival collections of the Balinese and Indonesian left. Several people who migrated to the Netherlands in the 1980s talked about the excited anticipation they felt for their migration to Holland, where they would meet with the individuals who had been exiled and were able to pursue leftist politics, unlike those who had stayed in Bali. In their narratives, the Netherlands featured as a place of promising opportunities to engage in a long-distance nationalism that would allow them to alter how the Balinese left was positioned in Balinese and Indonesian history. In other words, the residency granted to Balinese exiles after they left the former Eastern Bloc countries (where they had originally been based to study) allowed them to engage in long-distance nationalism of the left, making it an open and crucially important component of diasporic kebalian. Exiles were crucial in the formation of Banjar Suka Duka, and they continue to be positioned today as highly respected, informal leaders who often advise recent migrants in their struggles to establish the principles upon which the Balinese adat and agama should be practised outside Bali. Today, Banjar Suka Duka has around 800 adherents and gathers twice a year to celebrate Galungan-Kuningan, the largest Balinese Hindu festival. Some of the exiles have taken on the responsibility of leading prayers during Galungan-Kuningan, even though they had never been trained as priests. The celebration I attended in 2004 took place in Amsterdam, but as the organization does not have a permanent meeting place, the celebration is held in different parts of the Netherlands each year. In addition to these gatherings for Galungan-Kuningan, less formal social activities are also regularly organized by members. The organization’s name, featuring the Balinese term banjar, refers to traditional civic groups in Bali that are central to the social organization of village life there. Banjars are responsible for arranging and maintaining local public facilities and are able to request the labour of its members for

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any communal goal (Geertz and Geertz 1975; Warren 1993; Howe 2001). 4 In the migratory setting, the banjar is not a territorial organization, as adherents of Banjar Suka Duka live in different parts of the Netherlands, but the name banjar is retained to stress the group’s tendencies towards communal goals. This chapter explores how Dutch post-colonial society provided a safe and supportive environment in which the notion of kebalian could be expanded to incorporate political aspects of Balinese collective identifications. I use the Indonesian word eksil as a term used by my interlocutors interchangeably with the English term exile. Besides the term eksil, other terms used to describe these people in Balinese diasporic circles are klayaban5 and ‘Sukarno’s students’. The term ‘Sukarno’s students’, often used by non-exiles, is a contested one. For some exiles, the term is a source of pride for having participated in intellectual networks during the period of Sukarno’s government. Others resist the term, fearing that their intellectual capability might be questioned by being associated with Sukarno. In the years after the fall of Sukarno’s government in 1965-66, it was alleged by some that the scholarships the exiles received were given only to those who were politically active as prominent PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia) members rather than to those who deserved the scholarships as a result of their intellectual achievements. Many wish to stress that they were just ‘students’ and not political refugees, but due to the circumstances, they were characterized as such and, in the political climate that existed after 1965-66, they did not have many options other than remaining abroad. The doubts surrounding the intellectual capabilities of the students reflect the ongoing ramifications of the New Order stigmatization of the left wing that occurred from 1965 to 1998, during Suharto’s years as President. While my focus here is on Balinese eksils, it is important to stress that Indonesian leftist diasporic subjects belong to different ethnicities and the term eksil is used to refer to all those, regardless of their location within Indonesia, who were members, 4 Banjar organizations in Bali have been undergoing a series of changes, on the one side influenced by the Indonesian state and on the other by local dynamics within villages. Because of increasing migration from the 1970s to countries outside of Bali and Indonesia, Balinese people started organizing themselves into networks in their adopted countries. Those networks, while often bearing the name of banjar, differ widely among themselves and are adapted to be appropriate to the circumstances in the new country. 5 Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid used the term klayaban to refer to citizens who were prevented from returning to their homeland and forced to move from one country to another (Setiawan 2010).

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followers, or sympathizers of the Communist Party of Indonesia (the PKI) and who became stateless in the aftermath of 1965-66.

The Events of 1965-68 and Exilic Migratory Trajectories ‘The events of 1965-66’ refer not only to the violence and mass killings that started in Indonesia in 1965 and continued until 1968 but also to the stigmatization, marginalization, and suppression of the leftists and their sympathizers by President Suharto’s New Order government when it took control from President Sukarno in 1965 (Anderson and McVey 1971; Cribb 1990; Robinson 1995; Heryanto 2006). East Java, Central Java, and Bali were affected most severely, but as Robinson has suggested, in terms of the proportion of the population murdered, Bali was hit the hardest. From December 1965 to early 1966, approximately 80,000 people were killed, some f ive per cent of the Balinese population (Robinson 1995: 273). In Bali, the massacre was preceded by bitter clashes between supporters of the Indonesian Nationalist Party (Partai Nationalist Indonesia, PNI) who advocated the preservation of the status quo, and those of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), who called on its supporters to overthrow the caste system. According to Adrian Vickers (1989: 172), by eradicating the PKI, its enemies ‘created an unchallengeable consensus about what Balinese culture should be’. Thus, the ethnic identity discourse that was presented as consensual in official documents authored by the Balinese elite in the 1970s (which also completely excluded memories of conflict, the massacre, and the importance the PKI had in Bali) might have been, as Vickers has argued, a ‘symptom of terror’ rather than a sign of consensus. Following the killings, which constituted the biggest massacre in Indonesian history, President Sukarno was replaced by President Suharto, after which the country entered the New Order, which lasted until 1998. All Indonesian citizens were obliged to demonstrate ideological ‘cleanness’ in accordance with the authoritarianism of the Suharto regime that proclaimed the anti-communist national consensus, thus controlling the making and editing of history (Vickers and McGregor 2005). As Heryanto (1999) has argued, the New Order continued to invoke the spectre of communist subversion in order to elicit mass obedience well into the 1990s. Those who were affected directly or indirectly by the terror have since been reluctant or unable to share their memories with even close relatives (Dwyer 2004).

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Prior to the events of 1965-66, Indonesia had held a specific political orientation in the early years of independence. Through the mid-1950s, under the leadership of President Sukarno, Indonesia took on a major diplomatic role in the affairs of the Third World, occupying an important position in the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement. Simultaneously, Indonesia endeavoured to pursue a balanced foreign policy in relation to the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, and the USA. This foreign policy facilitated a rich transnational exchange across the countries of the Eastern Bloc, the USA, and the Non-Aligned Movement, allowing Indonesian students, artists, writers, and journalists to participate in numerous exchange programmes, mainly in China and the USSR (Liu 2006) but also in Albania, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam (Hill 2010a; Dragojlovic 2012a). Most of them were members of the Perhimpunam Pelajar Indonesia (PPI), a leftist student organization formed in the 1950s. While the PPI was not officially part of the PKI, it was ideologically close to it. The numerous young people who participated in these exchange programmes were expected to return to Indonesia after the completion of their studies. However, following the tragic events of 1965-66, hundreds of Indonesian citizens found themselves in uncertain circumstances as Indonesian embassies were instructed to conduct screening processes of their overseas citizens in order to determine their loyalties (Barton 2002). Those citizens who failed to demonstrate loyalty to the newly established Suharto government lost their passports and their right to return to Indonesia. In this period, the PPI networks outside of Indonesia were instrumental as a source of information and support immediately after the events of 1965-66. During the Cold War, exiles became associated with different state structures and often moved across countries of the Eastern Bloc and Non-Aligned Movement prior to permanently settling in Western European countries. As an international organization of states, the Non-Aligned Movement considered itself to be against the major power bloc of the Cold War (NATO 1949 or the Warsaw Pact 1955) and consisted mainly of countries perceived to be developing or part of the Third World.6 The Eastern Bloc referred to the communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, along with

6 The movement was founded in Belgrade (in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) in 1961 on the initiative of the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito, and Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser. Over the years, it had as many as 118 member countries and 17 observer countries.

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Yugoslavia and Albania (which ceased to be aligned with the Soviet Union after 1948 and 1960 respectively). Some of the more prominent members of the PKI in China7 created a party in exile referred to as the Delegation. The most senior PKI member abroad, Jusuf Adjitorop, became the Central Committee’s delegated authority to lead the party overseas. The Delegation attempted to play an instrumental role in monitoring and regulating the flow of information between exiles (see Hill 2010b). However, the ideological divergence and subsequent worsening of diplomatic relations between China and the USSR known as the Sino-Soviet split reached its peak in 1969 and had profound implications for Indonesian exiles’ political orientation and further mobility. Following the split, the PKI became increasingly pro-Chinese, and many exiles found themselves being pressured to choose between a Chinese or Russian orientation. Initially, the Chinese government supported the Indonesian exiles, but this changed markedly with the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and the imposition of restrictions on free movement, work permits, and exiles’ interactions with locals. The Sino-Soviet split and the Chinese Cultural Revolution caused the exiles’ position in the USSR and China to deteriorate, and many began to look for migration options in countries that would be more sympathetic to political refugees from Indonesia. The Netherlands became the country that accepted the largest number of exiles, followed by France and Sweden. In line with critical scholarship on refugees and forced migration studies (e.g. Malkki 1995, 1996; Naficy 1999), I argue that we need to attend to exilic historical agency as contextualized within the socio-political trajectories of the Cold War and the fall of President Suharto. In order to grasp the heterogeneity of the political aspirations of those Indonesian citizens who found themselves overseas, it is crucially important to stress that some people self-identified as political eksils because of their support of leftist ideas or membership and active participation in the PKI, while for others, the status of political exile was externally imposed. What these diverse groups of people had in common was their association with the Indonesian left and the former President Sukarno. Indeed, the diasporic networks and communities that were formed by these people emerged during their periods of transition from stateless subjects after 1965-66 to citizens of various countries across the world. Gradually, exilic networks and communities began to incorporate other Indonesian citizens who moved, either as temporary or permanent residents, to the countries where exiles 7 Close relations between Indonesia and China resulted in a large number of Indonesians residing in China in the early 1960s (Sukma 2004).

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were permanently based. Thus, Indonesian eksils became an important part of a wider spectrum of Indonesian diasporic subjects. Here, it is important to be reminded that the term ‘exile’, as Hamid Naficy (1999) persuasively argues, was once defined narrowly through its link to the homeland but has since been destabilized to include multiple exiles of different scales, incorporating forced and voluntary as well as internal and external exiles. As will become clear below, the mobility that is implied by the term eksil stresses the forced migration associated with estrangement but does not oppose movement, mobility, or active participation in various forms of long-distance nationalism. Instead, in the ongoing project of the Indonesian diasporic left, movement and estrangement stand as mutually constitutive factors. What is important in the case of Indonesian political eksils is to stress how the term – and thus the people recognized as such – have been politicized, and how various takes on historical events are mediated through the processes of collecting and communicating the leftist diasporic legacy.

Kebalian and Long-Distance Nationalism In mid-2009 while in the Netherlands, I visited a long-term interlocutor of mine named Pak Merta, who had been living outside of Indonesia since the early 1960s. As a young man, Pak Merta had been an economist and PKI member who worked as a public servant in Jakarta before going to East Germany on a postgraduate exchange programme. Finding himself in Germany in 1965-66 and unable to return to Indonesia, he moved between various Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War until finally settling in the Netherlands in the early 1980s, where he gained citizenship. Throughout our meetings in the early 2000s, Pak Merta always played down his involvement with the PKI in Indonesia and his participation in exilic networks. In contrast, our conversation in 2009 was quite political, largely focusing on researchers’ increased interest in the Indonesian left and his own participation in leftist activism. Pak Merta’s secretiveness in the early 2000s was almost certainly reflective of the proximity of the fall of the New Order in 1998 but might also have revealed the ongoing hope of making change within the Indonesian state, which could have been more influenced by the left. With a note of sarcasm in his voice, Pak Merta commented in 2009 on the abundance of scholarly and popular interest in the Indonesian left overseas, which was occurring at the precise moment when the leftists themselves ‘[could not] do anything … when they [were]

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sick and dying out’. When Pak Merta disclosed his party’s name to me – Komitee Indonesia – I immediately recognized it as one of the most active and prominent players in the exilic networks in the Netherlands. Together with some other eksils as well as non-Indonesians concerned with global human rights issues, Pak Merta had actively participated in various projects run by anti-New Order movements that mushroomed in the 1980s, the oldest and most prominent of which was Komitee Indonesia. Formed as a Dutch solidarity movement by Professor Wim Wertheim in 1968, Komitee attracted the active participation of a large number of exiles almost immediately. One of the more important contributions of the Komitee was its journal, Indonesie Feiten en Meningen (Facts and Opinions about Indonesia), the main aim of which was to provide information about the ‘other Indonesia’ in order to influence political opinions and decisions as well as to effect an improvement of human rights and the independence of East Timor. After the fall of the New Order government in 1998, the organization’s activity gradually declined, and its operations ceased altogether on 1 December 2000. The Komitee has, to some extent, been succeeded by the Wertheim Foundation (Wertheim Stichting), which organizes scholarly lectures and presents the annual Wertheim Award to a living Indonesian for merit in promoting freedom of speech and human rights. Gatherings organized by the Wertheim Foundation are often frequented by exiles, with some actively helping to organize its activities. These active interests and involvement in Indonesian political life stand as a form of long-distance nationalism, which scholars have referred to as a set of ethnicized identity claims and practices (such as lobbying, protesting, and contributing money) related to a nation-state that the subjects perceive as their ancestral home (Anderson 1983; Skrbis 1999; Schiller and Fouron 2001). Of course, it would be misleading to assume that all eksils were unified in their aspirations and activities, but what most of them have in common is a concern and interest in the Indonesian national project (Anderson 1999). With pride, Pak Merta also mentioned that Indonesians studying in the Netherlands often express interest in eksils and their legacy and are curious to learn more about this part of Indonesian history. In fact, Indonesia’s youth has been interested in eksils and their political and artistic endeavours for a long time. As David Hill (1993) pointed out, in the early 1990s, artist and exile Basuki Resobowo’s modest apartment in Amsterdam became ‘a place of pilgrimage’ for young Indonesian artists. The exile’s activities in the Netherlands served as a source of inspiration and guidance to Java-based political activists who, on several occasions in the early 1980s, visited exiles in Europe. In return, some of the exiles

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paid visits to political activists in Java during this period.8 This non-violent participation in the activism that led to the fall of the New Order was an important form of the long-distance nationalism in which some eksils participated. In the post-Cold War period, several of the Balinese exiles in Europe turned their efforts towards assembling the increasing number of Balinese people settling permanently in the Netherlands under the umbrella of a pan-Balinese organization. Administered under the patronage of Pak Wayan, the organization Banjar Suka Duka (meaning ‘mutual help in joy and sorrow’) was formed in 1995. Prior to this development, Balinese people had only formed smaller networks based around age, common interests, and proximity of residence. Pak Wayan owed the high respect he garnered from Balinese people to his rich political activism but also, like some other exiles, to his life-long estrangement from his homeland. As a prospective student in the late 1950s, Pak Wayan went to Albania on an Indonesian government scholarship to further his higher education in medicine. Following the events of 1965-66, he moved to China where he lived for five years before moving to the Netherlands. Shortly afterwards, Pak Wayan met and formed a close connection with Nyoman, a young Balinese man born in 1957 in the regency of Karangasem who had come to the Netherlands in 1989 to join his Dutch girlfriend. Shortly afterwards, Nyoman became Pak Wayan’s adopted son (Panah baan ngidih) and, later, the first president of Banjar Suka Duka. Nyoman remained in this position for many years, and he, Pak Wayan, and a group of their closest friends similarly had prominent roles in the institutionalization of the banjar structure. However, it was Pak Wayan’s patronage that positioned the organization under the framework of the Balinese left and stood as a formal acknowledgment and clear statement that kebalian overseas was about the open incorporation of leftist principles. While Banjar Suka Duka’s largest gatherings have never become sites of overt political activism, its loyalty to the ideologies of the left are nevertheless important. On the other hand, the lack of political activism in Banjar Bali, another Balinese network, appears to have been pivotal in its failure to gather any significant number of adherents. Formed in early 2004 on the initiative of Balinese people who had lived in different parts of Indonesia prior to coming to the Netherlands, Banjar Bali sought support from the Indonesian Embassy and organized bilingual Balinese and Dutch programmes at their gatherings. Pro-Indonesian in 8

Personal conversation with Ariel Heryanto, 5 February 2010.

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their orientation and not concerned with the history of the Balinese left, the proponents of Banjar Bali did not receive support from the exiles for their events. As a consequence, their gatherings were attended by a very small number of people – mainly the organizers’ family members and some Indonesian friends and acquaintances. By the end of the year, Banjar Bali had discontinued its activities. This dynamic appears to demonstrate that a majority of Balinese people in the Netherlands positioned themselves around the ideology of the left, even if they were not themselves politically active. In this way, Balinese debates about kebalian in Dutch post-colonial society are not only centred around the practice of agama (religion), budaya (culture), and adat (custom) but are also open to deliberations about the history of the left, the acknowledgment of their losses, and the protection of exilic collections. Banjar Suka Duka council members see the organization as pan-Balinese and egalitarian in which, in general, the adat (custom) of one local village is not preferred over that of any other village.9 While the united nature of Banjar Suka Duka is somewhat debated amongst adherents, it is important to engage with it closely in order to scrutinize the production of kebalian for the organization. Exiles and those close to them see egalitarianism as a fundamental part of Balinese culture and society. However, this approach fails to acknowledge the longstanding tensions between hierarchy and egalitarianism in Bali. These tensions, along with issues surrounding land ownership, economic inequality, inheritance rights, and the struggle between the organized political left and right, were one of the main causes of the violence of 1965-66 (Robinson 1995). Debates over egalitarianism and self-reliance as central features of kebalian in the Netherlands are developed in relation to both the Indonesian and Dutch states. For many years, Banjar Suka Duka did not want to be registered as an ethnic organization and was firm in its conviction to avoid official connections with the Indonesian Embassy. However, this underwent a dramatic change in 2010 when, with the approval of the exiles, the organization celebrated the Galungan-Kuningan festival at the Indonesian Embassy (at the expense of not serving babi guling – a pork dish central for the ceremony – in acknowledgement of Islam). In order to understand this radical shift, we must look more closely at the reasons why the exiles changed their political stance.

9 For a detailed discussion about hierarchy and egalitarianism in Southeast Asia, see Day (2002); Harms (2011); Herzfeld (2013).

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Mourning, the Aesthetics of Loss, and a Shift in Political Orientation Regardless of the numerous ways in which eksils have contributed to and participated in Indonesian political life over the years, and despite the extensive and relatively longstanding interest of young Indonesians and scholars of Indonesian studies in their lives and activities, my interlocutor Pak Merta sarcastically stated, ‘Now everybody is interested in the history of the Indonesian left.’10 There is an obvious contradiction here between the active participation of eksils in long-distance nationalism and my interlocutor’s opinion that it lacks importance. My interlocutor’s sarcasm is directed mostly at the time in which public and scholarly interest in the Indonesian left began to grow. With the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the fall of the New Order in 1998, the period of waiting for political change in which the left would play a significant part in Indonesian political life came to a close. While the leftists overseas might have inspired the political activism that brought down the New Order, and while the ideas and knowledge of leftist history became fashionable among young Indonesian intellectuals (Mohamad 2001), the left did not play a major role in Indonesia’s post-New Order governmentality.11 Crapanzano (1986) insightfully refers to waiting as a ‘passive activity’, stressing its agentic aspects. The crucial political changes across the world and in Indonesia that did not bring the left to the forefront of political life signalled the end of the period of waiting for Indonesian eksils and revealed the need for a shift in exilic political discourse and forms of action. Starting in the late 1990s and culminating in the mid-2000s, many exiles began compiling personal collections consisting of their own life narratives as well as the personal diaries, obituaries, and various other publicly known personal documents of people they knew. This was a process of exposure that coincided with increased scholarly interest in the topic. The predominant themes in many of the exilic narratives as well as media representations of them in Indonesia were those of failure, discontent, and mourning for losses suffered.12 Thus, in broad terms, the end of the period of waiting coincided with an increased representation of failure and loss. However, this did not mark the beginning of an excess of negativity or 10 Interview with Pak Merta, 12 June 2009. 11 Here, ‘governmentality’ is understood after Foucault (2000b) as a set of organized practices (techniques and rationalities) through which subjects are governed. 12 David T. Hill and I had numerous conversations on this topic in 2008 and 2009.

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mourning as pathology. On the contrary, I suggest that the ways in which the failure and loss came to be represented, narrated, and acted upon marks a shift in the agentic modality of the Indonesian diasporic left. The increased scholarly and public interest in Indonesian exilic networks and activities produced the ambiguous effects of simultaneous contentment and dissatisfaction among eksils. The dissatisfaction focused on latent interest, the main criticism being that it came at a time when Indonesian exilic networks were ‘not important’. It was a time in which eksils felt that they were powerless to change the course of Indonesian political orientation. The interest came at the end of the period of waiting, which locates the beginning of a process of public memorialization as an act of honouring the past, where memorialization is neither a monolithic nor a static process. In addition to personal documents, some eksils had collected large libraries of books about the left in general and about the Indonesian left in particular. However, access to and knowledge about these was available only to close circles of friends or to those who had sympathies for the left. The two largest collections in the Netherlands are those of Hersri Setiawan and Sarmadji Sutiyo, which have been publicly available since the late 1990s and mid-2000s respectively (see Dragojlovic 2012a). These collections, compiled over many years, were presented to the public as unique collections of the hidden history of the Indonesian left. The gradual public opening signalled the emergent representations of personal and political histories of the left in the form of a donation to the ‘truth’ of what ‘really happened’, positioning the collectors as guardians of leftist exilic memory and legacy. The two collections differ greatly in the way they were assembled, their content, their preservation processes, and representations as much as in the life histories of the two collectors. Access to these and other exilic collections coincided with the growing interest in the ‘awareness of history’ (kesadaran sejarah)13 in Indonesia. The heightened apprehension of eksils about the past and what has been lost prompts us to ask what it is precisely that exiles feel has been lost. Examining the exiles’ collections, it appears their sorrow is focused not on what the Eastern Bloc and the left were but of what they could have been – their unrealized potential. In these narratives, the left stands for a humanity that is deeply committed to equality, to what is good, rightful, and true. Concern about the decline of leftist ideas and systems in the world and the persistent conviction of the importance of equality and the correctness of the ideas of the left further contribute to exilic narratives 13 For a detailed discussion on kesadaran sejarah in Indonesia, see Strassler (2008).

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that mourn the left’s goodness and legitimacy. The sorrow stems not only from the forfeited potential for the development of the left in post 1965-66 Indonesia but also from the loss in time and historical moment for the left in the world. The mournful insistence on loss is an act of urgency to revive awareness of the rightfulness of leftist ideals and their potential to create a better and more equal society today. Exilic political thought is, however, heterogeneous, and this heterogeneity serves to contribute to the discourse of the failure of the left, depicted in a particular aesthetic of loss which is most characteristically represented in Basuki Resobowo’s paintings. Resobowo, an eksil who died in the Netherlands in the 1990s, used his canvases to reflect upon political and social life in Indonesia and upon eksils in the West.14 The frequent inclusion of textual forms in his paintings reflected notions of failure and loss. In his self-portrait, he wrote, ‘I prefer to face foes than people who claim to be comrades in the struggle but who bring dishonor’ (Hill 1993: 39). The text is simultaneously suggestive of a particular heroism in any commitment to what is right and stands to value comradeship but is also suggestive of the failure of the left to achieve ongoing loyalty and support. This concern with failure and loss in Resobowo’s self-portrait could be seen as a particular kind of aesthetics of loss – a creative take on the pain and suffering of those stripped of their citizenship and their sorrow over the lack of loyalty and honour within exilic networks and communities. With its insistence on exilic destituteness, the aesthetics of loss serves to caution against dishonour and lack of comradeship and to represent hope for a different future. Another even more dramatic representation of the exilic condition is Resobowo’s representation of the funeral of an eksil in the Netherlands. Resobowo portrays a crowd of mourners at the graveyard above which he inscribes the letters ‘PKI’, which stand for Persatuan Kematian Indonesia (Indonesian Bereavement Association) instead of Partai Komunis Indonesia (Communist Party of Indonesia) as one would expect.15 Again, this striking aesthetic depiction of loss is a visual effort to produce feelings of urgency for renewed engagement with the leftist legacy and a need for its incorporation within future knowledge formation about the Indonesian leftist diaspora. Resobowo’s emphasis on failure aims not only to contribute to the production of knowledge about exiles and the Indonesian left but also to 14 Writing about Indonesian exiles’ commemorative poems, Schaefter (2011) argues that rather than being merely eulogies, these poems stand as important sources of information on exiles’ ideologies and life trajectories. 15 See also Setiawan (2010: 17).

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provoke a discourse on the apprehension already present in journalistic and academic writing about the potential loss of the past that might become a loss of the future. The marginalization and suffering of the Indonesian left potentially stand as the heroic acts of those who, despite the hardships they have endured, have not given up on their conviction about what is right. Walter Benjamin (1969) rightly suggests that acts of mourning have the potential to establish an active relationship with the past. Narratives from Indonesian exiles about the failure of their exilic endeavours and the loss of the left thus have the potential to create tensions between past and present understandings of Indonesian history and to initiate a dialogue between the two. However, as always, no historical events are ‘true’ representations of what ‘really’ happened but rather re-imaginations constituted within the power struggle in which they occurred. The narratives of loss and failure neither deny nor stand in opposition to mobility or active participation in various forms of long-distance nationalism. Rather, they serve to position eksils within a particular kind of mobility and point in Indonesian history. They reinforce the exiles’ subjectivities as a kind that embody the memory of exclusion – not only from life in Indonesia and active participation in everyday political life but also from the memories of future generations and the national history in which leftist diasporic subjects could have held a place of respect. For exiles, estrangement from the Indonesian state was the necessary condition for the emergence of the new political and social engagements that led to their own exilic legacy. It is important to stress here that the political climate in Indonesia is still undergoing dramatic changes in regards to the formerly state-sponsored narratives of history and/or officially allowed national memory, in which all communists were constructed as evil and barbaric for their alleged role in murdering the army leadership during the events of 1965-66. Since around 2000, there has been a significant expansion in freedom of speech to talk about the events of 1965-66.16 In the light of these developments, wherein the actions of the left are not directed against the Indonesian state but towards the incorporation of the left within a broader Indonesian history, the eksils’ agreement to have Banjar Suka Duka celebrate the Galungan-Kuningan festival at the Indonesian Embassy 16 Scholars have been suggesting that there is still no determination within the government to deal with this issue at a national level, partly due to a lack of consensus about how to approach the topic of the New Order (McGregor and Hearman 2007: 360). For a more detailed discussion of the Indonesian public debate on national history, see also Hadiz 2006; Heryanto 2006; Vickers and McGregor 2005.

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in The Hague makes more sense, as a political statement of hope for ending the marginalization of the Balinese left. At the same time, for some exiles and many other Balinese people, this is a thorny issue. Apart from a wish to incorporate the left into Indonesia’s national history, Banjar Suka Duka’s closer links with the Indonesian Embassy are also related to the fact that Pak Kadek, a Balinese man who held a high position in an Indonesian Embassy in a neighbouring country for more than a decade, had informally become the new patron of Banjar Suka Duka. Pak Kadek was one of the initiators of the Balinese gamelan orchestra in the late 2000s and continues to coach it today. This initiative was accepted by the Balinese community with great enthusiasm and led to the formation of a second gamelan orchestra. Both orchestras now meet regularly for fortnightly rehearsals at the Indonesian Embassy in The Hague. The orchestras and their rehearsals have become important sites of social gatherings for Balinese people in the Netherlands. Reflecting on this, when in 2013 I asked another former exile, Pak Gede, what he thought about the celebration of the Balinese-Hindu festival in the Indonesian Embassy, he said: It is not up to me and those of my generation who are still alive to decide on the direction that Suka Duka should take. Times are changing, still they are not less difficult than before … look at how many people in Bali are getting rich by selling rice fields to foreign developers to build hotels and restaurants. Divisions between rich and poor in Bali are getting bigger every day. Good education is not valued. My wife and I helped my niece to get a university diploma in English but she couldn’t even get a job as a receptionist in a hotel in Bali. We have no connections in important places! Times are changing but Balinese mustn’t forget how important it is for them to keep their religion and tradition. I am very proud that we now have two gamelan orchestras here in the Netherlands and that people gather around them often to practice and be together. It is good the Embassy is providing Balinese people with a space and instruments for practice, but that shouldn’t be a reason why Balinese people drop important aspects of their rituals [referring to the omission of the pork-based dish, babi guling]; the Embassy is not a place where Balinese-Hindu rituals should be done.

Many of my other interlocutors shared Pak Gede’s opinion. As soon as the possibility to celebrate Galungan-Kuningan at the Indonesian Embassy arose, the Balinese community in The Hague entered several months of bitter debate that ended up breaking several friendships and producing

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a serious crisis in the community. The crisis invigorated debates over the Balinese collective ‘we’ in the Netherlands, resulting in a compromise whereby the festival was celebrated in the Indonesian Embassy but only once. After the festival, the Balinese gamelan orchestra continued to rehearse at the embassy on a regular basis and gave several performances at embassy events, including the celebration of Indonesian Independence Day. Such developments are in many ways in agreement with what exiles have been advocating for. On the one hand, there is a form of cultural association with the Indonesian Embassy through the orchestra, but on the other hand there is a refusal to compromise on Hindu-Balinese beliefs and traditions by refusing to celebrate Galungan-Kuningan at the Embassy – a place that strictly follows Muslim codes of conduct by not allowing pork to be served on its premises.

Post-Coloniality, Exiles, and Home-Making The numerous and varied ways in which exiles participate in socio-political activities point to the danger of generalizing the exilic condition and experiences which, if neglected, might diminish the richness, specificity, and locality needed for understanding exilic trajectories. The distinction between ‘home’ and ‘place of exile’ is blurred as the exiles have, through their lifetimes, been exposed to and influenced by the various countries in which they have resided. Regardless of their migratory history, diasporic subjects inevitably find themselves renegotiating notions of ‘home’ (associated with familiarity), which cannot be simply identified as the opposite of ‘away’ (associated with the strange and unfamiliar). Challenging the dichotomy between ‘home’ and ‘away’, Sara Ahmed (2000) observes that movement and strangeness within the home itself have to be taken into consideration. The notion of home is particularly fraught for those who were either forced to leave their homeland or were barred from returning. Here, ‘home’ – usually perceived as a ‘comfort zone’ – turns into a place of danger for those who either had to flee or leave. Simultaneously, in the aftermath of the events of 1965-66, the notion of ‘home’ as a place of comfort was destabilized for those associated with communism or leftist ideas. The act of exile, however, did not erase the exiles’ existence or their association with the PKI. Indeed, exiles’ family members who remained in Indonesia were punished on their behalves by being banned from employment in governmental institutions and suffering various forms of social marginalization. The exiles’ presence elsewhere

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continued to inform the experience of ‘home’ for those who stayed but also brought the notion of proximity and the possibility of migration for released political detainees. Thus, even under conditions of surveillance and exile, the links between those who stay at ‘home’ and those who are ‘away’ cannot be ignored, even though they can serve as further repressive processes. Thus, as Ahmed (2000) argues, ‘home’ becomes a contingent space of inhabitancy. During my fieldwork, exiles talked favourably about Dutch post-colonial society as far as it had provided the comfort and safety that they needed to protect themselves not only from persecution in Indonesia but also from the power struggles that existed during the Cold War, which put the exiles into vulnerable positions in the Eastern Bloc. According to my interlocutors, of all the Western nation-states where exiles went to live permanently, the Netherlands was the only one that kept providing sufficient institutional and monetary support for the legacy of the Indonesian left. One of the largest private collections of ‘secret materials’ of the left, as my interlocutors referred to it, was made public in the mid-2000s. The Indonesian Documentation Collection (Perhimpunan Dokumentasi Indonesia – PERDOI) was compiled by Sarmadji Sutiyo who, as a person close to the PKI’s Pemuda Rakyat in the 1950s, had worked for the Ministry of Education in Jakarta before going to university in Beijing, where he was located when the events of 1965-66 took place. After some years in China, he moved to the Netherlands in the 1970s and became a Dutch citizen. Sutiyo’s PERDOI collection consists of around 3,000 books containing publications by leftist organizations like the People’s Cultural Institution (LEKRA, Lembaga Kebudajaan Rakjat) and books published by prominent PKI members, including signed copies by D.N. Aidit, who was chair of the PKI from 1959 until his disappearance in 1965. All of these publications were banned during the New Order. The collection also contains publications of Chinese leftist literature in original form, and a special part of the collection consists of private files of around 50 eksils’ personal biographies, photographs, obituaries, and death certificates sent to the collection by family members of the deceased. The collection, largely f inanced by Sutiyo and supported through informal networks, is well known among Indonesian eksils across Europe. Many eksils and their families donated their own private collections of books, personal correspondence, and other material to PERDOI, within the framework of the left and the Indonesian left in particular (see also Dragojlovic 2012a). Another prominent collection of the Indonesian left is In search of silenced voices, a compilation of records of Indonesian eksils throughout the world which was assembled by political prisoner and eksil Hersri Setiawan.

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Setiawan first became interested in the leftist movement when studying sociology and communications at Gajah Mada University in Indonesia. For a short while, he was a member of the Indonesian Student Movement Concentration (Consentrasi Gerakan Mahasiswa Indonesia – CGMI), but he later abandoned the CGMI in favour of LEKRA, the literary and social movement associated with the Indonesian Communist Party, founded in the 1950s. Setiawan was imprisoned in 1969 in Indonesia and held without trial for nine years, including seven years on Buru Island.17 Setiawan moved to the Netherlands in 1987 and lived there for 17 years. During his time in the Netherlands, he befriended several political exiles and over the years travelled across Europe (and to a lesser extent through China), recording around 300 interviews with Indonesian eksils he met on the way. The project was done on Setiawan’s initiative and partially sponsored by the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. Part of this large collection of exilic life narratives was stored at the IISH, and it continues to be institutionally managed there today.18 The collection has been divided into published books, photographs, and sound tapes in the audiovisual section of IISH, while letters, memoirs, reports, and other personal documentation are filed under personal names. Most of the material is available to the public.19 These life narratives, which were collected through Setiawan’s arduous efforts, focus on political activities, networks between diverse organizations, grassroots movements, and the internal dynamics of various organizations such as the PKI, the LEKRA, and the trade union movement. The narratives are classified chronologically in order to distinguish life and political activism prior to and after 30 September 1965, and across various leftist diasporic networks. This collection, containing 50 life narratives of eksils living in the Netherlands, France, England, Sweden, Germany, China, and Vietnam, pertains to the making of factual knowledge about the left in the diaspora and the remaking of understandings of the Indonesian left, which had been consistently stigmatized during the New Order. Institutional support and the existence of informal networks of scholars, artists, and public intellectuals figure prominently in the production of home-making and a sense of proximity and post-colonial intimacy among exiles and Balinese people who live in the Netherlands. Through the 17 During President Suharto’s New Order administration in the 1960s to the 1970s, Buru Island was the site of a notorious prison used to hold thousands of political prisoners. 18 The smaller part is kept at the Sekolah Brosot in Yogyakarta, a school and a cultural centre run by Setiawan and his wife Fatia Nadia. 19 http://socialhistory.org/en/collections/search-silenced-voices, accessed 12 October 2014.

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generation of appreciation and support for the legacy of exiles and their ideals, the history of the left – which had been prosecuted and marginalized in Indonesia – found institutional, monetary, intellectual, and moral support in the Netherlands. As this chapter has demonstrated, many Balinese people who grew up in Bali during the New Order have since participated in exilic networks by consuming leftist literature that had been banned in Indonesia and participating in intimate exilic meetings. Feeling a deep sense of historical importance in being able to participate in this kind of long-distance nationalism, they see themselves as carriers of exilic memories and legacies. One of my interlocutors, who has been particularly close to exilic networks, stated: In Bali, people do not talk about the killings or people who disappeared. We need to hold cremation ceremonies for those who were killed – otherwise they won’t reincarnate – but Balinese people are still afraid. And tourists, they do not know anything about the killings at all.

These concerns give weight to Adrian Vickers’ argument that the notion of kebalian in Bali had for a long time been separated from memories of the left and emerged as ‘symptoms of terror’ by those Balinese people who were too afraid to voice their opposition to the ruling classes. In contrast, memories of the left dominate debates about kebalian for Balinese people living in the diaspora. Former exiles and those who enthusiastically support them openly articulate the notion of kebalian not only as inexorably linked to the history of the left and its ideology of egalitarianism but also as one that has to be incorporated into the Balinese notion of the collective ‘we’ in Bali itself. In this way, Balinese long-distance nationalism is an ongoing project that has shifted its focus from bringing down the New Order to incorporating knowledge about the events of 1965-66 into open conversations among Balinese people. Ardent supporters of the exiles and their legacies see themselves as carriers and guardians of the exiles’ memories of estrangement as well as of the principles of egalitarianism and self-reliance. As indicated above, it is important to stress that Balinese diasporic debates about the left are not homogeneous but are instead deeply invested in ongoing debates about the proper celebration of Balinese festivals overseas, including whether or not Galungan-Kuningan should ever be celebrated in Indonesian embassies if that means omitting the babi guling pork dish that is central to the ceremony. In a similar way, while Pak Kadek’s initiation of the Balinese gamelan orchestra, which is supported by the Indonesian

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Embassy, is predominantly looked upon favourably, many fear that his influence is taking Balinese people away from what they see as true Balinese values: egalitarianism and self-reliance. The narratives and presence of exiles in post-colonial Dutch society, along with their active participation in Banjar Suka Duka, have individual and collective effects; the exiles give voices to the troubled history of Indonesia, evoking the collective and individual memories of Balinese people who lived through the New Order. In Banjar Suka Duka, which has an inclusive approach to Dutch spouses and offspring, the exiles are positioned as focalized subjects who embody memories of multiple places: a sense of a differently remembered homeland and a long history of Balinese migration. The work of memory that occurs both through discourse (exilic narratives) and practice (activities in the organization) becomes a process that regularly interrupts – and at the same time is interrupted by – various interpretations of Balinese history and culture that are crucial to creating the dynamics through which the notion of kebalian in the diaspora is negotiated. Simultaneously, these processes interrupt Dutch partners’ vision of Balinese history as free of violence and essentially peaceful, thus serving to include these aspects into narratives about ‘the intimacy of terror’ (Dwyer 2004). However, as in Bali, references to the 1965-66 massacres are excluded from Banjar Suka Duka’s public discourses about Bali. Regardless of the fact that many Balinese speak openly among themselves about the need to recognize the violent events of 1965-66 in Bali and to incorporate the history of the left as an integral part of the diasporic kebalian, I have not witnessed or heard conversations about the particularities of violence take place outside of close circles of Balinese people and likeminded Indonesian nationalists. Discussing the particularities of violence in the Dutch national public space would inevitably expose facts about Balinese people being perpetrators (as well as victims) of the violence. Such a discourse would stand in sharp contrast with the self-image that Balinese people try to cultivate of uniquely peaceful and friendly Hindu citizens. Allowing Balinese people to be associated with brutal violence and mass killings would undermine popular images of Bali and, consequently, Balinese claims to the status of ‘best-of-all-the-rest’ within the matrix of post-colonial differences. The importance given to maintaining the image of Balinese people as not associated with violence is illustrative of an ever-lurking marginality facing non-Western allochtonen in Dutch post-coloniality.

2

Balinese Post-Colonial Pedagogies and Contested Intimacies

On 9 May 2009, I attended the wedding ceremony of Pak Wayan and his partner Thomas at the city hall in one of the largest towns in South Holland. I had met Pak Wayan some years earlier when he first moved to the Netherlands, sponsored by his then partner Paul, whom he had met in Bali. The Netherlands was the first country to make marriage and adoption available to same-sex couples, doing so in 2001. The move allowed Paul and Wayan and other same-sex couples to obtain an entry visa and, later, permanent residency for Wayan on the basis of their union. I had previously heard many conversations in which Wayan and Paul compared their experiences to those of other Balinese-Dutch couples and noted their surprise at the fact that it always seemed to take significantly longer for heterosexual couples to obtain entry visas than it took for them and a number of other same-sex couples they knew. Still, almost without exception, my interlocutors stated that once an immigration officer knows you are sponsoring a Balinese person, the entire process is much easier. As Wayan said, ‘Everyone loves Bali and knows that Balinese are not troublemakers. There is a problem with the Indonesian government because it does not allow same-sex marriage because of Islam and all that, but our immigration officer was very helpful in processing our documents very quickly. Being Balinese opens many doors (Balinees zijn opent vele deuren).’ It is well known within BalineseDutch networks and communities that same-sex relationships in Bali are not made public (instead being carefully guarded among a small circle of friends and acquaintances),1 as same-sex desires are not seen in Bali as a valid reason to prevent heterosexual marriage and reproduction. Still, Wayan is convinced that Balinese people would be more open to same-sex marriage if it weren’t for the repressive Indonesian state, where the majority of citizens are Muslim. In 2009, Wayan and Paul had already been separated for some years, and Wayan was about to be married again. The wedding ceremony was to be accompanied by a Balinese dance performed by two dancers from the Balinese community. Prior to the commencement of the ceremony, having the full attention of guests and wedding ceremony officials, the dancers 1

For a detailed discussion about gay relationships in Indonesia, see Boellstorff (2005).

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performed the Balinese welcome dance tari sambutan oleh, followed by a vigorous applause. The two men, both dressed in traditional Balinese clothing, approached the desk behind which the city hall officials were seated. The civil celebrant, dressed in a dark suit, had several frangipani flowers attached to her hair, which I later learnt she had been given by one of the dancers and was very proud to wear. The ceremony proceeded in the usual way and, once completed, was followed by two sets of Balinese dancing. After congratulating the newly married couple, the guests, accompanied by several public servants who joined the ceremony to see the dancing and what they referred to as the ‘Balinese wedding’, mingled around the room; it was obvious the couple had been given an unusually long time slot. I engaged in conversation with Anneke, the marriage celebrant who welcomed the length of the ceremony, explaining that for a wedding ceremony of such a nice culture, a longer time slot should always be provided. Soon after, we were joined by Wayan, who offered his thanks to Anneke. While they discussed the importance of a same-sex marriage as a global basic human right, Wayan proudly stressed that in the 1920s, Bali was a ‘gay paradise’ where persecuted gay men from Europe, such as the well-known artist Walter Spies, settled to live.2 Notwithstanding the historical complexities3 of his statement, Wayan employed it to celebrate Balinese culture but also note its oppression by the Indonesian state, which, in his words, has not only exploited Balinese culture and the revenues created by Balinese tourism for years but has also supressed all kinds of sexualities that were, as he stated, ‘normal in Bali’. Not surprisingly, given that this was pronounced by a Balinese man and given the widespread existence of islamophobia in the Netherlands, Anneke received his statements with great regret and expressed even more sympathies towards Balinese people and their culture. 2 German painter Walter Spies (1895-1942) settled in Bali in 1927 and was one of the major organizers of an artistic colony in Bali. 3 Vickers states that in “Bali, homosexuality was not a matter of moral condemnation, simply a pastime for young unmarried men” (1989: 106). Homosexuality here, however, describes a life stage of unmarried men rather than a lifestyle. As such, in the way described by Vickers, it is not surprising that same-sex practices did not pose moral condemnation or socio-religious concerns, given that this was a youthful ‘pastime’ rather than a life-long orientation. Moreover, even if Bali was a place where same-sex practices between men were more tolerated than in Europe at the time, it was the colonial establishment that brought this ‘homosexual paradise’ to an end. Vickers writes, ‘When senior Dutch officials initiated a witch-hunt, most members of the Bali set were targets. The police searched houses (perhaps looking for naked boys under the beds), clamped down on the expatriates, and threw some into jail for good measure. Colin McPhee left Bali at the height of this repression…Spies and Goris were not so lucky. In 1938 and 1939 they were tried and arrested for the offence of sexual intercourse with minors of the same gender’ (1989: 124).

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Following this conversation, Anneke stated that, in any case, Balinese people were not real migrants. This is a statement I had heard many times from Balinese people’s spouses, in-laws, and non-ethnically Dutch friends, eager to distinguish the Balinese from citizens of other non-Western backgrounds who are considered ‘problematic’. It was nonetheless interesting to hear it from Anneke as someone who, as far as I could tell, did not have any similar personal connections with Balinese people. Anneke proudly said she had conducted four marriage ceremonies in which a Balinese person married a Dutch national and how such events were a great pleasure for her. ‘Balinese have such a beautiful culture, and the Balinese dancing here at the ceremony, it is very special. I love their costumes, and the people themselves are so beautiful.’ Restating what Wayan had said, she stressed, ‘I am so proud to be able to marry men who those horrible Indonesian Islamic fundamentalists prevented from living together. Ah, if only all newcomers to this country could be like the Balinese.’ Wayan and Thomas’s wedding ceremony is illustrative of how intimacy between Balinese people and Western citizens is produced through dynamic interactions between Balinese subaltern citizens and state bureaucrats, whether in the Netherlands or in Indonesia. These dynamics highlight how Balinese pedagogical instructions – that Balinese people are the ‘best of all the rest’ – are readily accepted, based on the simple assumption that Balinese people are carriers of a peaceful, exotic culture – a culture that, based on this interpretation, has a long tradition of appreciating sexual diversity while being opposed by the oppression and backwardness associated with Islam. Pak Wayan and Thomas’ wedding ceremony neatly encapsulates the dynamics through which Balinese post-colonial pedagogies are generated as well as the complex ways in which they relate to the current national debates about active citizenship.

Active Citizenship In recent years, questions of citizenship and citizens’ duties, rights, and obligations have become burning issues in Dutch public and political debates. The question of citizenship has become primarily concerned with having citizens who are dutiful and communitarian and who understand their duties of loyalty to the nation-state and self-sufficiency. As in many European nation-states, the idea of active citizenship began to gain ground in the Netherlands in the late twentieth century, stemming simultaneously from the idea of citizens as cooperative subjects and from

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the rise of ethnic diversity perceived to be central to social disintegration (Marinetto 2003; Clarke 2005; Hurenkamp, Tonkens and Duyvendak 2011). In the Netherlands, this became closely related to the ‘nationalist turn’ and the rise of nationalist-populist parties as well as the revival of the project of a national history and the funding of a national history museum (Buruma 2006; Hurenkamp et al. 2011). This preoccupation with foreigners and foreignness is not unique to the Dutch state. With increasing global flows of labour, finance, and goods and services over the past half-century, the preoccupation with autochthony has become prominent as a way in which indigenous populations can express their socioeconomic and cultural anxieties against the perceived threat of foreign newcomers (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000; Geschiere 2009). In the Dutch context, these concerns have been closely related to the assassinations of the populist politician Pim Fortuyn (in 2002) and of filmmaker Theo van Gogh (in 2004). Both Fortuyn and Van Gogh were known for their harsh criticisms of multicultural society (highlighting its failures), as well as for making anti-Islamic statements (Van der Veer 2006; Buruma 2006; Sniderman and Hagendoorn 2007; Eyerman 2008). Both men characterized multiculturalism as a crisis of Dutch national identity (Scheffer 2000a, 2000b, 2007). This kind of nationalist concern is reflected in the extensive funding of ‘problem-solving’ oriented social science research which offers ‘solutions’ to these problematic developments through the practice of active citizenship and varying forms of social cohesion (Duyvendak et al. 2009; Newman and Tonkens 2011; Hurenkamp et al. 2011). The trend has reflected larger European anxieties about the growing populations of people of Islamic background, which has subsequently led to a rise in islamophobia and xenophobia (Fortier 2006; Olwig 2011; Delanty et al. 2011) as well as ‘cultural anxiety’ (Grillo 2003), ‘cultural fundamentalism’ (Stolcke 1995), and a normalizing process of ‘othering’ through racism and xenophobia (Delanty et al. 2011). In this chapter, I discuss several of the ways in which Balinese subaltern citizens understand and participate in ‘active citizenship’ in the Netherlands without, however, implying that all forms of active citizenship are thereby exhausted. It has to be stressed that, as members of middle- and uppermiddle-class multiethnic, multiracial families, Balinese subaltern citizens are not perceived to be an ‘isolated’ immigrant population associated with criminality and social disintegration. 4 Inquiries into how non-Western migrants who form families with ethnic Dutch people participate as citizens 4

For a detailed discussion, see Duyvendak et al. 2009.

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in post-colonial Dutch society help us to understand the multiplicity of ways in which active citizenship might be understood and lived by the Balinese migrant population. Before I proceed further, it is important to remember that, in the broadest sense, citizenship is a legal status that bestows the rights and obligations of citizenship on a person. Formal citizenship is usually either jus soli citizenship, assigned to a person born within the geographical territory of the country, or jus sanguinis citizenship, awarded by way of parental inheritance. However, ‘citizenship is [also] a relation among strangers who learn to feel it as a common identity based on shared historical, legal, or familial connection to a geopolitical space’ (Berlant 2007: 37). Likewise, social, economic, racial, and gendered aspects of belonging shape experiences of citizenship. In recent years, these broader aspects of citizenship formation have been on the agenda of much scholarly work aiming to contest the meaning of citizenship in various ways. The field of global citizenship has defined the concept of justice on the basis of linkages between people on the global and transnational scale (Bosniak 1998; Hardt and Negri 2000), while sexual citizenship refers to projects concerned with the struggle to gain full rights for sexual and gender minorities (Berlant and Warner 2000). Scholars discussing the concept of cultural citizenship (Ong 1999, 1999a; Rosaldo 1999) have emphasized that many historically subordinated groups may have had legal rights as citizens but nevertheless remained marginalized within the nation-state. Aihwa Ong has been particularly influential in approaching citizenship as: [a] dual process of self-making and being-made with webs of power linked to the nation-state and civil society. Becoming a citizen depends on how one is constructed as a subject who exercises or submits to power relations […] in shifting fields of power that include the nation-state and the wider world. (1999: 264)

Ong draws on the work of Michel Foucault, and in particular Foucault’s approach to ‘subjectification’ – a process of subject-making through schemes of surveillance, control, discipline, and administration. Focusing on the United States, Lauren Berlant has in a similar vein stressed that various institutions and social practices work towards identifying an individual with the nation, a process she refers to as ‘training in politicised intimacy’ (2007: 37). Both Ong and Berlant’s work are instructive for the analysis of my ethnographic material. In the Balinese-Dutch context, the colonial history is intricately linked to how Balinese subaltern citizens take up the

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role of active citizens presumed to be lacking among other non-Western migrants who are designated in policies and public discourses as problemoriented. Rather than focusing on state policies and migrants’ responses to them as Ong did (2003), however, I chart how Balinese subaltern citizens actively employ what I refer to as post-colonial pedagogies – a specific form of trained intimacy that occurs in everyday encounters between Balinese individuals and their non-Balinese others. Simultaneously, I explore how these claims are challenged in everyday life, particularly in relation to gendered hierarchies of labour present both in the colonial and current globalized economy. Balinese people forge a sense of translocal belonging in these everyday encounters by engaging with the many different values, images, historical knowledges, and general truth claims that have already been set about Bali and Indonesian/Balinese visual and performing arts. I argue that Balinese people engage in post-colonial pedagogies in order to reinstate, reimagine, and reproduce a novel sense of both the Balinese culture and the people, in authenticating themselves as willing translocal subjects. In my view, authenticity should not be understood as something that is a given or an essence that needs to be discovered but rather as a process of formation that is produced through a specific set of historical, socio-economic, and cultural relations (Bruner 1994; Taylor 1991; Dragojlovic 2012b; Filitz and Saris 2013). My concern is in how the knowledge generated through these encounters simultaneously serves to reiterate common representations and imaginations about Balinese culture but also claims to Balinese translocality, which is not, in the view of my interlocutors, perceived as a failure of their assumed uniqueness but as one of its many strengths. Moreover, these engagements are key to fostering a personal sense of belonging and the ongoing process of home-making. Paying attention to encounters through which Balinese post-colonial pedagogies are enacted sheds light on the political potentiality of subaltern citizens that favours attention to everyday social engagements in order to problematize post-colonial conditions in a way that is best seen as an ‘intentionality to resist’ rather than being voiced through open political activism. Thus, I discuss modes of agency that should not be understood as a vocal ‘resistance to relations of domination’ (Mahmood 2001: 203) but produced in a continuum of conformity and intentionality of resistance. In what follows, I first provide a brief reflection on the development of representations of Balinese culture as homogeneous and paradisiacal. This reflection provides an interlude for a subsequent discussion about Balinese dancers as long-distance cultural specialists. I then proceed to analyze ethnographic material about the Bali Ayu dance group’s

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activities in order to further tease out specif icities through which the notion of kebalian in the Netherlands is ultimately linked with echoing colonial effects. The second part of the chapter will then detail the ways in which Balinese workers perform post-colonial pedagogies in the service industry. All of these can, to various degrees, be seen as forms of active citizenship.

The Historical Positioning of Balinese Arts In 1937, Miguel Covarrubias wrote: Everybody in Bali seems to be an artist. Coolies and princes, priests and peasants, men and women alike, can dance, play musical instruments, paint, or carve in wood and stone […] No feast is complete in Bali without music and an elaborate dramatic and dance performance; no one would dream of getting married, or holding a cremation, or even of celebrating a child’s birthday, without engaging troupes of dancers and actors to entertain the guests and their neighbours […] Next to having a good orchestra, a fine group of dancers is an almost organic need for the spirit and physical life of the community. (1937: 160-216)

Besides Covarrubias, anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (1942) as well as Jane Belo (1970) contributed significantly to the introduction of Bali and Balinese art to the Western world. Bateson and Mead were the most influential scholars to work on this topic during the 1930s, and it was during this time that the image of Bali as an island paradise was created. Much later, Adrian Vickers (1989) and many others after him demonstrated that throughout history, the visual and performing arts have played a significant role in Bali, not only in religious ceremonies on the island but also in defining relationships with outsiders, including other islands, the Indonesian nation-state, and tourists from various parts of the world. My central concern here is to draw attention to the role that the historical forces of Dutch colonialism and the subsequent promotion of Bali by the independent Indonesian state and tourist industry have played in shaping what is seen today as ‘Balinese culture’. In my analysis, I emphasize the creative and productive nature of historical interchanges between Occidental and Oriental places, but I also stress the various power relations that have existed in Bali, including those exercised by the colonial state, and the later global geopolitics of the arts.

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Early Dutch conceptualizations of what was authentically Balinese versus what was later imported from elsewhere came to be employed and manipulated by foreign scholars, the Indonesian state, and the Balinese urban intelligentsia in various projects. For his part, President Sukarno made Bali ‘the mother culture of Indonesia’ (Vickers 1989: 5).5 However, it wasn’t until the New Order that mass tourism in Bali really commenced. Coming to power in 1966, the New Order initiated a series of five-year development plans (Repelitas). One of them took place in the period between 1969 and 1974 and had as its focus the development of tourism in Bali as a major income stream. For this purpose, the Bali Tourism Study was undertaken by the Société Centrale pour l’Equipement Touristique Outre-Mer (SCETO), a consortium of French firms. The study resulted in a policy document stating that Balinese people needed to protect their culture from tourism. It also highlighted that the island’s culture was its defining feature, and the consortium set out a strategy to limit the development of resorts to Nusa Dua, Bali’s southern peninsula. In 1975, the World Bank endorsed the strategy and reiterated SCETO’s recommendations. In spite of the fact that the policy developers were foreigners, Balinese administrators claimed it as their own policy of ‘cultural tourism’ and implemented it throughout the 1970s (Picard 1990). In his discussions about how ideas of ‘cultural tourism’ have influenced Balinese identity discourses, Michael Picard (1990) suggests that Balinese elites appropriated SCETO’s policy to generate public and scholarly discourses of kebalian. Picard persuasively demonstrates how Balinese culture and tourism have been tightly interwoven for many decades, suggesting the way in which the boundaries between ‘tradition’ and ‘performance’ have been and remain blurred for tourists (1990, 1996).6 It is, however, equally important to acknowledge the role of the Indonesian state in generating discourses about kebalian, as it further buttressed the connection between ‘culture’ and Balinese ethnicity. The particular importance placed by the 5 The Hollywood film industry of the 1950s produced the famous film South Pacific, reimagining the island of Ambae in Vanuatu as a beautiful ‘Bali-Hai’, thus combining imaginations of the South Seas and Asia. A ‘native’ woman in Vanuatu is transformed into a Vietnamese woman in the film (see Jolly 1997). 6 Baulch (2007) has argued for two dichotomous models through which Balinese engage in discourses of kebalian. She locates Balinese elite discourses of the 1970s, which emerged in response to development of mass tourism and the emergence of what both Picard (1990) and Vickers (1989) referred to as the ‘touristic image’. Furthermore, following Carol Warren’s study, Baulch argues that the ‘Balinese we’ of the 1990s was characterized by the emergence of discussions that challenged the preceding elites’ notion of Balinese collective identifications.

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state on the maintenance of cultural heritage and the academies of art as state-sponsored projects further contributed to the institutionalization of Balinese dance practices as an important part of Indonesian national heritage (Hough 1999; Noszlopy 2003). Initiated by Governor Ida Bagus Mantra (from 1969-1978), the Bali Arts Festival (Pesta Kesenian Bali) has been particularly significant in reinforcing Balinese identity through art (Hough 1999). Balinese arts hold the highest place in the Indonesian ethnic arts hierarchy and are considered the centre of Indonesian craft and ‘fine’ arts production. Indeed, Balinese motifs have been incorporated into general Indonesian cultural products such as films and building decorations (Vickers 1989; Hough 1999; Causey 2003), serving to cultivate notions of national art and cultural ownership not only of the Balinese people but also of the Indonesian nation as a whole. Balinese concerns about the preservation of Balinese cultural values and engagements with the global world (Rubinstein and Connor 1999) are not new but have been strengthened by a recent wave of cultural preservationists (the number of whom has augmented greatly in the aftermath of the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005) who insist, time and again, on the reinvigoration of ‘pure’ Balinese culture as a magical world of dance and drama. As noted before, this has been a longstanding image of Balinese culture (Bruner 1996; Picard 1996; Vickers 1989). Thus, the notion of ‘culture’ has been crucial in the development and maintenance of a distinctive ‘Bali’ and ‘Balineseness’ (Vickers and Connor 2003). Being Balinese came to mean ‘being artistic’, and the notion of kebalian is still firmly grounded in this idea today. Balinese performing art forms are available in various contexts in modern-day Dutch society, producing spaces through which Balinese subaltern citizens negotiate relationships between themselves and others. They are central in the articulation of kebalian in post-colonial Dutch society. Classical Balinese dance performances7 have multiple effects: they are embodied, pleasurable activities but also serve pedagogical purposes. Balinese people use these performances to engage in knowledge production about Bali but, more importantly, about being Balinese in the Netherlands and, in doing so, attempt to re-confirm and authenticate themselves as standing above other non-Western foreigners in the racialized and ethnicized hierarchy of otherness. The performances are, at the same time, indicative 7 Dances most commonly performed are Tari Cendrawasih, Tari Legong Kraton, and Tari oleg Tambulingan. Dancing techniques that people learned in Bali as young adults are used as a base, and new dances are rehearsed from DVDs that are bought in Bali. The rehearsals are often also opportunities for socializing between dancers and their respective family members.

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of home-making practices in the post-colony. It would be misleading to presume that Balinese claims to the status of ‘best-of-all-the-rest’ are unique to them. In her nuanced analysis about Parsis (the Indian colonial elite), Tanya Marie Luhrmann (1996) offers a compelling insight about trajectories of the colonial elite in a post-colonial society. She argues that during the Raj, the Parsis – a Zoroastrian people who were driven from Persia into India in the fifth century – adopted the mannerisms and aspirations of the British, ranging from cricket and tea to the glorification of an Oxford-based education. The British rewarded the Parsis with high-level mercantile, bureaucratic, and financial posts. Out of these engagements, the Parsis developed an image of themselves as being superior to the rest of ‘backward’ India and closer to the British as ‘best-of-all-the-rest’. Decolonization brought an end to the Parsis’ superior position in colonial society and paradoxes of self-criticism identical to the description of other Indians the British used in colonial India. Luhrmann charts the paradoxes of such identification in her analysis of the Parsis’ post-colonial self-identif ication as ridden with anxieties and fraught with uncertainties. Unlike in the case of the Parsis, Balinese claims are not only related to the colonial period but also to the celebration of their culture through the global tourism industry and the favourable treatment that Balinese subaltern citizens receive in their interactions with the state bureaucracy. Yet, this is not to say that Balinese subaltern citizens are entirely privileged. On the contrary, as I argue here, anxiety about marginality and about not being recognized as Balinese are central to people’s everyday life experiences and their engagements in post-colonial pedagogies.

Balinese Long-Distance Cultural Specialists Bali Ayu, a Balinese dance group, was formed by three Balinese women in 2002, and today has several male and female fluctuating members. The close friendship between the three founders of the group, their proximity of residence, and their similar attitudes towards how dance performance should be managed were the initial reasons for the formation of the group. The official web presentation introduces the group as follows: Bali Ayu is a dance group which provides dance performances. Think of pasar malams, reunions, exhibitions, tokos, anything in fact that has even the slightest connection with Indonesia is a suitable occasion.

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All of these occasions in which Bali Ayu claims that its dancing might be appropriate refer directly to the colonial heritage. Pasar Malams (or ‘night markets’) are festivals celebrating Indonesian and Indies’ past and present encounters. Their main aim, notwithstanding local variations, is to gather people who are interested in what is commonly known as Indies culture: the performing arts, literature, Indo-Pop music, and food. The main Indies festival in the Netherlands, the Tong Tong Fair (originally named Pasar Malam), has been organized yearly in The Hague since 1959.8 Alongside Tong Tong, however, there are a large number of regional pasar malam organizations around the country. Pasar Malam events are commonly glossed over in both popular and some scholarly literature as tempo doeloe, which translates (from Malay) as ‘the good old days’ of the colonial Dutch East Indies. While these events often bear the same name of pasar malam, they are in reality hugely diverse, and grouping them all under the umbrella of tempo doeloe somewhat misstates the numerous cultural expressions they represent. These expressions are often neither nostalgic nor directly related to the former colony. On the contrary, many of them feature a very strong presence of contemporary Indonesian and broader Asian popular cultures. For this reason, I prefer to refer to these events as sites of Indies and Indonesian expressive cultures9. While reunions can be very diverse, I use the term in this context to refer specifically to the family reunions of Indies families scattered around the world or the reunions of specific groups bearing the names of regions in Indonesia where their members once lived or were imprisoned in the Japanese internment camps during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies from 1942 to 1945. The openings of numerous art exhibitions related to Indonesia, whether produced by Indies people or under their patronage, or when there is a visiting exhibition from Indonesia, are all prospective sites for Balinese dance performances. Such exhibitions take place in local, regional, and leading national art galleries and museums as well as in city or community halls and local educational institutions. Toko, which in Indonesian translates to ‘a shop’, encompasses far more complex meanings in the Netherlands. The term stands for an Asian grocery shop that mostly sells food products from Indonesia or fresh fruit and vegetables used in Indonesian cooking. Most tokos also sell takeaway cooked Indonesian 8 The festival is designated as the largest Eurasian festival in the world and as one of the oldest festivals in the Netherlands. It attracts more than 100,000 visitors each year. For more information, see: http://tongtongfair.nl/tong-tong-festival/ 9 For an elaborate discussion about tempo doeloe, see Pattynama 2012; De Mul 2011; Bijl 2013.

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food. Sometimes, shopowners promote their business by organizing short performances of Indonesian dance. One of my interlocutors, Ibu Yani, runs a café selling Indonesian food and occasionally asks her dancer friends to take a stroll in the city’s main areas dressed in dancing costumes to give out pamphlets about the shop. Sometimes, she asks them to serve finger food in front of the café on weekends and give short dance performances. The members of the Bali Ayu dance group were introduced to me as women and men who were born and grew up in Bali and now engage in Balinese dancing as a hobby in their adopted country, the Netherlands. This emphasis on dancers originating from Bali serves to distinguish them from professional dancers of Balinese and Indonesian performing arts who were mostly born in the Netherlands and have learned dancing techniques either in dance courses or in arts academies that provide training in Indonesian performing arts. The emphasis on being ‘originally from Bali’ stands as a form of authentication and suggests that learning how to dance was an integral part of growing up in Bali. Indeed, dancing is part of temple ceremonies on the island.10 As amateur dancers, Bali Ayu performances are more affordable than those by professional dance groups from the Netherlands or Indonesia. The frequency of their dance performances varies, but throughout the period of my fieldwork, the average seemed to be one or two performances per month. This was manageable for the amateur dancers, who have full-time jobs outside of dancing as well as families where they are the primary caretakers. During my long-term fieldwork, Bali Ayu performed at various events, including the opening of an elderly people’s home, for nuns who used to live in Indonesia, at primary schools during ‘Indonesian week’, at birthday parties, at several Indies kumpulans (social gatherings including reunions), and at the opening of a Balinese temple built by an ethnic Dutch family. Several of my interlocutors who performed with Bali Ayu stated that, as adult women and not professional dancers, they would never have been invited to dance publicly in Bali. In the Netherlands, this is entirely different for three main reasons. First, it is widely understood that the Dutch cultural landscape is

10 Balinese dance-theatre is based on Indo-Javanese theatre, consolidated in the seventeenth century. From the time of Dutch colonization, new forms of dances were created in order to make ‘secular’ performances (Bandem and De Boer 1981: 97). Bandem and De Boer classified Balinese dances in accordance with the hierarchy of the places where they were performed. In this hierarchy, dances performed in the innermost courtyard of the temple are highest, followed by those performed in the second courtyard and then those performed outside of the temple (ibid).

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rich in various forms of Indies and Indonesian expressive cultures11 and is thus fertile ground for Balinese dance performances. Second, while Balinese people often partake in Indies or occasionally Indonesian social gatherings, they seem to make an effort to celebrate the specificities of Balinese cultural traditions, as these are seen as significantly different from both Indies and Indonesian traditions but also from those of non-ethnic Dutch citizens. One of my interlocutors explained this situation by drawing my attention to his feelings of compassion for immigrants of Turkish and Moroccan background: I feel sorry for Turkish and Moroccan people; they might have interesting dances and culture but we do not know, nor do Dutch people. Nobody wants to know about their culture.

The lack of interest in the cultures of those designated as problem migrants does not apply to the Dutch popular music scene, where some of the celebrated performers are of Turkish and Moroccan background. However, amateur performers of Turkish and Moroccan expressive culture are rarely invited to perform at small, private social gatherings of ethnic Dutch people; indeed, ethnic Dutch people’s interest in the expressive parts of these cultures seems to be entirely absent. In the Netherlands, the cultures of non-Western ethnic minorities seem to be acceptable only in a limited multicultural framework. As Slavoj Žižek has argued, multicultural inclusiveness poses no challenge to the culturalist logic of late capitalist globalization, as it lies in: Liberal tolerance [which] condones the folklorist Other deprived of its substance – like the multitude of ethnic cuisines in a contemporary megalopolis; […] the tolerance of the Other in its aseptic, benign form, which forecloses the dimension of the realm of the Other’s jouissance. (1997: 29)

The ways in which Balinese subaltern citizens perceive themselves and are often perceived by others as the ‘best-of-all-the-rest’ is situated in the specific socio-political and historical circumstances that have been crucial in the contemporary formation of ethnicized hierarchies of value (Herzfeld 2007), which to a certain extent make them less vulnerable to the culturalist logic of late capitalist globalization. 11 For a detailed discussion, see Pattynama (2000) and Van Leeuwen (2008).

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Third, to their great satisfaction, Balinese dancers are always not only expected to deliver a dance but invited to give an informal talk about Bali and its culture and to provide the audience with an opportunity to look at their dancing costumes. Spectators are often willing to ask many questions, ranging from the context in which the dancing had been mastered in Bali and the techniques of specific eye and finger movements to the history of the dancers’ migration and their rehearsals and performances in the Netherlands. In this way, Balinese dancers act as long-distance cultural specialists, reinforcing the idea of Balinese migrants as willing translocal subjects. Drawing on the concept of ‘long-distance specialist’ discussed by Mary Helms (1988) in relation to voyages in pursuit of esoteric knowledge, anthropologist Clare Harris (2006, 2012) extends this concept to ‘long-distance cultural specialist’ in her discussion about Tibetan artists living in the diaspora. In the field of Asian art history, John Clark (2013) employs the term to talk about Asian cultural producers through the lens of mobility and motility and discusses artists’ abilities to traverse geographical and cultural distances through artistic creativity. In their volume Asia through Art and Anthropology, Nakamura, Perkins, and Krischer employ the term to include artists, anthropologists, historians, intellectuals, writers, and other cultural producers (2013: 2). Given the way in which being Balinese is widely accepted by both the Balinese and non-Balinese people to mean ‘being artistic’, I find the notion of ‘long-distance cultural specialist’ to be highly relevant in relation to the ethnographic material at hand. However, unlike Harris and Clark, who are primarily concerned with professional artists and the professional visual arts scene, my take on this concept is closer to that of Nakamura et al. (2013). Building on their work, my approach is specifically focused on the divergent production of kebalian as firmly situated in various enactments of ‘being artistic’ – from everyday performances that serve to authenticate oneself as a Balinese to its affirmations through the visual and performing art forms.

Lessons in Balinese Culture In 2009, Ibu Cindy, who works as a teacher in a primary school, had her elderly Balinese parents visit her in the Netherlands for the first time. She is a temporary member of the Bali Ayu group but also performs independently and with other informal Balinese and Indonesian amateur dancing groups. Prior to her parents’ visit, Ibu Cindy had organized an ‘Indonesian week’ in

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her school on several occasions. These events incorporated many activities for both children and parents, including short lectures about different aspects of Balinese culture, playful dancing and cooking lessons, and dance performances by Balinese dancers. Ibu Cindy organized these events to have a specifically Balinese focus while still referring to Indonesia and Indies people in the Netherlands in more general terms. By interacting with the parents of her students in this informal setting, Ibu Cindy was able to discuss the commonalities and differences in childrearing as seen in Bali and the Netherlands as well as her own personal negotiations when it came to conflicting views in the respective practices. During her parents’ visit in 2009, Ibu Cindy organized another ‘Indonesian week’ in her school but this time invited her parents to talk about ‘an ordinary day in our life’. Her parents told stories about rice farming, described fruits and vegetables used in daily cooking, detailed their daily obligations in the banjar community, and explained some Balinese-Hindu rituals as well as games played by their grandchildren (the offspring of their other children, who live in Bali). They accompanied these stories with images made by Ibu Cindy during her visits to Bali. Her parents spoke in Balinese and Ibu Cindy took on the role of translator. The event had immense importance in Ibu Cindy’s life and made her feel ‘completely at home’, both through the involvement of her parents in ‘lessons about Balinese culture’ (which in this case included ordinary aspects of everyday life) and through the appreciation of her students (and their parents) and colleagues. These actions and the significance ascribed to them point to the ongoing celebration of the uniqueness of Balinese culture (being a culture that is much appreciated by others) and form an attempt to de-essentialize Balinese culture by talking about everydayness and, in particular, the lives of struggling farmers. This performance aimed to bring spectators and listeners closer to what scholars have called a ‘sense of place’ (e.g. Feld and Basso 1996) – in this case, the atmosphere of a Balinese village landscape and the vibrancy of daily sociality. The sense of comfortable translocal belonging that Ibu Cindy felt during this ‘Indonesian week’ is firmly situated in both the evocation of ‘Balinese atmosphere’, constituted by engagement in the familiar embodied practice of dancing, as well as the confirmation of the widespread value and appreciation by others that form part of Balinese cultural traditions and lifestyles. The ‘lessons in Balinese culture’ figured as a home-making practice and simultaneously served the didactic purpose of reminding others of – and authenticating the self as a carrier of – the unique Balinese-Hindu peace-loving culture which ought to stand above cultures of other foreigners as the ‘best-of-all-the-rest’ in Dutch post-coloniality.

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An Ethnic Dutch Family’s Balinese Shrine and Balinese LongDistance Cultural Specialists Formal and informal Bali Ayu members have large networks of friends and acquaintances through which their performances are solicited. In 2010, three female Bali Ayu dancer were invited to conduct an inauguration ceremony for a newly built Balinese shrine in the garden of an ethnic Dutch family. The dancers were asked to make appropriate offerings (banten) and also brought with them incense sticks commonly used in Balinese-Hindu ceremonies. The Dutch family had spent many holidays in Bali and had developed a strong sense of intimacy with the Balinese culture as well as a deep spiritual attachment to Balinese-Hinduism and its ceremonies. After many years of careful planning, the family found builders prepared to construct a shrine in the Balinese style and, wishing to authenticate its opening, invited the three Balinese dancers to perform a ceremony. All involved knew that the Balinese women were not trained as pemangku (temple priests), but their firsthand experience of dancing at temple ceremonies in Bali and knowledge about making offerings made them more than adequate to conduct the ritual. The ceremony was held in the presence of extended family members and consisted of elaborate offerings, classical dance, and the burning of incense to inaugurate the house shrine. The invitation to perform a classical Balinese dance at this unusual event was welcomed warmly by the dancers, as it enabled them to engage in the familiar embodied performance of dancing and making offerings. The performance of the ritual, however, brought about some interesting ponderings by the dancers and their friends. Some questioned whether the ritual, enacted by Balinese women and not accompanied by a priest, would be effective in making the shrine a blessed place, and whether Balinese gods and deities (understood in ethnicized terms) would recognize the shrine. These questions were enhanced by the Dutch family’s requests for the regular and continuous delivery of offerings at the shrine. These discussions about the potency, propriety, and effectiveness of such ritual actions are an integral part of Balinese people’s ongoing debates about themselves as Balinese long-distance cultural specialists. However, while these debates exist, the decision of the ethnic Dutch family to build a temple and adopt Balinese-Hinduism in their own way was never questioned or seen as inappropriate. Rather, these events are talked about positively among Balinese people and their family members and frequently told to others, serving as confirmation that Balinese culture is positively different from the cultures of other non-Western foreigners and should be respected as such. This is

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not to say that there are no ethnic Dutch citizens who have, for example, converted to Islam, but these possibilities do not enter Balinese debates about themselves and their self-claimed (and much reiterated by others) idea of themselves as carriers of a uniquely beautiful culture.

Post-Colonial Pedagogies and the Authentication of Balineseness My long-term interlocutor Ibu Atini came from Bali to live in a small town in Brabant (a province in the southern Netherlands) in 1993 as a 20-year-old after marrying a Dutch man of the same age. Not knowing any Dutch and having only a high school diploma from Bali that was unrecognized in the Netherlands, young Atini entered several years of hard labour in a local factory and slowly became fluent in the Dutch language, despite the complete unavailability of any formal language instruction for foreigners at the time. Following these initial difficult years, Ibu Atini stressed that she became ‘Dutchified’ (vernederlandst), speaking the language with a Brabant accent and being successful as a waitress and Balinese dance performer. Since she never felt comfortable with furthering her education,12 Ibu Atini continues to work as a cook and waitress today. Despite her difficult job, Ibu Atini prefers waitressing to being a cook, as it provides her with the satisfaction of communicating with the public. I have on many occasions visited places where Ibu Atini has worked and witnessed how she uses every opportunity to strike up a conversation with her customers. These conversations almost always turn into a performance of her ethnic identity. If by some chance she is not asked about her background or comments are not made about her southern Dutch accent, Ibu Atini voluntarily brings it up with a big smile and a comment about being a Balinese girl who has been ‘Dutchified’. If she is assumed to be Indonesian, she quickly corrects the person to whom she is talking, first saying that she is from Bali and following this up with a corporeal gesture commonly used in Balinese dancing or greetings for tourists in Bali. Her guests often respond with astonishment: ‘Why would you come to the cold Netherlands from an island paradise?’ Atini then proudly confirms that she indeed is from Bali but that she loves living in the Netherlands where she has been for more than twenty years and where her children were born. At this point in the conversation, Ibu has the full attention of her customers and she goes on to 12 In order to further her education, she was required to sit in class with young adults (16 years old) but found this to be too difficult for a person well in her 20s.

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talk about the things she takes to be locally Dutch – particular foods (cheese, bread, Italian cuisine, beer, and fine wine) and knowledge of popular culture, sports, and politics. In the presence of her Dutch audience, she frequently expresses her disapproval of migrants who are not willing to integrate, thus positioning herself as both a translocal person and a ‘good’ immigrant. On numerous occasions, I have witnessed this conversation extend to an explanation about the differences she finds important between Balinese and Javanese food, the latter being more commonly available in the Netherlands. For many of her customers who have visited Bali, Ibu Atini willingly chats about places in Bali, reminds them how to say thank you in Indonesian (terima kasih), or suggests new places where they can go on their next visit to Bali. If her customers were already planning such a trip, she passes on details about her brothers’ restaurant in Sanur. This self-making performance through which the subject constitutes itself deserves close attention. At first glance, it might seem that Ibu Atini’s performance is a simple act of self-exotization with the aim of ensuring her continued employment or perhaps better pay. While her attentiveness towards customers might be related to a potential increase in salary, it should not be attributed to this alone. Ibu Atini’s performances are also highly didactic – she is instructing her customers about the genuine possibility of inhabiting a translocal space; of being and feeling local in the Netherlands while still having her Balinese background. By talking openly with them about her life and views about migration and other foreigners, she also reinstates the hierarchies of foreigners in the Netherlands, describing certain migrants as problematic while demonstrating that she herself, and Balinese people in general, are unproblematic. Her anti-Islamic sentiments show through in her frequent references to the devastating consequences of the ‘Bali bombings’ committed by Indonesian fundamentalists in 2002 and 2005. Her evocation of a ‘common threat’ of Islam – whether in Bali or in the Netherlands – provokes a sense of vulnerability, thus evoking a feeling of shared intimacy. Likewise, by emphasizing this commonality, Ibu Atini actively re-produces the racial and cultural hierarchies of value (Herzfeld 2007) that have been widespread in regards to immigrants across many European nation-states. In a broad sense, Ibu Atini’s engagement with her customers also echoes colonial approaches to Balinese people as non-Muslim and the celebration of Hindu Bali as an island in the sea surrounded by Islam (see Vickers 1989; Pickard 1996). Stories told about familiar places in Bali and engagements in familiar embodied practices associated with Balinese dance or greetings are instrumental in Ibu Atini’s sense of comfortable belonging and feeling at home in her adopted country. In her performances in the Netherlands, which reflect

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the practices she learned as a young girl working in a restaurant in Bali, Ibu Atini takes on the subject position of a long-distance cultural specialist, which reflects the subject role she took on during her work in the Balinese tourist industry. Ibu Atini talks often about how, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, the Dutch realized how special and unique the Balinese culture was and provided a space for Balinese migrants like herself ‘to be ourselves’ in the present. What she means by this is that Balinese people talk about Balinese culture to the great interest and admiration of those around them – something she knows does not happen with certain other foreigners of non-Western backgrounds. Similarly, unlike those of other non-Western backgrounds, Balinese dance performers are frequently invited to ethnically Dutch parties. These narratives serve to reiterate Balinese cultural uniqueness and to claim a position above the cultures of other foreigners. This shows how closely the notion of kebalian has been linked with the longstanding celebration of Balinese arts and religious practices, which have become valued and appreciated as an integral part of Balinese cultural heritage in itself. Whether with Ibu Atini or my other Balinese interlocutors, I have never witnessed a situation in which a Balinese migrant’s anti-Islamic statements were not wholeheartedly supported by their Dutch audience. While there might be many reasons for this, those that came up most prominently in my ethnography were couched in a language present in the national public debates and policies about non-Western allochtonen. The concerns that my interlocutors expressed were that Muslim migrants and their descendants are reluctant to learn the Dutch language and to accept the ideals of democracy, equality, work, family values, and freedom of speech and religion. Predictably, such discussions were often accompanied by hypothetical statements such as ‘Not all Muslim people are bad’ or ‘this Muslim woman at my work seems nice’, but these statements in themselves serve an ongoing process of othering citizens of Muslim faith. This is not surprising given that, from the 2000s onwards, there has been a growing emphasis on Islam as a major barrier to integration and a major cause of social disintegration in Dutch society (Gijsberts and Lubbers 2009; Entzinger 2014). The form of knowledge production Ibu Atini engages in (as do many of her fellow Balinese people) is clearly relational but also quite unexpected when one considers the common trope that approaches Balinese subaltern subjects as people unlikely to willingly live outside of Bali, thus denying them both the capacity and the desire to be translocal subjects. Unlike other non-Western migrants primarily seen as wanting to stay in the Netherlands either because of economic needs, violent conflicts in their countries of

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origin, or as a way of escaping their ‘backward’ cultures, Balinese people are not perceived as having economic reasons behind their decision to live outside of Bali, nor are they seen as people who could ever want to live away from their ‘beautiful island/culture’. This perception echoes earlier imaginations about Bali which established, during the early twentieth century, the image of Bali as an island paradise, despite many Balinese people living in difficult economic circumstances (Vickers 1989). If disciplining practices prescribed through state policies of integration serve to turn new citizens into acceptable foreigners (Ong 2003; Olwig 2011), Balinese performances and pedagogies such as those engaged in by Ibu Atini and Ibu Cindy serve as legitimizing, normalizing, and authenticating practices. Through these, Balinese people confirm themselves as translocal subjects who claim a particular proximity to the Dutch nation through the continuous articulation of differences between themselves and other foreigners. They also serve to re-state Balinese subaltern citizens’ willingness to be translocal subjects, wherein translocality captures the varied and sometimes contradictory effects of interconnectedness that exist between people and places. Translocality also captures the active citizenly participation in Dutch life that is much desired by state institutions that are concerned that the Dutch nation might face social disintegration caused by citizens of foreign background. It is important, however, to stress that Balinese pedagogies are also tension-ridden and often present a struggle between wishing to engage in a representation of Bali that might stand outside of the paradisiacal image (for example, the life of struggling farmers) and wishing to maintain the favourable image of Bali held by others. Indeed, if ever Bali is represented as not conforming to the paradisiacal image, it is always in passing so as not to outshine the predominant, firmly established paradisiacal image.

The Normalization of Ethnicized Service Labour and the ‘Intention to Resist’ In early June 2010, I met with Ibu Atini and her long-term Balinese friend Ibu Lastri at a local café in the town where they live. At the time, Ibu Atini was working at one of the most expensive upmarket hotels often frequented by celebrities and foreign dignitaries as well as both local and foreign business people. With an exceptional sense of pride, she told me about the people she encountered at the hotel’s bar and restaurant during her long working hours. While glad to be in a position to meet various well-known foreigners,

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Ibu Atini stated that she preferred Dutch customers, saying that ‘the Dutch tip better. They feel guilty; I can feel it, because of colonialism and all that’. In her interpretation, foreigners liked Bali and had an appreciation for the Balinese culture, but their tips never matched those of the ethnic Dutch. Her statement about Dutch guilt was wholeheartedly supported by her friend Ibu Lastri, who also felt compelled to emphasize that what was done in the past during colonialism had nothing to do with present-day Dutch people, but she was sure that ‘colonial guilt’ existed. Lowering her voice, Ibu Lastri added, ‘They exploited Indonesia for more than 300 years!’ Ibu Atini and Ibu Lastri’s articulations about the unscrupulousness of colonialism and the associated post-colonial guilt were never associated with Bali but rather with other parts of Indonesia. This might have to do with the fact that the duration of colonial rule in Bali was significantly shorter than in other parts of Indonesia and did not include the establishment of large plantations or Christian missions. Also, as I will discuss in chapter four, these are some of the Balinese interpretations on how Balinese-Dutch power dynamics operate. However, the sense of shame and guilt just mentioned deserves more attention. It is useful to turn to Michael Herzfeld’s notion of cultural intimacy, which he describes as ‘the recognition of those aspects of cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality’ (2005: 3). My Balinese interlocutors presumed that a Dutch customer would give better tips because of their deep-seated sense of guilt and embarrassment over the colonial empire’s extraction of economic sources during colonialism. Claiming that such a transaction is stable and reliable, my Balinese interlocutors are clearly implicated in the production of an embarrassing recognition of intimacy, even though their sense of being the ‘best-of-all-the-rest’ both in colonial society and the post-colony does not allow them such articulation. In the luxurious hotel at which Ibu Atini was working at the time, the waitressing staff were predominantly employed on a casual basis with a very low basic salary. Uncertain working hours per week led to many employees becoming compliant and reluctant to refuse exceptionally long hours, fearing that if they complained they might not be called again. These working conditions incited Ibu Atini to comment that her work manager treated her like a babu, a term she also used to refer to the ways she often felt treated by her ex family-in-law: But you know, I am not their Javanese babu! Dutch people sometimes forget this! The colony is over! No more! Finished!

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The gendered service labour market in the colonies brought about this figure of the babu. In the Dutch East Indies, a babu was a local woman who was usually either a nursemaid and/or a domestic helper. In the colony, the rendering of servants was predominantly depicted in one of two ways. First, it was depicted in colonial housekeeping guides and medical handbooks as the threatening image of an Indonesian woman contaminating Dutch children (Gouda 1995; Stoler 1995). In contrast to this, there is the romantic image of a nurturing and caring servant that pervades Dutch colonial fiction and memories (Dermout 1993; Kousbroek 1995; Hillen 1993). In their research on memory work in Java, Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler (2000) examine the structure of the intimate colonial relations between the Dutch and their servants and find that the colonial times are very differently remembered, with only a few former babus who now talk favourably about their assigned nurturing roles. Ibu Atini’s refusal to be perceived through the essentialist image of subservient, nurturing femininity by both her former in-laws and her employer is telling of how easily available and applicable the expectations of colonial gendered labour are to contemporary circumstances. Furthermore, it is worth noting that her evocation of babu is ethnicized and associated with Javanese and not Balinese women, again engaging in the (re)production of colonial hierarchies in which Balinese people and their culture stand above those of others. At the time of our conversation, Ibu Atini was living on her own after her divorce several years earlier. She was experiencing serious financial problems that could not be resolved by the money she made working as a waitress. As a person with a low income, Ibu Atini was eligible for the Dutch rent rebate system, which enabled her to rent a relatively large apartment, parts of which she sub-let in order to have enough monthly income to live comfortably. The official rent of subsidized housing is significantly lower than market rental rates, a fact that makes the sub-letting of social housing a relatively profitable enterprise (Leerkes et al. 2007: 1505-1507). Over the years, Ibu Atini had had several housemates consisting mostly of undocumented migrants from Indonesia. The financial problems Ibu Atini had at the time of our conversation were related to the fact that her ‘nice and reliable’ tenant Ibu Sari, an undocumented migrant from Java, had suddenly disappeared. Like many undocumented migrants, Ibu Sari had arrived in the Netherlands on a tourist visa and then overstayed it (Leerkes et al. 2007: 1492). As the Dutch government has strongly discouraged low-skilled labour migration for some time (van der Leun 2003), gaining a working visa for low-paid jobs is almost impossible, as is getting a tourist visa without having a Dutch citizen acting as a sponsor. Just like many other undocumented

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migrants, Ibu Sari had paid a broker in Java a sum equivalent to about €5,000 for her tourist visa. It is estimated that the Netherlands has around 150,000 undocumented migrants originating from more than 200 countries, the most numerous being from Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, and Suriname (Leerkes et al. 2007: 1492).13 Leerkes, Engbersen, and Van San (2006) have pointed out that many undocumented migrants in the Netherlands rely on ethnic and family networks for housing, work, information, and possible marriage partners, and that low-income single-person households are often important providers of housing for undocumented migrants. While Leerkes et al. see the interaction between undocumented migrants and their social networks among Dutch citizens exclusively through a functionalist lens, we also need to take into consideration the emotional support, companionship, and friendships that often develop in these situations, particularly in the case of single-person households. My interlocutor’s undocumented housemate, Ibu Sari, had frequently performed Indonesian classical dance either independently or as part of one of many amateur dance groups in the area. Most of her work, however, was done in Wassenaar (an especially affluent suburb of The Hague), where she was employed as a domestic worker and was paid €12 per hour for services that were worth between €18 and €25 per hour for those who had legal work permits. Ibu Atini contends that this was a good income in comparison with undocumented domestic workers from Turkey and Morocco, who worked for €8-10 per hour. In this problematic hierarchy of labour, Ibu Sari seemed to be in a better position because she was from Indonesia and, as my interlocutor explained, Employers like Indonesian workers; they can trust them. They know from colonial times that a Javanese babu is the best and the most reliable.

Despite this highly problematic ethnicization of domestic workers in which Ibu Sari’s work is supposedly better valued, she, like other undocumented migrants, lives in a situation where her labour is required but access to resources including health care and basic housing is highly restricted, while the possibility of deportation is a cause of ongoing anxiety. In the 13 Leerkes et al. (2007: 1508) detail the development of ‘shadow institutions’ run by Dutch volunteers who teach the Dutch language, provide legal advice on how to obtain residency permits, and provide medical advice and medical help. Most of the institutions that are based in neighbourhoods with a high percentage of foreign migrants are not strictly legal. 

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Netherlands as in many other states of the European Union, undocumented migrants increasingly provide a low-cost, flexible but legally vulnerable source of reserve labour. As European Union legislation has forced Europe’s outer borders to close, an informal internal economy has grown. Conditions on the labour market have changed to favour temporary, insecure forms of employment, and many small- and medium-sized enterprises, such as ethnic grocery shops and small family businesses, often depend on cheap, informal labour (Leerkes et al. 2007; Van der Leun 2003). While service industries such as cleaning, catering, child care, and home improvement have long been associated with a formal and informal ‘ethnic economy’ in the Netherlands, the favourable evocation of the babu as ethnicized domestic labour deserves more attention. In her work on supply chain capitalism, Anna Tsing states that this form of capitalism relies on socio-economic niches that provide cheap goods and services but also the performance of difference and ‘cultural characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality’ (2009: 117). In these niches, ethnic and economic performance becomes instrumental for the supply chains to operate. This also helps to situate employers, most of whom work for Dutch governmental institutions and seem to have a preference for domestic workers from Indonesia. In her work on domestic workers, Marina de Regt (2009) has demonstrated that the ethnic, racial, and national background as much as the social class of domestic workers plays an important role in this highly feminized and ethnicized labour market. De Regt argues that the influx of refugees and undocumented migrants from various countries has resulted in racialized hierarchies of domestic labour. Likewise, Pei-Chia Lan has argued that, in the context of domestic work, ‘racialization is not merely a dichotomous construction between the self and the other: it creates plural categories of ethnic others associated with stratified layers of cultural imagery’ (2006: 16). In her case study about migrant domestic workers in Yemen, De Regt (2009) notes that employers search for a convoluted balance of closeness and distance between themselves and domestic workers. In the Dutch context, or more precisely in the context of Ibu Atini’s affluent neighbourhood in The Hague, undocumented Indonesian domestic workers are favoured for their cheap labour but also for a troubling sense of proximity to the figure of the colonial babu on which these workers rely as a source employment in the otherwise poorly paid market. Both Ibu Atini and Ibu Lastri’s narratives about Javanese domestic workers were cast through a shifting continuum of pride for being valued as a good and a reliable worker through to stories of resistance that portray

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Indonesian undocumented migrants as people who want to travel and experience life overseas rather than as desperate job seekers. Moreover, what became prominent in their narratives was how the figure of the babu was not only firmly associated with colonial times but also very clearly with Javanese ethnicity. Ibu Atini’s earlier resentful rejection of being treated as a babu was not only framed in the language of displaced expectations of overburdening caring and nurturing labour but also as an inappropriate association between the figure of the babu and Balinese ethnicity. This was particularly clear in arguments with her in-laws, to whom she on many occasions tried to explain that the ‘babu lived in Java, and I am a Balinese’ in an attempt to disassociate herself from the nurturing, subservient expectations of her Dutch family-in-law. Of course, this is not to say that such associations between ethnicity and nurturing roles are in any way given, but paying attention to these arguments can help us gain insights into how interethnic hierarchies operate, in particular in regards to colonial relations of power. Explaining to us how her housemate had gone missing, Ibu Atini offered a lengthy narrative about how she always advised her tenants to pay for public transport. Working for a low salary, having to pay debts to their brokers in Indonesia, and having dreams of traveling around Europe or saving money to build a house and start a small business in Indonesia, many undocumented migrants try to save money by not paying for public transport, which makes their legal position even more vulnerable. As Ibu Atini had feared, Ibu Sari was caught by ticket inspectors on the bus on her way to work. Not able to provide documents of identification, she was reported to the police and detained as an illegal resident in Zaandam, a facility north of Amsterdam at the time reserved specifically for the administrative detention of undocumented immigrants. Ibu Atini stressed that her friend was not detained in a prison for criminals because she was from Indonesia and thus was not seen to be as threatening as undocumented migrants from other parts of the world. But, according to the official regulation of undocumented immigrants, only those who carry out criminal acts are sent to prisons, while others are sent to administrative detention centres and then deported to their countries. After paying a visit to the detention centre, Ibu Atini reported that the detention guard had asked Ibu Sari if she wanted rice and rendang for dinner, not because this was available but to express his own knowledge of what he considered was an Indonesian national dish. This led to a conversation between the guard and Ibu Sari in which the guard disclosed his interest in holidaying in Bali as soon as possible. While the police officer’s offering of food that was not otherwise available can be interpreted as the ethnicized mocking of a detainee, Ibu Atini framed it

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the language of the guard expressing his familiarity with Indonesia and its food and his ultimate desire to visit Bali, seeing this as favourable treatment in comparison with that of other undocumented migrants. Of course, this is not to say that Dutch people are not interested in holidaying in other countries from which other undocumented migrants come. This interpretation, however, is an attempt to turn this situation into one’s own advantage and celebrate Balinese culture as the ‘best-of-all-the-rest’. Following Cathy Cohen, I suggest that these interpretations are best understood by paying attention to how ‘people living with limited resources […] use the restricted agency available to them to create autonomous spaces absent the constant stream of power from outside or normative structures.’ (2004: 40)14 Cohen is particularly concerned about the ‘intention to resist’ that is organized around two modes of agency which are not opposed but interrelated – on the one hand, wanting to make one’s life easier under specific circumstances, and on the other, intentional, principled resistance. In order to appreciate the political potentiality of subaltern citizens, it is also useful to be reminded of Saba Mahmood’s approach to agency ‘not as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create’ (2001: 203). However limited and contradictory, the agency of Balinese subaltern citizens is best approached by what Paul Gilroy (1994) theorizes as ‘small acts’, or what Raymond Williams terms ‘alternative attempts to create autonomy over one’s life’ (quoted in Cohen 2004: 40). The last I heard about Ibu Sari, in 2011, was that she was living in Bali once again and helping two Balinese men (who had recently married Dutch women) to prepare for the culture/language examinations that are part of the Dutch government’s processes for integration from abroad. The former undocumented migrant in the Netherlands had thus become a cultural broker, assisting prospective migrants to achieve Dutch language and cultural competency in order to be granted a provisional residency permit (machtiging tot voorlopig verblijf, MVV) and join their spouses in the Netherlands. In their empirical research on active citizenship in the Netherlands, Hurenkamp, Tonkens, and Duyvendak have shown that migrants’ ideas of citizenship are based on ‘want[ing] the right to opt out, to keep quiet, and to be left alone when their identity is at stake’ (2011: 220). Not surprisingly, this conclusion is based on research conducted with migrants who are already 14 Allen (2011) deploys Cohen’s arguments in his analysis of black self-making in Cuba.

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designated in public discourses as ‘problem-oriented.’ Both formal and undocumented Balinese migrants’ understandings and participation in the Netherlands as active members of the Dutch state show how Balinese people grapple with and actively attempt to both comply with and change preconceived ideas about Balinese culture as well as their own intimate claims to homelike belonging to both Bali and the Netherlands. Here, it is helpful to turn to Avtar Brah’s important discussion about migrants’ ‘homing desire’, which she defines as the desire to feel at home achieved by the physical or symbolical (re)constitution of spaces in migration, and defined against the physical return to an original home(land) (1996: 180). The (re)constitution occurs through an active production of a sense of intimacy, which inevitably draws on colonial connectivities in the context of the Netherlands, and the embodied performance of their home-making practices. Drawing on the work of Emile Benveniste, Ghassan Hage conceptualizes home-building ‘as the building of the feeling of being at home’ (2010: 417, emphasis in the original). Importantly, Hage considers this process as being constructed out of ‘affective building blocks’ constituted by ‘four key feelings: security, familiarity, community, and a sense of possibility or hope’. As this chapter has shown, my Balinese interlocutors actively engage in home-making practices, which might fall within the state’s expectations of loyal and self-sufficient citizens but are also firmly embedded in didactic practices where subaltern citizens invest in the performance of post-colonial intimacy. As we have seen, however, their agency is informed by both historical and contemporary inequalities and their engagements in informing others of what it means to be Balinese – beyond the figure of a silent dancer or a subservient and nurturing babu.

3

‘Shared Cultural Heritage’ and the Visible and Invisible World Overseas

In this chapter, I analyze the Balinese reception of a major exhibition featuring Balinese royal regalia obtained during the Dutch colonial conquest. This analysis allows me to tease out the correlations that my interlocutors make between the looted objects and their own Balinese presence in contemporary Dutch society. I argue that Balinese interpretative understandings of Balinese-Dutch historical connectivities generate specific knowledge production about ‘shared cultural heritage’. The heritage I talk about here is one that differs from that of Dutch policymakers’ conception of ‘shared heritage’ but also from interpretations that might be found in an exclusively Balinese context. In other words, I argue that Balinese subaltern citizens take on colonial dynamics and notions of heritage developed by the Dutch to create their own positionality in post-colonial Dutch society. The exhibition entitled Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past held in De Nieuwe Kerk (the New Church) in Amsterdam from December 2005 to April 2006 was the result of a co-operative endeavour between the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden (RMV) and the National Museum in Jakarta (MNI) as part of a broader project entitled Shared Cultural Heritage. Most of the material displayed had initially been in the possession of the Batavian Society Museum (located in present-day Jakarta), but it was divided in the early twentieth century – one part stayed in Indonesia while the other was sent to the Leiden Museum of Ethnology. The 2005-2006 exhibition was the first time since the colonial period that the collection, featuring predominantly Hindu-Buddhist objects, had been brought together. The exhibition organizers insisted on the importance of the ‘shared cultural heritage’ as an identity that needed to be safeguarded. In so insisting, however, they problematically presumed that the array of cultural forms that existed in the colonial empire were harmonious and used this presumption to try to promote that diversity as a model for facilitating cultural tolerance in the Netherlands (something that has been dramatically eroding in recent times). Interestingly, unlike previous exhibitions about Indonesia in the Netherlands (most of which had focused primarily on the artistic or ethnographic value of the objects collected during colonial times), this exhibition offered a detailed explanation of the predominately violent context in which the objects were collected, using the term ‘colonial wars’ (Ter Keurs 2005: 35). In my mind, there is something to be said about this open rhetoric about

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colonial wars, which brings with it an open discussion about the crisis of the Dutch identity, the rise of Dutch cultural fundamentalism, and the country’s political shift towards the right. During the years in which the Netherlands’ self-representation was that of multiculturalism, there was no mention of colonial lootings or the violence of the colonial conquest in any exhibition featuring material from the colonial Dutch East Indies.1 The supposed ‘multiculturalism’ of the Dutch East Indies was not compared with the state of multiculturalism in the Netherlands during the 1980s, as the Dutch nation and the Dutch empire were treated as separate matters (Bijs 2012). The rise of Dutch nationalism and the ‘history turn’ (Hurenkamp et al. 2011) that commenced in the 2000s – which, it should be added, brought into existence the Common Cultural Heritage Policy – encouraged a contentious lumping together of ‘colonial happy hybridity’ with colonial violence and looting. If the colonial army was instrumental in the management of this presumed colonial multiculturalism, one ponders what kinds of regulatory norms and ideas of tolerance and inclusion this museum exhibition and the politics behind it were aiming to promote. It is important to stress that, just like in many previous public engagements with the colonial history of Indonesia, the exhibition drew on the trope of Dutch colonial amnesia (discussed in chapter four) and made the assumption that the colonial past was absent from the Dutch public sphere – presuming a need for a ‘discovery’. In what follows, I first reflect on Indonesia’s colonial history and the role the Dutch played in establishing the Batavian Society of Arts and Science and the Batavian Society Museum (which were later merged to form the Indonesian National Museum) in order to critically illuminate the rationale behind the institutions’ claims of a ‘common cultural heritage’ and their representation of the colonial state as a successful ‘multicultural’ society. Second, I look at one of the possible ways in which the exhibition was received through an analysis of how and why Balinese subaltern citizens living in the Netherlands welcomed the exhibit, ignoring the violence that surrounded the collecting of the exhibition’s items during the colonial period. Thus, rather than primarily focusing on how the postcolonial nation of the Netherlands constructs its national identity in the public space (Walkowitz and Knauer 2009), my analysis is focused on the meanings that migrants from the former colony ascribe to the royal regalia on display, which were looted during the colonial conquest. I focus my analysis as 1 See Wiener (1994) for a detailed discussion about why the Dutch made no effort to individuate the kris in their museums.

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such in order to elucidate Balinese claims to shared heritage, which differ significantly from those promoted by institutions of the post-colonial Dutch state. In a broader sense, my analysis is about post-colonial subject formation and not about personal experiences of colonialism and its enduring effects as voiced by subaltern intellectuals (e.g. Fanon 1986; Spivak 1988; Bhabha 1994). Rather, I focus on the absence among subaltern citizens of what one would expect to exist, considering their history – namely, anti-colonial sentiment. My interest is in unravelling the relations and connections that my Balinese interlocutors make between themselves and the objects looted during the colonial occupation – in particular, the royal kris obtained during the annexation of Badung in 1906. Finally, I explore how forms of Balinese knowledge production that make an unconventional link between the colonial conquest and the presence of Balinese subaltern citizens in the Netherlands bring about heated debates in muthiethnic, multiracial Balinese-Dutch families.

The Colonial Collection, ‘Shared Cultural Heritage’, and ‘History Turn’ The Batavian Society of Arts and Science was established in 1778 and was initially managed by a high-ranking officer of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compaginie – VOC). The Society claimed to be the oldest of its kind in Asia and operated under the motto ‘For the Common Good’ (Ten Nutte van het Algemeen). Inspired by the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, the Society focused on what it saw as scientific research into topics ranging from history, ethnography, and literature to agriculture and medicine. The research results were published in Batavian Society Reports (Verhandelingen van het Batavische Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen) in the period between 1779 and 1950. Initially, membership in the Society was open only to Dutch citizens, mostly residents of Batavia (present-day Jakarta), but also to those living in the Netherlands and other Dutch colonies. Membership was made available to Indonesians in 1860 but was restricted to Javanese individuals of noble background. In the beginning, members donated their own collections to the newly formed Batavian Society Museum (1779). The National Law on Items of Cultural Property, passed in 1885, required all archaeological findings to be submitted to the museum. The collection of the Batavian Society Museum grew with rapid speed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries after the Dutch attack on the royal palaces in Lombok and Bali and their

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violent expeditions in Ache and South Kalimantan. Following decolonization, the Society changed its name to the Indonesian National Museum (Museum Nasional Indonesia). In time, many of the objects submitted to the museum were moved to the Netherlands, and in particular to the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. The Indonesian state made repeated requests for the return of the collection from the Leiden museum, but these were rejected until 1978, when the largest part of the Lombok treasure (together with a valuable Buddhist sculpture of the Prajnaparamita) was returned to the National Museum in Jakarta (see Ter Keurs and Hardiati 2006). Similar to European imperialism in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, Dutch colonial warfare of the nineteenth century was characterized by extensive looting of the defeated, with a particular interest in royal regalia and other symbols of rule (Hevia 2008: 129). Looted objects found their way to museums, private collections, and art markets and thus acquired ‘additional biographical elements’ (Kopytoff 1986: 64).2 As noted earlier, the exhibition Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past was the result of the co-operation between the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden and the Indonesian National Museum in Jakarta, but the concept of a ‘common’ cultural heritage was not initiated by these two institutions. The concept of common heritage as well as most of the funding for this costly exhibition came instead from the Dutch government’s new policy on cultural heritage. In 1997, Eimert van Middelkoop3, a member of the Dutch Parliament representing the conservative Christian Union party, brought up the question of Dutch colonial history in the public debate. His main argument was that Dutch colonial history should be reconceptualized as something more than just a dark page to be ignored and pushed away from the main narratives of Dutch nationhood. Gradually, the initiatives he developed resulted in the Common Cultural Heritage Policy that defined Dutch heritage overseas located in the territories that were once part of the Dutch East Indies and the Dutch West Indies. The policy focused on commonality with the purpose of fostering joint conservation efforts and strengthening bilateral relations between the Dutch state and its former colonies. Based on the idea that cultural heritage from the colonial period was formed under reciprocal cultural influence, it assumed that the nation-states that were listed as a priority in this project – Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Suriname, 2 For an important critique of the history of museums, ethnography, and collecting, see Clifford 1988. 3 Van Middelkoop later went on to become minister of defence in Prime Minister Balkenende’s conservative cabinet.

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Brazil, and Ghana – would have similar attitudes and interests (Fienieg et al. 2009; Oostindie 2009). The Common Cultural Heritage Policy required that cooperation in the conservation of the common heritage be based on the political goodwill and commitment of all parties, and this goodwill and commitment was made a threshold requirement for conservation funding proposals. Problematically, the focus on common and shared heritage assumed that the understanding of colonial history and its heritage would be the same in both the former colonies and the colonizing nation. By holding the concept of commonality as central to its actions with the former colonies, the Dutch Common Cultural Heritage Policy claims a continuing form of ownership over the heritage on the territory of the former colonies. This is not without its problems. While certain aspects of sharing certainly existed during colonialism, unquestioned assumptions of balance and equality seriously undermine the power relations that inscribed the colonial empire. None of the countries listed as priorities on the Dutch policy’s list signed the agreement at the national level. Despite this, some collaborative projects between the Dutch and the former colonial territories institution were realized, one of them being the exhibition I analyze in this chapter. It is important to stress here that the Common Cultural Heritage Policy was closely linked to the rise of Dutch nationalism, including the prominence of nationalist-populist political parties and a fixation with national history, often referred to as a ‘history turn’ (Hurenkamp et al. 2011). While an extensive discussion on this topic is beyond the scope of my analysis here, it is necessary to briefly reflect on a number of public events and on significant research related to the history of the Dutch East Indies and the broader public exploration of Dutch identity formations. This is important, as it helps us locate the broader socio-political context in which Balinese claims to common heritage with the former colonial power are generated. From 2006 to 2009, an extensive research project generously funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) was carried out by three major Dutch research institutions – the International Institute of Social History, the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), and the Meertens Institute. Entitled Bringing history home: Postcolonial identity politics in the Netherlands, the project was primarily focused on individuals designated as post-colonial migrants as well as their histories and institutions. The research was subsequently published in three book-length monographs (Leeuwen 2008; Bosma 2009; Oostindie 2009). Reflecting national concerns, the project was framed under

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the assumption that history had to be brought home, raising important and tension-ridden questions of ‘ownership’ of both ‘history’ and ‘home’. On several occasions, the project provoked tense public debates instigated by Indies people and organizations. The language employed in these debates was of the ownership of truth over histories and genealogies as well as the legitimacy of the interpretations they offered, with the aim of uncovering ruptures between the past and the present. The main concern voiced by the Indies individuals was related to the potential for academic research to create discourses about Indies people4 produced predominantly by non-Indies, senior male academics.5 Two years after the commencement of the project, another large-scale grant was allocated to research into the colonial past, this time to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientif ic Research (NWO), for a project entitled Sites, Bodies and Stories: The Dynamics of Heritage Formation in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia and the Netherlands (2008-2012).6 Approaching heritage formation as a dynamic process in both colonial and post-colonial Indonesia and the Netherlands, and focusing on ‘Sites’ (state interventions), ‘Bodies’ (international professional agendas), and ‘Stories’ (individual local cultural productions), the project offered much-welcomed critical perspectives on heritage studies (Boonstra 2009; Schulte Nordholt 2011; Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2011; Legêne, Purwanto, and Schulte Nordholt forthcoming). Simultaneously, a two-year project running from 2007 to 2009 entitled Be[com]ing Dutch was organized around questions of Dutch identity formation. Developed and hosted by the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, it featured debates, artist projects, exhibitions, and reading groups, with a particular focus on achieving the collective participation of art practitioners, academics, and citizens. Its events, which gathered together many international participants, featured debates about questions of globalization, citizenship, subjectivity, and national representations. In addition to these projects, a large exhibition curated by Meta Knol entitled Beyond the Dutch: Indonesia, the Netherlands and the Visual Arts, from 1900 Until Now was shown at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht between October 2009 and January 2010. The exhibition had the aim of engaging 4 See Ong (2003) for a discussion about Asian Americans and the power of academic discourse. 5 For a critical overview of the three monographs that came out of this project, see Legêne 2011. 6 For more information, see http://www.nwo.nl/onderzoek-en-resultaten/onderzoeksprojecten/91/2300140991.html, retrieved on 8 March 2014.

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Dutch-Indonesian cultural interactions and the ambition of being the first major attempt at invigorating the public post-colonial discourse in the Netherlands. Knol argued that although one in ten Dutch people have personal connections with Indonesia, there was surprisingly little knowledge about Indonesian contemporary art and culture. Knol envisaged that the exhibition would be didactic for museumgoers in the Netherlands who, according to her, suffer from deep-seated ‘Western-oriented art criteria’. Knol saw this as largely outdated in the broader global context (Knol 2010). Reflecting on complex entanglements between post-colonial Netherlands and Indonesia, the exhibition also included the work of Dutch artists who were either born in Indonesia or have links with the country. Aside from a few students of history and people working in the Dutch academic world, my interlocutors were not familiar with the details of the above-mentioned academic research. They were, however, certainly familiar with the public debates the research brought about. Many of my interlocutors visited the exhibitions of Beyond the Dutch and Be[com]ing Dutch, and their impressions were primarily articulated through an understanding that the Dutch East Indies and its heritage feature prominently in current Dutch national imaginaries. The most persistent comments I heard from my Balinese interlocutors were that ‘the Dutch cannot stay away from Indonesia’, ‘the Dutch will never stop longing for the Indies’, and ‘the Dutch feel guilty’, suggesting what Renato Rosaldo has called ‘imperialist nostalgia’. Rosaldo has argued that this nostalgia for a lost empire is marked with a sense of guilt for destroying that which is longed for, but the nostalgic discourse denies this guilt, as the ‘relatively benign character of most nostalgia facilitates imperialist nostalgia’s capacity to transform the responsible colonial agent into an innocent bystander’ (1989: 109). My interlocutors’ comments did not have the critical undertone central to Rosaldo’s argument. On the contrary, the increased interest in the heritage of the Dutch East Indies and the connectivities that ensued were articulated through a sense of pride about ‘Dutch and Indonesian special bonds’. These Balinese claims need to be situated within broader national public and political concerns, anxieties about foreigners (allochtonen) and foreign practices, as well as the presumed socioeconomic and cultural threats they are perceived to represent. Since the early 2000s, Dutch society has been undergoing tremendous changes in self-representation, which author Paul Scheffer has famously called a crisis of the Dutch national identity (Scheffer 2000a, 2000b, 2007). Cultural anxieties about otherness and their potential threat to how the Dutch nation envisages itself have been voiced through the anti-Islamic statements and sharp criticism of multiculturalism put forth by

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Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. Similar rhetoric has been employed with much success by Geert Wilders, a right-wing politician who has called for a tax on those who wear headscarves, compared the Qur’an with Mein Kampf, proposed to prohibit immigration from Muslim countries, and argued that citizens of allochthonous background with a criminal record should be returned to the country of origin of their parents and grandparents.7 Even though they are not of Muslim background, in the last several years a rising number of Balinese-Dutch children have been bullied at their prestigious schools, their dark skin tones being the main ‘sign of recognition’ of their allochtoon background. Across the Netherlands, a pattern of bullying has been reported at schools, with ethnically Dutch children – mimicking Geert Wilders’ statements about foreigners – targeting children of ethnic minorities and those who do not look white.8 It is in this climate of cultural fundamentalism and normalization of othering through racism and xenophobia that we need to situate Balinese claims to a shared heritage.9 In what follows, I discuss in some detail how the exhibition featuring objects collected in Indonesia during the colonial period were received by my Balinese interlocutors.

The Exhibition: Indonesia, The Discovery of the Past Held at the Nieuwe Kerk, a fifteenth-century church located on Dam Square in Amsterdam and frequently used for important public events, the exhibition Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past featured some 330 objects from Java, Bali, Lombok, Eastern Indonesia, and Sumatra. Keen to stress the idea of a ‘shared heritage’ and to imply equality, the curators emphasized that the number of objects on display that were held permanently in Indonesian and Dutch museums were almost equal, with 160 from Indonesia and 170 from the Netherlands (Keurs and Hardiati 2006). 7 Considering that Wilders has an Indies background (his parents immigrated to the Netherlands after the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies), comments have been voiced that if those with criminal records were to be sent back to the country of origin of their parents and grandparents, then Wilders should be sent to Indonesia. See http://www.speld.nl/2014/03/21/ pvv-wilders-bij-veroordeling-terug-naar-indonesie/ retrieved on 28 March 2014. 8 http://www.omroepbrabant.nl/?news/2084691263/Tilburgse+Amin+%2811%29+verdrieti g+na+Wilders-opmerking+Klasgenootjes+riepen+minder,+minder,+minder.aspx retrieved on 28 March 2014. 9 For similar debates in the context of the European Union, see Fortier 2006; Olwig 2011; Delanty et al. 2011; Grillo 2003; and Stolcke 1995.

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Accompanied by four of my Balinese interlocutors, I visited the exhibitions in March 2006. For three of them, this was their second viewing, despite the fact that getting to Amsterdam required several hours of intercity travel for each of them. The rich display of golden crowns, sacred daggers with precious stones, beautifully decorated temple doors, and royal garments urged visitors to admire not only the richness of Indonesian cultural traditions but also the affluence and power of the colonial empire. A detailed explanation of the violent context in which the objects were collected might have emanated from a post-colonial critique of colonial power relations, but the idealized celebration of colonial cultural diversity it created stood in sharp contrast to such critiques. Ironically, the trope of colonial ‘happy hybridity’ did not reflect on Indonesia’s rich Islamic cultural traditions. If this representation of the colonial society and its management were viewed through a positivist lens with the hope that it might serve as a model for tolerance in contemporary Dutch society, one cannot but wonder to what extent the approach also endorses the coercive marginalization of Islamic cultural traditions in the present. The section in the exhibition featuring objects from Bali offered an explicit representation of puputan (finishing, ending). The royal regalia and other objects looted after these events that came to be represented at the exhibition were accompanied by a text written immediately after the puputan by a correspondent for the Dutch newspaper De Locomotief describing the sad state of events following the puputan. In his text, the correspondent stressed how valuable treasures including manuscripts were ‘saved’ and sent to the National Treasury in Batavia. The text also mentions the valuable royal kris – a long dagger suitable for close combat – that were sent to the museum in Batavia, stressing that they had initially been ‘stolen’ by the prince himself during wars with smaller neighbouring states (Keurs and Hardiati 2006: 137). While a description of the violence of these events was included in the correspondent’s text, the exhibition’s reliance on Dutch sources – which stress the mercenary role of those who ‘saved’ the precious royal regalia and emphasised that the Balinese prince himself stole the sacred objects – serves to give context to these events in a manner that justifies the looting of the objects and larger colonial projects (see also Wiener 1995). While my interlocutors and I admired the beauty of the royal regalia, my comments about the people who had regretfully found their death during the puputan did not engage my interlocutors. They kept stressing that what had happened was history and that similar violent events have occurred all over the world and were by no means unique to Bali. Furthermore, they

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made numerous references to how Balinese arts came to be highly celebrated in the 1920s and 1930s, becoming known to the world even beyond the Dutch colonial empire. ‘It was during this period’, my interlocutors told me, ‘that foreigners began to visit Bali and to appreciate its religion and culture.’ My interlocutors did not make the critical connection between the puputan and colonial attempts to preserve Balinese culture and actively promote it through the emerging tourist industry.10 My suggestion of this idea was quickly dismissed with a firm conviction that the Dutch were powerful enough not to have to respond to accusations from the other countries at the time. After all, many wars had been held in Indonesia before, my interlocutors argued, but the Dutch never chose to promote and celebrate those cultures in the aftermath of that violence. The clear implication here was that what happened had to do specifically with the Balinese as a people and a culture rather than the simple geopolitical struggles of the time. The teenage child of one of my interlocutors, who accompanied us at the exhibition, proposed that perhaps before the conquest the Dutch did not know much about Balinese culture and thus were unable to know about its uniqueness, which dramatically changed once the Dutch became well established on the island. Her comment, however, was dismissed by remarks that ever since they set foot on Bali, the Dutch had valued and admired Balinese culture. While this statement brushed over other possibilities and interpretations, it was also grounded in my interlocutors’ familiarity with the existence of the Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk collection containing texts and drawings about Bali, which has been kept in Leiden since the late nineteenth century. Moreover, their claims were not far removed from Van der Tuuk’s own romanticized image of Bali. Adrian Vickers (1989: 83-85) describes Van der Tuuk as an eccentric intellectual who was born in Malacca (Malaysia) and spent his childhood in Surabaya in East Java. Being of mixed descent, he only visited the Netherlands to study and spent much of the rest of his life in the colonies. In 1870, Van der Tuuk travelled to Bali with the aim of studying Balinese culture. In 1873, he was given a job by the Netherlands Indies Government as a civil servant, which allowed him to pursue his interest in studying the Balinese language and culture. Vickers (ibid.) notes that Van der Tuuk was highly influential, advising other scholars living and working in Bali at the time. After his dictionary was 10 Both Vickers (1989) and Picard (1996) have argued that what was perceived as the selfsacrifice of the Balinese nobility significantly damaged the liberal image of the Netherlands in Europe, which in turn forced the Dutch government to turn towards the preservation and protection of Balinese culture.

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posthumously published, his work became the main source of knowledge about Bali. Van der Tuuk’s emphasis on Balinese cultural ‘uniqueness’ had a profound influence on how Balinese culture was subsequently understood both by the Balinese and foreigners alike. In the weeks that followed our visit to the Nieuwe Kerk, I discussed the exhibition with many of my other interlocutors. Only a few questioned the Dutch presence in the Indonesian archipelago in the first place, but even then, none of the comments doubted whether the Balinese royal regalia and other objects should have been on display. Rather, there was a sense that Bali and Balinese objects were not only an important but clearly an integral part of any exhibition about colonial Indonesia. The majority of my interlocutors visited exhibitions with their whole families, and those few who did not attend it reasoned that for them there was nothing new to be seen at the exhibition and certainly nothing to be discovered. However, most of my Balinese interlocutors thought that an exhibition of this sort should definitely be visited more by citizens of non-Balinese backgrounds. These arguments closely echo public, scholarly, and state policy concerns that there is an urgent need to enhance active citizenry participation on non-Western allochtonen in public events as a way of increasing social cohesion. In this way, Balinese subaltern citizens were somewhat in agreement with the title of the exhibition: Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past. However, in their interpretative understanding, other foreigners (particularly those who in their view were not well-informed about Balinese culture) needed to learn more about Bali and Indonesia in order to better understand Dutch society. Given that many Balinese people work alongside recent migrants, most of whom neither express a specific interest in the Balinese culture nor equate it with uniqueness and thus do not see Balinese people as a ‘different kind of foreigner’, my interlocutors noted that, perhaps, introducing these other foreigners to the richness of the colonial heritage and to Bali’s shared history with the Dutch might alter the ways in which other allochthonous citizens perceive Balinese people. Thus, in this case, Balinese people appear to be more concerned with their own situation and the production of their own hierarchies as compared with other foreigners than with state concerns about active citizenship as a way of enhancing social cohesion. Initially, it seemed that my interlocutors were oblivious to and entirely devoid of anti-colonial sentiments. Their claims to historical knowing were entirely focused on the longstanding Dutch admiration for Balinese culture, which was almost unanimously described to me as the inability of the Dutch to resist the beauty of Balinese dance, rituals, and religious practices. Considering that these statements were made from the standpoint of a

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predominantly anti-Islamic post-colonial society, it is not surprising that these claims about the Dutch colonial appreciation for Balinese culture were also articulated as a lack of interest in Islamic heritage on the part of the Dutch. These comments were strengthened (or perhaps inspired) by the exhibition’s focus on Indonesian Buddhist-Hindu heritage. In order to understand the exhibition better and to situate Balinese attitudes towards both the exhibition and their colonial history in general, we need to engage with Balinese-Hindu ontologies, including, most importantly, the visible and invisible worlds.

The Colonial Conquest and the Visible and Invisible Worlds Overseas In her groundbreaking study Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali, American anthropologist Margaret J. Wiener weaves together oral histories from Klungkung as well as Balinese texts and Dutch colonial sources in order to provide a complex account of Bali before, during, and after the puputan that took place in 1908. She argues that the Balinese were satisfactorily compliant colonial subjects. There were no rebellions and nothing that could be obviously identified as resistance. (1995: 4-5)

Wiener argues that the silence about the conquest existed on both the Balinese side and the Dutch side but contends that the Balinese silence was not an affirmation of Dutch authority, nor were the Balinese people indifferent about the loss of their leaders (1995: 5). The meaning of the conquest for the Balinese marked not only the end of political autonomy but also the end of a manifestation of powers in the invisible world (niskala). Wiener demonstrates how Klungkung stories about the conquest were focused entirely on a Balinese drama in which the colonial government is credited with little agency in the fall of the realm (ibid.: 9). This, she argues, was because the Balinese conceptualization of power was radically different from colonial interpretations. Before Wiener, American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1980) had made the claim that the pre-colonial ruling classes in Bali had a distinctly different idea of power from that of Europeans. In his much debated book, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali, he argued that the nineteenth-century Balinese state challenged the familiar models of political theory and standard Western approaches to

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understanding politics. Geertz claimed that Negara – the ‘seat of political authority’ – was a ‘theatre state’, governed by rituals and symbols rather than by force. According to him, the Balinese state did not rely on tyranny, conquest, or effective administration. Instead, it emphasized spectacle. The elaborate ceremonies were ‘not means to political ends: they were the ends themselves, they were what the state was for … Power served pomp, not pomp power’ (1980: 3). While a detailed discussion about Geertz’s seminal work is beyond the scope of my analysis, it is worthwhile highlighting the fact that Wiener offered a critical reflection on Geertz’s approach by claiming that his distinction between the expressive and instrumental obscures Balinese intentions (1995: 10). For the present discussion, it is crucial to emphasize that [i]t is impossible to understand the actions and words of Balinese without appreciating how much the invisible world is both taken for granted and intimately implicated in Balinese agency. (ibid.: 12)

The coexistence of the visible (sekala) and invisible (niskala) worlds is crucial in Balinese epistemologies of the real. From the Balinese perspective, power is not situated exclusively within the visible world and its social relations but rather is enmeshed in interactions between the visible and invisible worlds. Niskala, which can be more specifically translated as the invisible and intangible world, is inhabited by ‘niskala beings’. This can refer to the highest deities (e.g. Siwa, Wisnu) or to gods, imps, and spooks who reside in the local environment (Geertz 1994: 36). In opposition to this stands sekala – the visible, tangible world. Commonly, explanations of misfortunes or hardships are rarely attributed exclusively to personal carelessness or secular experience. Instead, those hardships, as well as physical health, economic prosperity, and a general sense of well-being, are all perceived to depend on a harmony between the visible and invisible worlds – sekala and niskala (e.g. Howe 1980; Lovric 1986; Warren 1993; Wiener 1995; Geertz 1994). Rather than perceiving the landscape of a new country as places where an individual’s access to the niskala world is regarded as impossible, most of my interlocutors see various visible phenomena as the manifestation of the intention of niskala beings. In the light of this, I argue that we need to situate the Balinese reception of the exhibition within a framework of Balinese interpretative understandings of the visible (sekala) and the invisible (niskala) overseas. The following discussion will demonstrate that an interpretative understanding of the puputan – including the looting of the objects and even Balinese presence in the contemporary Netherlands – are all interlinked.

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The Kris Pak Wayan, a long-term interlocutor of mine, has used many of our conversations as opportunities to update me on the different manifestations of niskala that he has noticed in the Netherlands. Like many of my other interlocutors, he f irmly believes that the sekala and niskala realms travel with Balinese people. He claims, as many others do, that it is of fundamental importance for Balinese people to be aware of this. Scholars have argued that the Balinese landscape is marked by references to cosmology, and this understanding of physical landscapes and cosmology is embedded in the Balinese people themselves (Hobart 1979; Lovric 1986). Drawing on Marilyn Strathern’s point that Melanesians ‘make places travel’ (1991), I suggest that place similarly travels with people in the Balinese cosmology as an integral part of people’s very bodies, moving to wherever Balinese people are living. Being versed in Balinese esoteric knowledge, Pak Wayan was convinced that Balinese people who are ignorant of the manifestations of niskala outside of Bali are faced with various kinds of misfortunes – illnesses, problems with spouses and children, extreme forms of jealousy among friends, unemployment, and depression. Accompanied by his wife and two sons, Pak Wayan visited the exhibition Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past and was particularly keen for his family to see the Balinese royal regalia. Their visit was narrated by Pak Wayan’s interpretation of puputan and his view on the presence of the Balinese royal regalia on display, which he also then shared with me. Pak Wayan’s narrative centred on the kris obtained after the conquest of Badung in 1906 but also referenced the kris taken from the royal house of Klungkung in 1908, currently in the collection of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. My Balinese interlocutors’ focus on the kris is not surprising. The kris is well known throughout the Malay Archipelago as an object with particularly potent relations with the invisible world (Rassers 1959; Solyom 1978; Errington 1983; Wiener 1995; Pedersen 2008). In his report to the Governor General in 1908, resident G.F. de Bruyn Kops wrote the following about a kris seized by the Dutch: ‘the people attribute [to these] the possession of supernatural forces.’ He recommended that ‘[t]o bring these again in the possession of Balinese lords would not thus be defensible’ (quoted in Wiener 1995: 345). As a result of the looting that followed the Dutch conquest, many kris ended up either in the Batavian Society Museum or in the Netherlands. In the 1930s, when the Dutch reinstalled the Balinese rajas, they also offered to return some of the royal objects to them. Most

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of the rajas requested the return of their kris but never received them. Today, the whereabouts of many kris remains unclear. Lene Pedersen (2008: 222) notes that representatives of the Indonesian nation-state have expressed their concern about the possible emanation of power from the kris (Pedersen 2008: 222). Pedersen’s 2008 recent study demonstrates that, aside from being very much a part of everyday life in Bali, a special kris of kinship known as Ki Bangawan Cangguh – claimed to be a fourteenthcentury gift to Bali’s king from the emperor of Majapahit – manifested its power in 1998 by entering a social project in the Balinese highlands that involved Balinese princes, ancestral powers, and the Indonesian president at the time. The kris are objects of power, commonly linked to the identity of their owners. Indeed, stories of the kris and their holders are frequently told in relation to each other. In Janet Hoskins’ terms, the kris are ‘biographical objects’ (1998).11 A royal kris stands for the power of the ruler, and heirloom kris passed down through the generations have particularly high potency. Kris are thus not just objects with particular aesthetics but also items that are invested with power (kesaktian), which, as Wiener (1995) has argued, were central for royal agency in pre-colonial Bali. Following this, Wiener reiterates that ‘powerful kris may work magic’ in the way of ‘surpris[ing] us into acknowledging that there is more to the way we act and perceive in the world than we normally agree to agree about’ (ibid: 345). As the following section shows, the Balinese kris on display at the exhibition and other kris kept in Dutch museums have become instrumental in the creation of new stories and interpretations of the relationship between people and things. My analysis follows scholarship (Strathern 1990; Thomas 1991) that pays attention to what particular objects have the potential to reveal and what they might manifest in a particular context. It is important to be mindful of the ways in which changing social and economic contexts generate contested meanings and values of material objects (Appadurai 1986; Marcus and Myers 1995; Price 2007; Tilley et al. 2006; Morphy 2008; Dragojlovic 2012b) and how these claims affect local meanings of citizenship and belonging. Likewise, we need to keep in mind certain literature from the anthropology of migration that emphasizes the importance of objects for migrant populations (e.g. Parkin 1999; Dragojlovic 2013) as well as the transformative value ascribed to objects in the diasporic context (Dragojlovic 2013).

11 See also Pedersen 2008.

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In his narrations, Pak Wayan explained how kris – and royal kris in particular – possess high levels of power from the niskala world. Throughout, he passionately argued that kris are powerful, independent agents with their own will and ability to act and exercise power in the sekala world. As such, kris cannot be manipulated or tricked. Indeed, in his renderings, the fact that the kris from Balinese royal houses found themselves in the Batavian Society Museum and other Dutch collections was not a sign of Balinese defeat or loss of power but on the contrary a manifestation of that very power. Put simply, the kris had themselves chosen to be taken by the Dutch. In this way, royal kris are imbued with absolute agency and do not in any way resemble narratives from Klungkung in which the Dutch are credited with an understanding of how power operates (Wiener 1995: 276-277). However, Pak Wayan’s narrative is not only concerned with the colonial conquest but more broadly with forces of globalization and with Balinese migration to the Netherlands in particular. Ultimately, his story credits the kris with envisaging the development of the globalizing world in the aftermath of colonialism and having the capacity to foresee the resulting Balinese migration: The kris are not here for nothing. Our exiles from 1965 found refuge here, they were treated well; and now there are so many of us here, our children will stay to live here, … kris have plans of their own which we do not know anything about.

Echoing Wiener’s observation that the kris ‘form a bridge between the great deeds of the past and those possible in the future’ (1995: 67), Pak Wayan does not see the presence of the kris in various museums as the end of their power but rather as a manifestation of their own intention to become translocal, just like Balinese migrants themselves. Thus, the Dutch merely facilitated what the kris themselves intended to do. Pak Wayan’s highly articulate narrative echoed that of many of my Balinese interlocutors who stressed that the kris were ‘here for a reason’; they ‘have their own plans for the future’ that cannot be predicted, and Balinese heirlooms are always close to Balinese people. Like Pak Wayan, they all reiterated the agency of the kris, similarly suggesting that kris had foreseen globalization and preceded (and perhaps facilitated) Balinese migration to the Netherlands. While Balinese interpretative understandings about the agentic possibilities of objects might vary to some extent, Balinese-Hindu ontology that takes agency of the objects seriously has become a source of contestation within multi-ethnic families.

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‘To me, you are not an allochtoon’: Citizens’ Integration and ‘Appropriate’ Ways of Knowing The fact that the Balinese do not talk about colonial history or violent colonial conquests in an anti-colonial way presents itself as a source of puzzlement and vigorous debates for Dutch spouses. I have witnessed several family conversations in which the Dutch wives took a radically critical view about what happened during puputan, referring to the actions as Dutch colonial atrocities. These women were, however, unable to elicit similar anti-colonial sentiments from their husbands or Balinese friends and acquaintances. Willeke, a Dutch woman in her late 30s at the time, commented: I do not understand this. Every time Nyoman does not feel like doing something I have asked him to do, he calls me ‘colonialist wife’, but now when we are talking about real colonialists assassinating thousands of Balinese people, he says, ‘that’s history’. I do not understand this. I do not!

Willeke, like some other of my Dutch interlocutors, took it upon herself to blame the Dutch colonial establishment for committing atrocities during the puputan and frequently derided Balinese people’s reluctance to criticize colonialism, construing it as the repression or denial of bad and uncomfortable feelings common to Balinese people. Almost without exception, Balinese men argued that the looted kris on display had special powers and could not easily have been captured by the Dutch. In other words, it was up to the kris to decide its destiny, not the Dutch. The ultimate power lay with the royal kris and not with the colonial empire. While these were appreciated as ‘nice traditional stories’, several women said, ‘here in the Netherlands we do not take those stories seriously. They are superstitions.’ This approach echoes the views of Dutch curator David van Duuren who argues in The Kris: An Earthly Approach to a Cosmic Symbol (1996: 94-96) that there are some superstitious kris owners in the Netherlands who believe that the objects they possess have a soul and are capable of acting independently. The frequent comments coming from some of my interlocutors about the repression or denial of bad feelings can be seen, on the one hand, as symptomatic of a broader ‘trauma culture’ (Berlant 2000) and, on the other, the emergence of what Nikolas Rose (1991) calls ‘psy discourse’, in the light of the proliferation of therapeutic culture and self-help guides in recent years. Rose argues that the therapeutic culture has spread far beyond the medical therapeutic realms to become present in the sphere of everyday

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life. The insistence that stories about the magical potency of a kris are nice traditional narratives that should not be taken seriously, limits the possibilities of appreciating nonlinear, non-secular understandings of history. This example highlights how engagement with colonial history by subaltern citizens, which is not articulated through vocal, argumentative resistance, is not seen as a legitimate mode of political agency but ascribed to a traumatized subject’s inability to speak. This disqualifying treatment of Balinese claims resonates closely with what Michel Foucault has called ‘subjugated knowledges’. Foucault urged his students to think about forms of knowledge production that have been ‘buried or masked in functional coherence or formal systematisation’ (2003: 7). While his focus was on a historically situated institutionalized production of knowledge, I find his arguments crucially relevant when looking at regulatory norms of knowledge production in multi-ethnic families. These norms need to be situated within public discourses and state policies concerning the integration and re-integration of foreigners and permanent residents respectively. In addition, we need to consider heterosexual gender relations and constraints and the expectations that middle-class Dutch women have about them, and how these play out when the women form families with Balinese men from much lower socio-economic backgrounds. In what follows, I take a detour from my discussion of my interlocutors’ reception of the Discovery of the Past exhibition to consider these broader contexts. This detour is crucial in allowing me to situate the reasoning that leads Dutch spouses and Dutch women in particular to subjugate Balinese knowledge of the magical power of the kris. The current desire to protect the integrity of the Dutch ethnic identity has resulted in the regulation of transnational families. This has manifested itself in the inclusion of those foreign family members who are viewed as ethnically similar to the ‘autochthonous’ Dutch and the exclusion of those who are not. Since the change in the Dutch civil law in 1994, anyone in the Netherlands wishing to marry a non-EU citizen must have her/his marriage motives screened by public officials ahead of time. In addition, the Dutch citizen must have permanent employment as well as an annual salary higher than the country’s average in order to meet the state’s standards and be deemed able to support a whole family. This often gives rise to intra-familial politics of dependency. Under Dutch immigration law, the foreign partner is dependent on their Dutch spouse during their life in the Netherlands (De Hart 2001, 2006). Thus, socio-economic class is directly linked to access to citizenship, and strict income requirements indirectly discriminate against family migrants from so-called non-Western countries,

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namely all countries outside of the Schengen Agreement,12 the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. In addition to economic considerations, gender practices are perceived by policymakers as a major obstacle to an immigrant’s ability to integrate into Dutch society. In the context of these debates, the Dutch culture in particular and ‘Western culture’ in general are seen to be exemplified by the liberal and secular norms that currently shape Dutch family law: universal human rights, the equal treatment of men and women, and individual freedom. In contrast to these norms, the cultural norms of non-Western immigrants – and of Islamic immigrants in particular – are perceived, according to a selective caricature, to be religiously inspired, patriarchal, and with no place for the emancipated woman. Concerns about non-Western influence escalated during the late 1990s and early 2000s and culminated in the introduction of the Civic Integration Act in 2007, which requires not only new migrants but also ‘oudkomers’ who are ‘allochtonen’ (permanent residents with non-Western backgrounds) to successfully pass the latest civic integration course. This act gave state institutions the power to identify, mobilize, and police the country’s entire existing permanent resident population in order to determine who needed to undergo the integration exam (inburgering), regardless of the number of years they had already lived as permanent residents in the Netherlands. In these processes, many Dutch spouses and in-laws see themselves as fundamentally important in helping their Balinese partners to not only understand but also accept what they believe to be Dutch common norms and values (normen and waarden). One day in 2010, I was discussing employment conditions with Pak Kadek, one of my interlocutors, who had at the time been living in the Netherlands for three years. Working in a factory as a manual labourer, he told me that he worked alongside other ‘black and brown’ allochtonen. Pak Kadek’s Dutch wife Saskia quickly commented: ‘You mean they are Surinamese and Africans’, replacing his language of racialization with the language of ethnicity. Pak Kadek: ‘Yaa … you know poor black migrants’.

12 The members of Schengen in 2014 were Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France (excluding overseas departments and territories), Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lichtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands (excluding Aruba, Curaçao, Saint Maarten, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba) Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

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Saskia: ‘Kadek, I explained to you before that here we do not call people ‘black’. We [Dutch people] are not racist.’ Pak Kadek: ‘I do not know about that, but why do you have black schools (zwarte scholen)?’ Saskia: ‘It has nothing to do with being racist. You know that these schools are in poor neighbourhoods with majority immigrant populations.’ Pak Kadek: ‘Yaa … I am lucky we do not live there. Life is hard there.’ Turning to me, Saskia continued: ‘I’ve been encouraging him to go to school and then he can get a nice office job, like Nyoman from Rotterdam. No-one would say that Nyoman is allochtoon.’ ‘Aaahh,’ protests Pak Kadek, ‘all Dutch wives want their Balinese husbands to be like kantoor Nyoman (officer Nyoman).’

Like numerous others, Saskia fails to grasp the relation between race and socio-economic standing.13 By commenting that Nyoman does not appear allochtoon, Saskia is lifting him up from the low allochtoon status, thereby obscuring the underlying presupposition that the term autochtoon represents a higher category towards which other immigrants should aspire; especially those with a Dutch spouse and multiracial children. Barely any of my Dutch interlocutors ever used the word ‘race’, arguing that ‘race’ was not a scientific concept. Resonant with these sentiments are various scholarly claims which posit, problematically, that the lack of the use of the term ras (race) in everyday Dutch language is proof that there is no racism in the Netherlands (Verkuyten 1995; Botman and Wekker 2001). In a similar way, the dominant norm prescribes that skin colour is ‘unimportant’. At the same time, skin tone stratification is very present. When articulated by white, ethnic Dutch subjects, the privileges of white skin are never mentioned, while the darkness of one’s skin and darker skin tones in particular are only ever mentioned as not being relevant, raising tensions surrounding white invisibility (see also Hondius 1999: 410). Philomena Essed and her co-authors (Essed and Trienekens 2008; Essed and Nimako 2006; Essed and Hoving 2014) have cogently argued that, in the Dutch context, references to race are often intertwined with notions of ethnicity and culture, which make them morally acceptable.14 Such practices are resonant with 13 For a detailed discussion about the failures of ethnic Dutch citizens to grasp the relationship between race and socio-economic standing, see the empirical study conducted by Essed and Trienekens (2008). 14 Following Pieters, Essed and Trienekens (2008) have argued that the national panic over foreigners and foreign influences has its roots in cultural racism and Orientalism.

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what has been termed a ‘racial democracy’ in Brazil (Goldstein 1999) and Colombia (Wade 1995), where racial discourses are embedded in everyday interactions but in codified and masked ways. Stuart Hall (1991) and others after him have pointed out that racial identities are changing and complex and a product of culture rather than nature, acquiring meaning through social classification and embedded in systems of power. Rather than being discarded or described as irrelevant, close attention needs to be paid to the complex ways in which racial categories are produced and lived in everyday situations. We have seen in the conversation between Saskia and Pak Kadek how ‘whiteness as a form of power is defined, deployed, performed, policed and reinvented’ (Twine and Gallagher 2008: 5). In a similar vein, Twine and Gallagher make an important point by arguing that across Euro-American societies, whiteness is still privileged despite the visible and influential existence of progressive social politics and interracial social movements. In addition to the state-run integration courses, Balinese people are taught about Dutch culture by their Dutch spouses, in-laws, and friends as well as acquaintances and neighbours. All of these individuals feel motivated and morally obliged to explain the Dutch culture and way of life to the Balinese individuals in their lives, as well as current social, political, and economic conditions, in order to help them achieve the status of a ‘well-integrated migrant’. The ultimate goal of these narratives is not only to ensure that the newcomer understands local particularities as articulated by those close to him or her but also to motivate the development of personal strategies that will convince them that their present class position is only temporary and that, as long as the Balinese person has an ethnically Dutch partner and is a member of a ‘common’ Dutch family, the Netherlands is a land of numerous opportunities for them. Nevertheless, for newcomers whose high school education from Indonesia is only partially recognized, taking this path is quite difficult. For these individuals, obtaining even a clerical job assumes three to four years of further full-time schooling. For most Balinese men with female Dutch partners, full-time education is hardly a possibility, as most of them work part-time in order to take care of the young children. They also do the cooking and other household chores. Where the wife’s income is much higher than the husband’s, the husband tends to take over most of the care of their children and domestic work. This results in a radical reversal of Balinese gender relations, where childrearing and domestic work are traditionally done by women. To describe their new status, Balinese men commonly say that they were kings in Bali but are only house husbands in the Netherlands. When a Balinese man works part-time and takes care of domestic duties, additional study emerges as

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a daunting task. While many Dutch women specifically want to represent themselves as modern and emancipated and far removed from patriarchal gender norms, the importance ascribed to their husbands’ achievements in higher education and the workforce reinforces a normative gender order in which the husband has a higher if not equal educational and social standing compared with his wife. This patriarchal gender normativity is also reflected in the way that Balinese women who have male Dutch partners are rarely expected to achieve higher education and are instead encouraged to undertake further vocational training in typically feminine professions such as the care and beauty industries. This divide illustrates the extent to which expectations of integration are gendered and racialized. It also reveals how governmental technologies of integration operate at the level of everyday life, away from the prescribed civic integration courses (inburgeringscursussen) and integration exams (inburgering). While Balinese culture is almost without exception talked about in romanticized and idealized language by the ethnically Dutch members of Balinese-Dutch families, the instances in which a Balinese person might interpret an everyday event or action as potentially causing ‘good’ or ‘bad’ luck are frequently perceived as threatening by these same Dutch family members for the presumed lack of ‘appropriate’ or ‘logical’ thought they represent. These interpretations by Balinese people are thus labelled as superstitions that need to be eradicated. For Dutch spouses and in-laws, the matter of a Balinese person becoming a ‘good enough’ citizen is not only a matter of personal achievement for the Balinese person but is of broader importance for the whole family. Making Balinese people ‘appropriate’, however, narrows their proximity or commonality with foreigners whose beliefs and cultures are in sharp opposition to what are seen as ‘common norms and values’ in the Netherlands. While discourses of ‘commonality’ and normalcy are associated with Dutchness, there is an undertone in all of them suggesting that the idea of normalcy, however abstract, is universally valued in Western civilization. In line with this, Dutch spouses refuse to refer to their partners as ‘migrants’ or allochtonen, as these terms are most often associated with Turkish and Moroccan newcomers who migrate to the Netherlands as part of the family reunification and marriage migration schemes, and these migrants are perceived to be the worst threat to the Dutch national identity. Having a Dutch partner, being a member of an ethnic Dutch family, and being non-Muslim, Balinese people are positioned by their ethnic Dutch family members as newcomers who have the potential to be good citizens, or if necessary to be uplifted from the dangers of inappropriateness and cultural backwardness associated with foreigners and

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foreign practices. Rather than being a given, the idea of Balinese people not being migrants – as frequently stated by their spouses, in-laws, and ethnic Dutch friends and acquaintances – is deeply rooted in a sense of anxiety about ‘foreignness’ that looms large in everyday life experiences. The tensions on these points that occasionally arise between spouses in Balinese-Dutch families stem from the pressure that exists for the ethnic Dutch citizen in the relationship (and Dutch women in particular) to uplift their non-Western partner to a social standing in which they can ‘pass’ as almost non-allochtoon. The Balinese partner is expected to achieve the education and values associated with the status of their middle-class Dutch spouses. On this point, Gyanendra Pandey (2009) has cogently argued that the middle classes have always been defined by exclusions on the basis of gender, race, and religion. In his nuanced discussion about the subaltern middle class of African Americans and the dalit (ex-untouchables in India) in North America, Pandey stresses that middle-classness is perceived as merit-based and not associated with inherited wealth or privilege but rather with the possibility for self-fashioning, individual achievements, and opportunities. It is ultimately seen as a sign of modernity (2009: 323). Thus, the achievement of middle-class status (a status that for a long time excluded ‘non-whites’) is something that is done through personal efforts of education and self-improvement. In this way of thinking, the socio-economic class in which one finds oneself can be undone or changed by following specific rules and making specific achievements. This approach assumes that elevating one’s social class can occur through proper education and the adoption of desirable cultural competencies and knowledge. When this is achieved, it can even result in the dilution of skin shades, meaning that non-Western allochtonen might be able to ‘pass’ as autochthonous or even white subjects, thus becoming unnoticed, unnamed, and unmarked. While the possibility of ‘passing’ suggests the destabilization of the system of power in which racialization is embedded, Ahmed (1999) reminds us that, through this very process of destabilization, existing power relations in fact became reinforced and solidified. Willeke’s comment that her partner refers to her as a ‘colonialist wife’ is by no means unique. On the contrary, I have heard my Balinese interlocutors use the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘Dutch’ together on many occasions to refer not to the presence of the Dutch empire in Bali but to the various forms of integrative, enculturating actions their spouses, in-laws, and neighbours use in order to teach them how to be ‘proper citizens’. In its usage by subaltern citizens, ‘colonialist’ here refers to the implementation of current integration policy ideals within the family, which not only fails to recognize Balinese people as the ‘best-of-all-the-rest’ but also denies Balinese ontology.

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‘Shared Cultural Heritage’ and Translocal Kebalian Actor-network theory (ANT), and in particular the work of Bruno Latour, has importantly emphasized the need for social scientists to consider ‘non-human actors’ in their analyses of various social phenomena. Latour argues that subjects and objects are entangled in networks of assemblages between human and non-human actors. As my ethnographic material has demonstrated, ‘networks’ between people and things need to be situated within a specific historical context (see also Navaro-Yashin 2009, 2012). Developed as a critique of social constructivism, which long dominated the academic world, actor-network theory took a radically different approach by emphasizing the primacy of objects and visible matters. However, as Navaro-Yashin has cogently argued in her critique of ANT, the marginalization of ‘the human’ can lead to a failure to acknowledge that objects are also discursively qualified. My ethnographic material attests to this critique of an object-centred approach and urges me not to make sharp distinctions between subjects, subjectivities, and objects. Instead, it is through the articulation of subject-object relationships that the production of knowledge about objects (for example, the kris) and subjects (here, Balinese people) is reiterated. The topics of migration and multiethnic families make the discursive spaces in which relationships between people and things are claimed, debated, and contested crucially important for both collective and personal re-productions of kebalian. A major challenge for many of my Balinese interlocutors was to have their interpretations accepted by their nonBalinese partners and children as valid and legitimate claims to Balinese translocal belonging – not simply as ‘traditional stories’ without any real power or legitimacy behind them but rather as ontologically real. These concerns, as well as debates between Balinese people on the questions of power and the visible and invisible worlds outside of Bali, are sites of the conceptual reconfiguration of kebalian and of the development of Balinese tradisi baru (new traditions) overseas. For a long time now, scholars have argued that the notion of culture is best seen as a creative practice that is always evolving (e.g. Wagner 1975), and this has certainly been the case in Bali.15 However, the more important question here, as Nicholas Thomas (1992: 216) has argued, is ‘not … How are traditions invented? but instead, 15 See Bakan (1999) for a consideration of the development of new traditions in Bali, particularly through the government-sponsored ‘kite festival competition’ and new ‘traditional’ marching gamelan bands.

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against what are traditions invented?’ Life in multiethnic and multiracial families in Dutch post-coloniality are sites in which kebalian is produced as a translocal concept but always in conceptual reference to Balinese-Hindu ontology and colonial history. However, as we have seen, Balinese claims to non-conventional knowledge, where objects such as the kris have real power, are contested by Dutch spouses and in-laws who are concerned to elevate their Balinese partners from the position of allochtoon but also to prevent their multiethnic children from supporting claims that ascribe power to objects as anything more than traditional stories. Balinese renditions about kris and their power are clearly translocal and focused on the re-production of kebalian in the Netherlands but might not be relevant to the other Balinese diasporic contexts. In his discussion about kebalian in Bali, Michael Picard (1996) conceptualizes it as a ‘transcultural discourse’ by stressing its historically constructed, interactive character.16 In his recent discussion about relations between Hindu-Balinese and ethnically Chinese people in Bali, Volker Gottowik (2010) analyzes Barong Landung, a type of barong performance consisting of a black-and-white couple, recognized by many as a symbol representing the first ancestors, to argue that this multi-ethnic pair serves as a reminder to Hindu-Balinese people that their origins are outside of the island – their religion derives from India and certain aspects of their culture come from China. Leo Howe (2001) has emphasized the transnational dimension of Balinese Hinduism, suggesting that Balinese people see India as the homeland of their religion. He draws his argument from the high value ascribed by Balinese-Hindu leaders to religious education in India. Howe (1999) argues that emerging forms of Hinduism in Bali, such as the Sai Baba and Hari Krishna movements, suggest that these are not seen as foreign imports but as closely related to existing Balinese religious traditions. This suggests multiple and complex interactions between the ‘local’ and the ‘foreign’ (Ramstedt 2004). India scholar Assa Doron (2006) goes so far as to suggest that the Balinese might be the first Indian diaspora. While this suggestion seems somewhat far-fetched, we can certainly say that Balinese-Hinduism has translocal dimensions. A conceptual recasting of ethnic identity in migration is inevitable, and more than in any other Balinese diasporic context, the collective and 16 Balinese debates about ethnic identity that centre around the notions of agama (religion), adat (custom), and budaya (culture) are ongoing ones and are made in relation to different forms of foreign influences (see Rubinstein and Connor 1999; Vickers 1996; Creese 2004; Schulte Nordholt 2007; Fox 2011) and local concerns (Warren 1998; Baulch 2007).

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personal expressions of kebalian in the Netherlands are intricately and unavoidably related to the colonial. While Balinese debates about ethnic identity in Bali are ascribed to local urban intellectuals, in the context of migration, discussions about ethnic identity are a matter of common concern and one of the most frequent topics at social gatherings and Balinese-Hindu festivals. The notion of diasporic kebalian, as the ethnographic data in this chapter has demonstrated, is firmly based in its rejection of linear temporality and is ultimately translocal. Indeed, the interpretative understanding of past and present relationships entirely undermines the linear approach to history – wherein post-colonialism is a historical epoch succeeded by colonialism – as well as the power relations that such linear understandings imply. The exhibition Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past and the policy behind it have evoked broader debates about national legacies and state boundaries. The concept of ‘discovery’ – in this case the act of achieving knowledge – presumes that what is to be discovered had, until its discovery, been unknown. In the context of the exhibition, ‘discovery’ referred more to what had been forgotten or had never been acknowledged. The exhibit seems to call for the ‘discovery’ of a past in which the Dutch state is represented not only as strong and affluent but also as capable of managing the incorporation of ethnic and cultural diversity while simultaneously taking care of and educating ‘the other’ of their own cultural richness. Clearly, the ways in which citizens of the nation-state position themselves in relation to the national past is directly related to ethnic, class, and racialized hierarchies that underpin broader national narratives. In this context, Balinese people are not merely visitors but rather subaltern citizens of the state with families, social networks, and organizations that are Balinese-Dutch. These claims to intimacy and proximity with the Dutch across colonial and post-colonial temporalities challenge the idea of the Dutch as those with the ultimate power (colonizers and autochthonous citizens) and of Balinese people as those with extremely limited power (colonized, migrants). Balinese narratives about these subjects reflect processes of citizenship-making which occur through claims to divergent degrees of distance and proximity to the colonial and a sense of familiarity between themselves and the Dutch in different times and places. These claims to intimacy are central to the changing notion of kebalian and to what it means to feel at home as Balinese people and collectivities in Dutch post-coloniality today.

4

A Balinese Colonial Drama without the Balinese? Interethnic Dynamics in Post-Colonial Commemorations

On 10 June 2009, I was invited by Ibu Setia, another one of my long-term interlocutors and one of the founding members of the dance group Bali Ayu, to attend the group’s dance performance in Nijmegen, the largest city in the eastern part of the Netherlands. The performance was to take place at the Stadsschouwburg, Nijmegen’s main theatre, as a prelude to Puputan, Val van Bali (Puputan, The Fall of Bali), to be performed by the choir Colourful City Koor.1 Established in 2003 at a time when public discourses on failed multiculturalism were just beginning to heat up, the Colourful City Koor consists of some 80 members of various ethnic backgrounds and is directed by Johnny Rahaket, who is of Moluccan descent. The choir specializes in world music with the goal of introducing different musical traditions to Dutch audiences. The event I was invited to attend commemorated the centenary of the 1908 puputan in which the last independent Balinese kingdom of Klungkung was conquered by the Dutch and brought under colonial rule. I begin this chapter by exploring the context of recent commemorative practices related to the Dutch East Indies that have stemmed not from a Dutch nationalist turn to history but rather from a longstanding battle by people of Indies descent for recognition of historical injustices in Dutch society – a battle that can be contrasted to Balinese people’s interpretations of Balinese-Dutch relations. Setting the scene is important, as it helps us to locate the broader socio-political circumstances in which post-colonial memorial work is situated. In the second half of the chapter, I discuss the commemorative performance Puputan, Val van Bali as well as Balinese subaltern citizens’ (non‑)participation in it. A detailed analysis of ethnographic material will reveal the complex set of interethnic dynamics that exist in post-colonial commemorative practices as well as divergent interpretations of the common colonial heritage. Overall, the chapter charts further discourses about kebalian in relation to Bali’s colonial history and the rise of Balinese debates over the collective ‘we’ in the diaspora in relation to other ethnic groups with Indonesian heritage. The discussion demonstrates 1

http://www.colourfulcitykoor.nl/ Retrieved on 10 March 2014.

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that Indies and Moluccan protagonists of the commemorative performance understand and interpret the colonial past differently from my Balinese interlocutors, who, as earlier established, use the past to make claims to proximity and intimacy with the Dutch in the present. In contrast to this, the Indies and Moluccan protagonists perceive the colonial past as the ultimate subjugation of a colonized people and themselves as political agents who ought to employ a vocal resistance in order to highlight past injustices and seek accountability today for occurrences in the past. Crucially important here is the Balinese understanding of historical and political agency (as discussed in chapter three) but also the fact that the Dutch colonial presence in Bali was much more short-lived than in other parts of the Indonesian archipelago. This fact sheds important light on post-colonial interpretations and struggles for recognition and entitlement to heritage by Balinese people and those of Indonesian descent in the context of a multiethnic state with a long colonial history.

Post-Colonial Politics of Remembering Interethnic dynamics in post-colonial politics of memory and commemoration need to be situated within the broader politics of memory and forgetting in relation to the Dutch East Indies in Dutch post-coloniality. It needs to be said at the outset that the field of memory studies has tended to approach memory and forgetting as two things that are in radical opposition to each other. In my understanding (which accords with recent studies within the field), however, memory and forgetting are not stable, mutually exclusive categories but rather mutually constitutive analytical frameworks. In the introduction to their voluminous work Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwartz state that there is ‘no memory without forgetfulness, no forgetfulness without memory’ (2010: 4).2 The politics of forgetting and other forms of anti-memory are often key to nation-building and state making projects (Werbner 1998: 74). Tendencies towards collective oblivion are purposeful and deliberate and constitute a process that Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler have termed the ‘art of forgetting’, which they see as a ‘delicate enterprise … [which is] part and parcel of remembering’ (1999: xii). Arguing against the tendency of memory studies to perceive forgetting as a failure of memory, Paul Connerton (2008) delineates 2 For more details about forgetting within memory studies, see Connerton 2001, 2008; Olick et al. 2011; Forty and Küchler 1999; and Bijl 2012 for the context of the Netherlands.

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seven different types of acts which are commonly seen as synonymous with the action ‘to forget’. Here, I briefly reflect on the seven proposed types in order to stress the importance of approaching the concept of forgetting not as something that is in binary opposition to remembering but as something that, along with memory, is constituted through complex processual interactions. Importantly, paying close attention to Connerton’s multiple forms of forgetting prompts us to pay more attention to divergent modalities of forgetting. Connerton begins by explaining ‘repressive erasure’ (ibid.: 60) as an act of forgetting that is characteristic of totalitarian regimes that utilize repression in order to bring about historical breaks or to deny historical rupture. This is similar to the second type of forgetting, ‘prescriptive forgetting’ (61), which is advanced as an act of the state but, unlike in the acts of ‘repressive erasure’, can be publicly acknowledged. The third type, ‘forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity’ (62), challenges the idea that acts of forgetting always entail a loss. Fourth, acts of ‘structural amnesia’ (64) are most commonly related to genealogy work, wherein those who are actively remembered in family genealogies are those that are perceived in some way to be significant in the family’s history. The fifth type, ‘forgetting as annulment’ (64), are acts that flow from an oversupply of information, whereas the sixth type, ‘forgetting as planned obsolescence’ (66), is generated by a capitalist system of consumption. The seventh type are acts of ‘forgetting as humiliated silence’, which are related to political expediency and civil society – ‘its most salient feature is a humiliated silence’ (67). Consistent with Connerton’s work, scholars concerned with social memory and forgetting (for example, Antze and Lambek 1996; Tapp 2002) have persuasively argued that we need to be particularly concerned with how the past is forgotten. In so doing, the processes of remembering and forgetting are contextualized and situated. Apprehensions with and presumptions of ‘forgotten colonial histories’ loom large in post-colonial Dutch society. Discourses about the forgotten parts of colonial history have been particularly significant in the larger project of Indies cultural politics and Indies struggles for recognition within the imagined community of the Dutch nation. One of the primary concerns of Indies political activism centres on people not having received compensation for services performed in the Dutch colonial institutions and the inadequate treatment of Indies war victims. While this debate – which has been going on for almost half a century – is beyond the scope of my analysis, it is important to note that the allocation of Dutch national funding in relation to its colonial history in the Dutch East Indies increased significantly in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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The most far-reaching initiative of the Dutch government’s allocation of funding for Indies projects was Het Gebaar (The Gesture), established in 2001 for two main purposes. The first was to provide for the processing of applications, the verifying of claims, and the making of payments to those Dutch nationals who had lived in the Dutch East Indies during the Second World War and had settled in the Netherlands before 1967. The aim of this initiative was to recognize the suffering experienced by Indies individuals, whether during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, the subsequent Indonesian war for independence (the bersiap period), their difficult repatriation to the Netherlands, or their less-than-welcoming reception by the Dutch bureaucracy and local people. The second purpose was to solicit proposals from individuals and groups for projects that would enhance the well-being of Indies people. It is important to underline here that the Dutch media has been saturated with fiction films, TV series, documentaries, and travel and fiction writing about the former colony since the 1960s (Pattynama 2000, 2012a, 2014; Bijl 2012). Many regional pasar malam festivals, which occur on a regular basis throughout the country, are rich sites of Indies and Indonesian expressive cultures. The Dutch media regularly report on debates about the legacy of Dutch colonialism, such as the massacre of the Javanese village of Rawagede in 1947, and on commemorations about the end of the Second World War in Asia. An extensive body of academic literature has been published on the theme of the Dutch East Indies and Indies people in the Netherlands since the 1960s, with a dramatic increase since the late 1990s and 2000s. Funded by Dutch state resources, several large research projects commenced in 2005 with the goal of rewriting the history of the Dutch East Indies and their repatriates. These projects resulted in numerous publications which were written to be as accessible as possible to a broad audience (see, for example, Captain et al. 2000; Captain 2002; Steijlen 2002; Meijer 2004; Bosma, Raben, and Willems 2006; Vries 2009; Bosma and Raben 2009; Bosma 2009; Van Leeuwen 2008; Willems 2008; Oostindie 2012). The memorialization of the Second World War in the Dutch East Indies and the politics surrounding these memorials have been another point of bitter debate in the Netherlands since the early 1960s. The national monument to the Second World War in Dam Square in Amsterdam was initially built as a memorial for the war victims in Europe, but after protests from those who were in the Dutch East Indies, an additional urn was added. A distinction was not made, however, to signify that the majority of the Royal Dutch East Indies Army (KNIL) soldiers were indigenous or that Indies people also suffered during the war (Bossenbroek 2001). Indies

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dissatisfaction over these and other national commemorative practices resulted in the first Indies monuments being built in 1971 in Apeldoorn and in 1972 in Bronbeek. In the 1980s, the 15 August 1945 Foundation (the date which marked the end of the Second World War in the Dutch East Indies) was charged with organizing a national commemoration ceremony to be held in the city of Utrecht that year. The ceremony was attended by Dutch and Indonesian state dignitaries as well as some 111,000 visitors.3 The foundation’s activities resulted in the opening of a major Indies monument in The Hague in 1988, which has served ever since as the site for the 15 August Memorial Day events, regularly broadcasted on national television (see Oostindie 2012: 91-93). My careful analysis of Puputan, Val van Bali charts interethnic dynamics in the post-colonial commemorative practices that stemmed from the organizers’ firm intention to reveal what has been presumably forgotten and/or missing from the Dutch national imagery: colonial history and its related atrocities. It is important to stress, however, that their attempts ‘to reveal’ are neither unique nor new. The group Stichting Gastdocenten WOII ZO Azie (Network of Visiting Teachers on World War Two in Southeast Asia), for example, has been particularly active in spreading awareness about the history of the Dutch East Indies during the Second World War by giving lectures across the Netherlands and Southeast Asia.4 In 2010, Aad Engelfriet, a history teacher in the town of Geldrop-Mierlo, offered a course at the adult education centre (volksuniversiteit) entitled ‘The forgotten history of the Dutch colonies’ and built an elaborate website about Dutch colonialism.5 The course, which focused on the idea that Dutch history needs to be brought into the open and revealed to the wider public, followed in the footsteps of the 2002 book, Black book of the Netherlands overseas: What all Dutch people should know (Zwartboek van Nederland overzee: Wat iedere Nederlander moet weten) by Ewald Vanvugt. The book details various violent events, from the crusades in the thirteenth century to the Dutch-Indonesian wars in the 1940s, all committed by people from the part of Europe where the Dutch nation-state is currently located. Presuming that the general Dutch public is oblivious to these events, Vanvugt uses images and stories about the atrocities with the aim of altering the course of Dutch national memory work.

3 4 5

See also Oostindie, Schulte Nordholt, Steijlen (2011). http://www.gastdocenten.com/organisatie.html Retrieved on 11 March 2014. http://www.engelfriet.net Retrieved on 11 March 2014. See also Bijl 2012.

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And yet Dutch historians, the general public, and the media are continuously accused of suffering from colonial amnesia. Using Ann Rigney’s notion of the ‘scarcity principle’, Paul Bijl (2012: 446) has argued that these accusations are more than a century old. The Dutch mnemonic community has been forged through the convergence and repetition of memories without achieving a consensus on colonial memory. Bijl’s analysis stems from a simultaneous fascination with the numerous sources providing information about the colonial Dutch East Indies as well as ongoing protests about the marginalization of Indies history in Dutch national imaginaries. Contributing to this debate, I suggest that we need to make a distinction between academic and popular historiography, and then pay attention to how the dynamics between the two might be obscured and/or limited. As Johnathan Fabian (2001) has argued, we need to look at the dynamics between ‘levels of reflection, arts of memory, and form[s] of representation’ (2001: 78). Rather than locating my analysis of post-colonial memory work in the Netherlands within a textual analysis, I offer a detailed ethnographic account of interethnic dynamics over commemorative practices, which I suggest provides insights that would remain invisible if I were only to focus on the representational in post-colonial memory making. In what follows, I explore how this kind of memory work is enacted by Puputan, Val van Bali to address the broader question about post-colonial memory work in the Netherlands and to tease out why Balinese subaltern citizens, whose colonial history was commemorated by the performance, both distanced themselves from and were marginalized by the event.

The Performance: Puputan, Val van Bali ‘In most cases, we dare not know what is true’ (‘In velen gevallen durven wij niet weten wat waar is’) – Multatuli

The commemorative performance Puputan, Val van Bali was organized to mark the centenary of the Balinese puputan (ending, finishing), which brought the Balinese people under colonial rule. The public announcement of this performance included the quote seen above, which first appeared in the novel Max Havelaar by the well-known Dutch author Eduard Douwes Dekker. Using the pseudonym Multatuli, Dekker wrote a book condemning the abuses that occurred during colonialism in the Dutch East Indies. Although Multatuli’s literary merit has been much criticized, the director of Puputan, Val van Bali, Johnny Rahaket, chose to quote him not only because

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it reflected what he wanted to convey in the performance (i.e., the ‘truth’) but also because he saw Multatuli as a rare and unique example of Dutch criticism of colonial inequalities. Prior to the performance, which took place on 10 June 2009, a mobile gamelan orchestra, dressed in Balinese clothes suitable for gamelan performance, was led by Rahaket from the Indische Buurt6 in Nijmegen to the historical barracks where troops of the Royal Dutch East Indies Army (KNIL) had assembled in 1945 before being sent off to defend the Dutch colony against Indonesian freedom fighters. The purpose of this walk through the city was not only to introduce the forthcoming performance but also to draw attention to the sites in the city from which Dutch citizens had been sent to the colonial wars.7 Attempting to reiterate that colonialism cannot only be associated with the ‘far-away elsewhere’ of the Dutch East Indies, the act endeavoured to intervene in the ‘prescriptive forgetting’ (Connerton 2008: 61-62) engaged in by the Dutch in order to make the links between geographical locations in the Netherlands and colonial atrocities more visible. The staging of this performance on the streets of Nijmegen and at the site of the former KNIL barracks was postulated on the idea of the failure of these sites to mediate colonial memory. As such, the performance aimed to work as a remediation – ‘the mediation of mediation’ (Bolter and Grustin 1998). The gamelan chorus performed their take on the popular Balinese performance known as kecak, which most who have visited Bali would be familiar with.8 This served as an attempt to make a clear connection between the colonial army and their interventions in Bali, a place which in the popular imaginary is never associated with violence – colonial or otherwise. Early in the afternoon of 10 June, I arrived at the house of my friend Ibu Setia to find her and her friend Ibu Yulia rehearsing for the performance and carefully choosing the right costume. The two dancers were unusually anxious in their preparations for the opening performance of Puputan, Val van Bali. Anouk, Ibu Yulia’s teenage daughter, who was to serve Indonesian finger food during the reception, was trying on her sarong and kebaya (traditional skirt and blouse). Not being a dancer, this was the first time that Anouk had been asked to actively participate as a Balinese cultural 6 Indisch neighbourhood, named as a reference to the Dutch East Indies, where streets bear the names of different islands and/or ethnic groups in Indonesia. 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOdJ_OHnKAA Retrieved on 10 March 2014. 8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE7Mrqk7vFg Retrieved on 10 March 2014.

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Image 1 Balinese dancers at the performance of Puputan, Val van Bali

Photo: Ana Dragojlovic, June 10, 2009

representative. The drinks were to be served by a professional catering agency, but young girls of Balinese descent and Balinese dancers were chosen to serve the food by an agency that organizes Indies events in order to provide, as the organizer told me, ‘an authentic Balinese flair’ to the event. Here, authenticity was seen as pre-given essence embodied in a dance performance, wherein Anouk’s multiraciality and her comfort in moving around dressed in traditional Balinese clothing validated her as a Balinese long-distance cultural specialist. Attended by a large number of people, Puputan, Val van Bali featured a stand with books about the Dutch East Indies, memoirs written by Indies people, and other forms of Indies literature, films, and music. A short booklet with the same title as the performance that was edited by Indies author Inge Dümpel offered reflections on the colonial past by various Indies authors and several reprints of colonial reports on the 1908 Klungkung puputan. Two Balinese dancers performed the tari sambutan oleh welcome dance and, after short intervals, there three more dance performances – tari cendrawasih, tari legong kraton, and tari oleg tamulilingan. Unlike at other events where Balinese dance is the main event, at this reception, the welcome dances received surprisingly little attention. It seemed the audience was waiting for the main event. Barely having enough time to change before the main event, the two dancers (Ibu Setia and Ibu Yulia), Anouk, and I rushed to join the fully booked Stadsschouwburg. The performance commenced with the following words:

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Image 2 Balinese dancers at the performance of Puputan, Val van Bali

Photo: Ana Dragojlovic, June 10, 2009

On 28 April 1908, the Royal Dutch East Indies Army (KNIL) in Bali repeatedly fired at thousands of men and women holding krises. The prince of Klungkung called his family and his people to Perang Puputan, de strijd tot het einde – ‘to struggle to the end’. Inspired by this event, the Colorful City Choir, conducted by Johnny Rakahet, presents Puputan, Val van Bali. In the 1900s, the city of Nijmegen served as a base for the Colonial Reserve. From the barracks of Prince Hendrik’s base, many young men, sons of Zeeland farmers, were sent to the Dutch East Indies, not knowing what was in front of them. There is now sufficient distance from these events that we can revisit them as our collective memory. The dramatic events that took place in Bali in 1906 and 1908 should be seen in this context. The Colourful City Choir visited Bali in 2008 in order to prepare for the commemoration of this historic event.9

Rather than being entirely focused on the puputan as the title and the opening suggested, the performance moved between images of colonial conquest in Bali to poetry written by Frans Lopulalan, a second-generation Moluccan

9

My translation is based on the text of the performance.

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in the Netherlands, about the Dutch army’s presence in Srebrenica, Bosnia.10 This was followed by anti-war poetry by Dutch poet Leo Vroman (who had been interned in Japanese prison camps during the Second World War) as well as Balinese and Indonesian dance and music, and a performance by the gamelan orchestra which combined poetry and music by composers and artists such as Jean Sibelius, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Míkis Theodorakis, and Sinead O’Connor. Clearly, the content of the event was far more concerned with Dutch accountability for specific atrocities that took place throughout the twentieth century than with specifically being a colonial story about the Klungkung puputan. Most strikingly, the performance was preoccupied with a longing for dignity and a sense of fraught urgency to bring respect, forgiveness, and reconciliation to both those who were killed by Dutch soldiers and those whom the Dutch soldiers failed to protect in their peacekeeping missions. The song ‘This Is To Mother You’ – sung at the end of the performance with the clear intention of calling for the accountability of the Dutch state and to evoke a sense of guilt and responsibility – also served as a reiteration that violence and past loss have neither being forgotten nor healed: This is to mother you To comfort you and get you through … All the pain that you have known All the violence in your soul All the ‘wrong’ things you have done I will take from you when I come All mistakes made in distress All your unhappiness

The dramatic co-casting of the puputan with various other mass atrocities of the twentieth century instrumentalizes the puputan as the pinnacle of Dutch wrongdoing in the twentieth century. As the event’s structural, conceptual, and creative organizers, Johnny Rahaket and Inge Dümpel relied on the well-established, romanticized image of Bali and its people as happy, peace-loving natives brutally assassinated by Dutch soldiers in order to emphasize the cruelty and inhumanity of the Dutch and the concomitant need for accountability. This strong dedication to political activism and the 10 The Dutch peacekeepers stationed in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war failed to prevent the killings of Bosnian Muslims in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

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desire to reveal past Dutch wrongdoing came out in my conversation with Dümpel, who sees these pursuits as part of both her personal struggle and the collective Indies struggle. In her rendition of puputan, Balinese people are portrayed as lenient and agreeable and lacking political agency – in the other words, as subjects who need others to voice colonial injustices for them. The organizers had hoped to perform Puputan, Val van Bali in Bali, but to date this has not occurred. However, following the event in Nijmegen, the Colourful City Choir performed at the 30th annual Bali Art Festival in Bali in 2009. Their act in Bali included popular Indonesian songs such as ‘Nina Bobo’, ‘Burung Kakaktua’, and ‘Naik-Naik Ke Puncak Gunung’ as well as the traditional Malukan song ‘Gandong E’, a song inspired by the Balinese kecak dance, and several other tunes from different parts of the world which drew a large audience. The Indonesian songs and the kecak performance received considerable attention in the Indonesian media, yet the fact that these performances were an integral part of the Puputan, Val van Bali performance remained unmentioned.11

Intentionality and Struggles over Representation Resonating with Dutch colonial sources (see Wiener 1995), the commemorative performance of Puputan, Val van Bali portrayed puputan as a ritual suicide on the Balinese side and as a mass murder committed by the Dutch army on the other. This conception drew a clear line between the Dutch as the perpetrators (and thus those with absolute power) and the Balinese as helpless victims. The organizers claimed that what was unique about the commemorative performance of puputan was that it approached puputan as a ‘common history’ (gemeenschappelijke geschiedenis); their intention was for the act of remembrance to be the ultimate conveyer of ‘facts, which can speak for themselves’ (Het Colourful City Koor laat de feiten voor zich spreken zonder een oordeel te vellen12). Ironically, however, what they were portraying as ‘truthfulness’ was a further reiteration of the Dutch colonial representation of puputan, with Balinese perspectives that marginalize the role of the Dutch in the destabilization of the Balinese world remaining absent. (These Balinese perspectives have, however, been well documented in 11 http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/07/09/dutch-choir-lights-arts-festival-withindonesian-songs.html Retrieved on 10 March 2014. 12 http://www.zazzyu.nl/?p=63379 Retrieved on 10 March 2014.

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anthropological scholarship – see, for example, Wiener 1995.) Furthermore, the organizers neglected to inform Balinese migrants in the Netherlands about their intended commemoration. During the interviews I conducted with the director and some of the choir’s members, the description of my research project, which focused on Balinese migrants’ identity politics, was received with surprise, as Balinese people were rarely perceived as migrants. Indeed, one of the choir’s members commented, ‘Balinese migrants?! Why would Balinese people leave such a magnificently beautiful place? Bali is like paradise on Earth.’ This commonly found perception of Balinese people being unlikely migrants serves to further perpetuate the well-established romantic images about Bali and its culture as free of economic and political hardship. Furthermore, the imagery is entirely oblivious to the existence of violence on the island or the mass killings of alleged communists in 1965-66. It also tends to silence memories that still haunt the survivors of the violence and their family members today (e.g. Dwyer 2004; Dwyer and Santikarma 2006). Simultaneously, a perspective of Balinese people as unlikely migrants presumes that those who left Bali to live elsewhere are in some way failed Balinese – people not appreciative of their own island and culture. One year after the commemorative performance, I interviewed the director, Johnny Rahaket, who told me that he had encountered numerous problems while making Puputan, Val van Bali.13 As he described it, both the reason for which he decided to stage the commemorative performance and a great source of struggle during and afterwards were based on his conviction that the general Dutch public and people in the choir did not know about puputan: Nobody I know knows anything about it … that is strange, right? Even well-educated people … The Dutch are famous for saying nothing about the terrible things they did. They never ever talk about it. We need to change that; we need to bring into light what has been repressed. (interview 13 June 2010)

Rahaket’s intentions are primarily didactic and focused on shifting the course of memory in the Dutch public sphere. Yet, as already stressed, Dutch colonialism and its violence are not entirely absent from the Dutch state’s national memory project. In his nuanced analysis of colonial memory and forgetting in the Netherlands, Paul Bijs (2012) suggests that the predominant frameworks surrounding Dutch national memory projects do not easily 13 Interview 13 June 2010.

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include violence and suffering from the Dutch East Indies – a fact that turns them into non-memorable events in the Dutch national imagination. On the contrary, the most publicly memorable events are those that represent the Dutch as resilient and independent – for example, the struggle against the Spanish in the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648), as victims of the Germans in World War Two (and more recently of Muslim immigrants), and as humanitarians involved in international human rights affairs (e.g. as hosts of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice in The Hague). The humanitarian efforts of the Dutch state are fully represented in both the public sphere and educational system. As Bijs argues: Remembering the dead of Dutch colonial violence … also implies remembering Dutch perpetratorship, and that historical subject position is hardly available … the histories of the Dutch nation and the Dutch empire are mostly treated as separate matters. (2012: 450)

As will become clear in the following discussion, feelings of discomfort, guilt, and shame about these past events were sites of bitter debate among the Colourful City Choir’s members, which resulted in the commemorative performance taking more than one and a half years to organize. One of the singers from the choir who wished to remain anonymous stated: It was very difficult for Johnny [Rahaket] to take us with him into the performance. It was his story really. Some people in the chorus did not like it, they were afraid – they felt very guilty about it – still, it was a great honour to do it. (emphasis in speech; Interview 17 June 2010)

Another choir member who also wished to remain anonymous said: It took a very long time to do it, it was very difficult for Johnny [Rahaket] to take us with him, it was very heavy, we did not know anything about it. People had to read books, watch documentaries … it was very, very heavy. Puputan is our history, this is what the Dutch did, but for Johnny it was what Dutch people had done to his people. He was very angry with the Dutch and we understood him, but it was not us who did it. It was like ‘black’ people against ‘white’ people, and he was black. It was very heavy stuff. (emphasis in speech; Interview 17 June 2010)

Deeply aware of the struggles within the choir, Rahaket declared that the performance was ‘non-judgmental’. It took many months for the choir to

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reach an agreement on what would constitute accusatory or judgmental representations of the colonial violence of the Dutch nation and what would be acceptable for the majority of the choir’s members. In the end, the agreement was as follows. First, while the focus on commemorating puputan was to remain, the performance was to represent ‘the truth’ of only what ‘really happened’, including other atrocities from around the world. The performance would represent violence as an integral part of various histories (and not just Dutch history) and would indirectly promote the idea of reconciliation and forgiveness. Thus, the commemorative performance invested in the authentication of ‘what really happened’ in the Klungkung puputan and simultaneously placed it in its global historical context. The choir members, who were the ones to ‘give voice to the past’, had read extensively not only about the puputan but also about the various other atrocities that had occurred throughout the world in the twentieth century. This comparison with other contemporary wars and genocides was to serve as a process of normalization of colonial violence and thus be less confrontational and more acceptable to the general public. Nevertheless, I approach ‘truth’ as something that is not a given or an essence that needs to be discovered but rather as a process that is formed through a specific set of historical, socio-economic, and cultural relations. No historical event is a ‘true’ representation of what ‘really’ happened but rather a re-imagination constituted within the power struggle in which it occurred. Moreover, these debates are deeply embedded in the ‘ethics of memory’ and in the insistence that what can be represented as acceptable for broader audiences (and presumably ethical to do so) are representations barred of anything but ‘neutral memory’.14 For Rahaket, whose father immigrated to the Netherlands in the 1950s as a former KNIL soldier of Moluccan background, addressing past Dutch military engagements was a deeply personal question. In 1951, some 12,500 Moluccans (KNIL soldiers and their families) moved to the Netherlands, where they were immediately discharged from the army. For a long period of time, the Dutch government treated the former soldiers and their families in the Netherlands as temporary citizens. The South Moluccans claimed that the Dutch state had promised them support to form the Republic of South Maluku (RMS). When this support did not materialize, the frustration felt by the Moluccans in the Netherlands led to some of them hijacking two trains and taking hostages at a school during the 1970s (see Steijlen 1996). All of this contributed to the development of public discourses about how 14 For a broader discussion about the ethics of memory, see Ricoeur (1999).

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people of Moluccan descent were prone to violence and lacked the requisites for social and cultural integration. In his self-initiated narrative, Rahaket talked about the personal struggles and distressed sense of emotional well-being of many Moluccan KNIL soldiers. In his opinion, the emotional turmoil from which the former soldiers suffered later informed their parenting styles and resulted in diff icult interpersonal relationships for their offspring and friends. Moreover, Rahaket made a direct link between these experiences and the high percentage of drug use among younger generations of Moluccans. His urgency for the past to be revealed is thus firmly situated within the prevalent therapeutic discourse which demands for a ‘public revelation of … darkest secrets’ (Illouz 2008: 17), wherein self-examination can be freeing, liberating, and, more than anything else, therapeutic at both the personal and the national level (see also Rose 1991). For Rahaket, both personal and collective well-being required the exposure of the unspeakable. Puputan, Val van Bali was staged only twice: on 10 and 11 June 2009 in Nijmegen. It was never staged in other parts of the Netherlands as Rahaket had hoped. In his discussion about colonial memory in the Netherlands, Bijl (2012: 449) has argued that the predominant self-representation of the Dutch nation is that of being ‘non-violent’. Such self-imagery makes public engagement with past violence a challenging matter. While predominant discourses about the absence of colonial history and colonial amnesia prevail among those who wish to shift the course of Dutch national memory, the term ‘aphasia’ as argued by American anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler might be much more suitable. In her discussion about the constraints in viewing the Republic and the Empire as mutually exclusive in contemporary France, Stoler introduces the term ‘colonial aphasia’ to problematize notions of ‘amnesia’ and ‘forgetting’, highlighting the importance of both the seclusion of knowledge and problems with articulation: rather than ‘amnesia’, I would turn to ‘aphasia’ as a possibly more productive term to describe the nature of the disconnect … not to pathologise historical loss as organic cognitive deficit but rather to emphasise two features: that it is not so much a loss of memory, but an occlusion of knowledge that is at issue. Aphasia is rather a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts to appropriate things. (2001: 125)

The concept of cultural aphasia makes clear that silence should not be equated with forgetting or oblivion but rather as a struggle of articulation.

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As Stoler argues, such occlusion of knowledge about historical encounters has far-reaching legacies. Equally important here is the work of British scholar of migration studies Georgie Wemyss (2009). Based on an ethnographic and discursive analysis, she demonstrates how ‘amnesia’ with regard to the empire in England – prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s – is still recognizable in different forms in many discourses of colonial-related events. She terms this ‘the invisible empire’ to illuminate how the history of the British Empire is perceived as disconnected from the contemporary British state yet ubiquitously present today. Similarly to the Dutch case, Wemyss demonstrates how the discourse of ‘the invisible empire’ operates to varying degrees of sophistication to repetitively bury the British Empire’s history of violence in retellings of Britain’s history. The the British Empire is most often evoked in relation to merchants and the spread of profits and ideas of liberty and democracy. Rather than being invisible, Wemyss’s nuanced analysis demonstrates how discourses of empire operate in the present in shaping discourses about ‘common sense’, tolerance, and racialized categories.

Balinese Reception Neither of the two Balinese dancers in whose company I watched Puputan, Val van Bali offered much in the way of commentary or references to either the puputan or Dutch colonialism. They briefly mentioned that they had known about puputan for many years but relegated it to ‘history’, articulating it through a language that normalizes past violence. The two dancers used exactly the same narrative when referring to puputan as my other interlocutors did when referring to the display of royal regalia at the exhibition Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past (as discussed in chapter three). Ibu Setia and Ibu Yulia’s comments referred to the highly metaphorical language of the narration and poetry on which the performance relied, saying ‘you must listen to the story very carefully … it was not easy to follow’. They expressed appreciation when well-known Indonesian songs were performed and admiration for the choir’s interpretation of the Balinese kecak dance. As experienced dancers, my interlocutors noted that one of the dancers who performed a classical Balinese dance must have been originally trained in Javanese classical dance, as his movements were what they considered unusually slow for Balinese dance. The two dancers did not invite other Balinese people to attend the event. It seemed that I, as a researcher, was the only person whom they had informed about the event,

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being certain that this commemorative event would not have been of interest to any of their Balinese friends. In addition to popular conceptions of Balinese people as happy islanders, this attitude gives the impression that Balinese people are completely passive and non-willing political agents. It appeared that while Puputan, Val van Bali was meant as a commemorative performance of an event in which many Balinese people lost their lives and which led to their ultimate subjugation, the event was not a Balinese event. In the protagonists’ imagery, Balinese people were happy locals living in their island paradise rather than subaltern citizens who have been residing in the Netherlands as a result of broadly political events since the 1960s. Despite the fact that no Balinese person or organization was contacted by the organizer of the commemorative performances, the performances themselves did not remain unnoticed or unknown. A few people who neither knew much about the content of the performance nor were interested in finding out more dismissed it as something that had to do with Dutch colonial guilt. Other interpretations, however, seemed to be much more vocal. In June 2010, I attended a party hosted by my long-term interlocutor Pak Nyoman. While we chatted about the most recent Tong Tong festival and Indies cultural performances in the Netherlands, Pak Nyoman brought up Puputan, Val van Bali, which he had attended the previous year with some of his Indies friends. Referring to it as a so-called puputan centenary commemoration, he said: The Moluccans and Indos hijacked Balinese history to get back at the Dutch; to blame and shame the Dutch. But it was not for them to say that the Balinese were victims. You see, this happens all the time, in Indonesia, here … everyone wants to use the Balinese name for their own ends.

Others who joined our conversation wholeheartedly supported what Pak Nyoman said, further arguing that if this was truly a commemoration of puputan, Balinese people should have been consulted, informed, or invited. Others argued that the performance was all about the Moluccans’ anger over what the Dutch had done to them and had nothing to do with the Balinese and their colonial history. The heated debate was accompanied by some people performing a caricature of the classical Balinese dance, implying that their caricature was the style in which the commemorative performers – of Indies and Moluccan backgrounds – had attempted and ultimately failed to perform it. This ethnicized and racialized protest endeavoured to disqualify ‘historical truths’ about Bali and its people that the organizers, Rahaket and

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Dümpel, had strived to show and to ultimately discredit their attempt ‘to speak in the Balinese name’. This act of caricaturing the ethnic ‘other’ portrays the Indies dancers as failing to successfully perform the Balinese dance but also the classical Javanese dance, thus implying a failure of the multiracial subjects to ‘belong’ to either of these groups. Moreover, the director, being of Moluccan descent, was portrayed as an animalistic creature unable to contain his anger. Just like my other Balinese interlocutors who actively produced hierarchies of foreigners through the firm expression of anti-Muslim sentiments (as discussed in chapter two), the Balinese caricaturing of Puputan, Val van Bali employed racial and ethnic hierarchies of otherness vis-a-vis the various Indonesian ethnicities. In both of these articulations of difference, Balinese people positioned themselves as firmly belonging to their own culture and tradition instead of to multiracial diasporas (regardless of their own multiracial families) and as poised and refined individuals when compared to the figure of the angry Moluccan descendant. As such, the Balinese hierarchies of foreignness and otherness were firmly based in racialized and ethnicized stereotypes about other citizens with Indonesian heritage, wherein the Balinese are positioned as the ‘best-of-all-the-rest’. This is not to say that the people involved in this debate reached a consensus as to whether – and if so, how – they would have wanted to be involved in the commemoration of the puputan centenary. What was clear, however, was that Balinese people did not see themselves as victims of Dutch colonialism at large (as discussed in chapter three). As staged by Rahaket, the commemorative performance completely undermined Balinese understandings of historical agency. The performance provoked Balinese cultural nationalists to make claims about the Balinese collective ‘we’ wherein kebalian is seen as being in critical danger as a result of its inept appropriation by the Indonesian state and Indo-ethnic groups in the Netherlands. Balinese diasporic concerns to protect the Balinese collective ‘we’, however, are not separated from Balinese cultural nationalist debates in Bali. Being regular consumers of Balinese media, Balinese subaltern citizens are more than just passive observers of social and political debates over the Balinese collective ‘we’ in Bali. The threat of radical Islam evinced by the terrorist attacks in Bali in 2002 and 2005 brought about new debates concerning foreign presences in Bali and gave rise to new forms of Balinese nationalism referred to as ajeg Bali. The term ajeg literally translates as ‘firm and strong’, but in a broader context it encompasses different aspects of Balinese custom (adat), religion (agama), and culture (budaya) that are

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taken to represent stability in a contemporary world characterized by uncertainty (e.g. Creese 2004; Schulte Nordholt 2007). The head of the Bali Post, Satria Naradha, has been credited as the informal leader of the ajeg movement, the goals of which are to: protect the identity, space and process of Balinese culture. This remedy will flow towards raising the capacity of Balinese people so that they do not fall subject to the hegemony of global culture. (cited in MacRae 2010: 15)

However, as the term ‘ajeg Bali’ spread, it began to stand for a wide variety of social, cultural, and political issues, all of which have a strong moral imperative to defend and protect Bali from corrupt (usually foreign) influences. Moreover, central to the ‘Bali ajeg’ discourses is a reassertion of the Balinese-Hindu identity within a predominantly Muslim Indonesia. Furthermore, as Allen and Palermo (2005) have argued, the notion of ajeg also expresses cultural xenophobia in othering non-Balinese residents by using the term pendatang (visitor) to describe both foreign and non-Balinese Indonesian residents instead of the more common penduduk (settler). While the meanings of these two terms are similar, it implies that those who are not ethnically Balinese are only temporary inhabitants, even if they own property and maintain local businesses on the island. It is commonly understood that, like the earlier debates over kebalian, discourses on ajeg belong to the Balinese urban elites. However, in the diasporic context, ethnic identity politics in Bali are followed by many people, regardless of individual educational and socio-economic position. Ajeg debates from Bali have, for example, been wholeheartedly taken up in the Netherlands and developed in relation to the perceived threat of Muslims and their presumed lack of social integration, thus becoming sites of contemporary connectivities between the Balinese and the Dutch. The representation of the Balinese as helpless, impotent victims of the Dutch soldiers in the puputan’s commemorative performance provoked Balinese men to employ the term ‘ajeg Bali’ in order to articulate their dissatisfaction with this portrayal of Balinese people. In these renderings, ajeg had strong masculine overtones that celebrate Balinese men’s strength and attractiveness as a desirable form of machismo. A strong correlation between the term ajeg and machismo in Bali has been noted by Balinese anthropologist Degung Santikarma, who argues that ajeg discourses celebrate ‘bravery, unbroachable barricades, and “unflagging erections”’ (Santikarma 2003: 13).

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Interethnic Dynamics in Post-Colonial Commemorations The performance of Puputan, Val van Bali, which aimed to ‘reveal’ colonial injustice and point towards the need for accountability in the broader Dutch society, ended up silencing the very people whose history it was claiming to reveal. The intentions and struggles through which the performance was produced as a visual technology of memory revealed a complicated struggle in the post-colonial Dutch mediascape over the recognition of a difficult colonial heritage. As some scholars have argued, recognition and entitlement to heritage have been much-debated issues in the context of migration and multi-ethnic nation-states (Gutman 1992; De Jong and Rowlands 2008), and this was certainly true with Puputan, Val van Bali. Visual technologies of memory, as utilized by Johnny Rahaket, rely on visuality as a method for garnering public recognition of a difficult heritage. This has been extensively detailed by scholars in other post-colonial contexts (see, for example, Fabian 1999; Küchler and Melion 1991). The central aim of this work is a shift towards a memoryscape which would be more inclined towards an open recognition and reconciliation about past violence: questions that have for some time been addressed in the USA, South Africa, and Germany (see Coombes 2003; Young 2000). Ultimately, the commemorative performance organized by Johnny Rahaket was a form of political activism advanced by its allochtoon director, aimed towards changing the Dutch national imagery so that the history of the Dutch nation and the Dutch empire would not be treated as separate entities. The performance brought about an interethnic drama over memory work between the event’s director Rahaket and the choir’s members, which some characterized as a ‘black over white’ historical struggle. Being part of a multiracial historical diaspora with a background in the Dutch East Indies, the Indies and Moluccan protagonists of the commemorative performance saw themselves as political agents who ought to employ a visual technology of memory as a form of open resistance to what they saw as ‘prescriptive forgetting’ (Connerton 2008) in the Dutch national imagery. In organizing the performance, they relied on their own sense of proximity and intimacy with the Balinese people on the basis of ‘shared colonial heritage’. Balinese subaltern citizens, however, received it as an inappropriate and invalid claim to intimacy and proximity. Balinese people’s rejection of Puputan, Val van Bali as a viable commemorative performance in honour of the centenary of the Klungkung puputan is a denunciation of the representation of Balinese people as helpless and impotent victims of the Dutch state and as inert political agents. In

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some ways, their discourses are resonant of those of the Balinese colonial nationalists who stood against Dutch intentions to cultivate Bali as a ‘living museum’ of premodern, Hindu-Buddhist societies and Dutch efforts to ‘reshape Balinese culture according to a romantic image that appealed to outsiders but not to the Balinese’ (Robinson 1995: 48). At the same time, my Balinese interlocutors employed their own hierarchies of value in order to produce a sense of distance from the commemorative practice, which was staged by an ethnic ‘other’, and to reinstate historical connectivities between themselves and the Dutch through the language of pride and their own sense of superiority. In these renditions, Balinese people’s understanding of their historical connectivities with the Dutch is firmly based on the self-image of their cultural ‘uniqueness’ and foreigners’ longstanding appreciation of it – the Dutch being seen as promoters and protectors of such an image as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century. These Balinese discourses serve as forms of self-recognition (Herzfeld 2005) and are central to the production of post-colonial intimacy. As the Dutch nation struggles to publicly engage with the difficult colonial heritage of the Dutch East Indies, the Balinese are not interested in the public commemoration of colonial violence that took place in Bali, albeit for different reasons than those of the Dutch state. Seemingly self-assured and comforted by the longstanding international celebration of their culture, many Balinese people do not see a reason or indeed a need for public recognition of the historical violence. It is in my interlocutors’ rendition of historical agency (discussed in chapter three) and in the translocal networks of interaction that are central to the formation of Balinese classical arts and their representations (as will be discussed in chapter five) that we can see how the longstanding celebration of Balinese culture becomes appreciated as Balinese cultural heritage in itself. The post-colonial intimacy that my Balinese interlocutors forge is situated in alternative discourses that are not in agreement with the expectations of subaltern citizens to take subject positions that would be invested in publicly revealing the violence that took place during colonialism. The Balinese collective ‘we’ in Dutch post-coloniality needs to be approached as a historically situated sense of self, wherein the colonial history is not one in which they see themselves as oppressed colonial subjects. Quite on the contrary – it was the Bali’s unique culture that enthralled the Dutch. Thus, rather than seeing ‘common colonial heritage’ as a historical injustice for which accountability must be obtained (as proposed by the Indisch and Moluccan protagonists of Puputan, Val van Bali), the Balinese interpretation of shared heritage in relation to puputan relies on non-linear understandings

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of individual and collective agency and history wherein Balinese are not victims of the colonial context but rather both the Balinese and Dutch are implicated in powers orchestrated by the invisible world. If, however, we view these dynamics using Michael Herzfeld’s notion of cultural intimacy, in which a sense of embarrassment is central to the production of a common sociality, we can read the Dutch struggle to engage with their own colonial violence and Balinese understandings of historical agency that primarily reject the idea of subjugation to the colonial power (and simultaneously the idea of Balinese people as not having agentic powers) as signs of common embarrassment that stand as a source of Balinese and Dutch post-colonial intimacy. This is a point that remains open for further discussion.

5

My Home is Your Home The Possibilities, Challenges, and Failures of Home Making

In early February 2004, at the invitation of some of my Balinese friends, I attended a pasar gathering in Utrecht where my friends were going to be performing a classical Balinese dance accompanied by I Komang Suaka, a multidisciplinary Balinese artist of whom I had heard before. Suaka is a painter, an installation artist, and the leader of pop band ‘Burning Seed’, which was also scheduled to perform that day. I arrived at the venue accompanied by my friends in the early afternoon to give the dancers enough time to have a quick rehearsal on the new stage as well as apply make-up and put on their dancing costumes. The venue consisted of a room with a stage and around 250 seats and a large hall in which numerous food stalls were set up next to stalls for tourist agents offering trips to Bali and Indonesia, sellers of batik and other clothing items imported from Indonesia, and sellers of Indonesian and Balinese arts and crafts. There was also a large stall selling books, including novels about Indies people in the Dutch East Indies and diaspora, academic books written by historians and anthropologists, and various publications concerned with Indies identity politics in the twenty-first century written by artists, archivists, novelists, and cultural critics. Next to the books were numerous DVDs with documentaries and feature films about Indies people as well as documentaries about contemporary Indonesia made by Indies filmmakers.1 These were accompanied by numerous Indo-rock music CDs produced in the Netherlands but also those imported from Indonesia, mainly belonging to the dangdut genre of music.2 Suaka and four members of his band ‘Burning Seed’ arrived after us, all already dressed in trousers made of Balinese white-checkered poleng fabric, ready for their performance. This fabric plays an important role in Balinese-Hindu ceremonial life. Meeting them, I found out that two members identified themselves as Indies and one as Filipino. While they were familiar with Indo-rock and dangdut, those were not their preferred genres of music; instead, they performed reggae tunes, including songs 1 Among documentaries about Indies people, the most prominent are ‘Indo Nu’ (2009), ‘Aanpassen! Aanpassen? Aanpassen…’ (2009), as well as a documentary trilogy about contemporary Indonesia by Leonard Retel Helmrich entitled Stand van de Sterren (2010). 2 Dangdut, a music genre which incorporates Indonesian folk with Arabic, hip-hop, R&B, house music, and reggae, became widespread in the 1990s and has since dramatically increased in popularity across Indonesia and its diasporic spaces.

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by Bob Marley. Suaka, who was eager to inform me how much he enjoyed classical Balinese dancing, spoke of how he had learnt it from his late grandmother, a famous dancer in her time. Keen to share his passion for dancing and curious to know how much I knew about Balinese dancing techniques, Suaka offered to give me a specifically framed history lesson on Balinese dance. Later, I learned that this performative history lesson was not something special that Suaka had decided to do just for me but was rather a common occurrence surrounding Suaka’s classical dance performances. His narrative focused on his family’s long tradition of dance and on the history of Balinese dancing for foreigners. The latter was mainly motivated by foreigners’ ‘discovery’ of Balinese dancing and its unfading appeal and popularity. Still, there was something he was eager to stress, namely the longevity of Balinese dance’s presence in the wider European scene. ‘Balinese dance’, he emphasized, ‘was appreciated in Europe long before Javanese dance became known to the broader public; before Indies people migrated to the Netherlands’. Suaka was referring to the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition in which, as Conrad Spies described in 1931, a group of 50 Balinese performers were brought to the Netherlands as representatives of the colonial Dutch East Indies: The group consists entirely of people from Bali, and is thus of the best imaginable social composition. It ranges from wealthy people from a high caste, big landowners with countless coconut palms, to small peasants who do simple coolies [sic] work. Quite naturally and without giving it a second thought, the peasant who works his paddy field in the daytime consorts with the nobleman who has spent the day dreaming outside the gates of his estate, stroking his fine bantam. Whether at work or at rest, playing games or engaging in pleasant conversations, they mingle harmoniously at all times. The fact that this is entirely unremarkable on Bali makes our hearts warm to this enviable state of affairs and prompts us to think back wistfully to a lost paradise. (Spies cited in Bloembergen 2006: 333)

The Balinese performance was a novelty for most of the visitors to the 1931 exposition. Indeed, this was reportedly the first formal Balinese artistic performance in the West. The troupe was presented as a novelty, recorded as being one of the exposition’s most ‘exotic attractions’ (Savares 2001: 61). The Balinese performances at the exposition and across the Netherlands in 1931 were developed jointly by Western and Balinese cultural authorities

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and were designed with the intent of satisfying the interests of the Dutch government by celebrating the accomplishments of Dutch colonialism (Winet 1998: 99-100).3 The performance, like those in the rest of the exposition, had a didactic mission – to show that Western nations were engaged in the project of awakening ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’ peoples. The exposition followed the well-established practice of all international exhibitions of the time by spectacularizing cultural differences and emphasizing the exotic qualities of the performers as accurate representations of the inherent characteristics of particular cultural aesthetics – a practice that served to manufacture otherness. Representations of the Balinese performance at the exposition and across the Netherlands contributed significantly to the romanticization and exoticization of the Balinese culture and its people within Western imaginings. Bloembergen (2006: 330) has argued that the exposition was a ‘signifier of “Bali, paradise on earth”, [and] Paris was the harbinger of a growing stream of tourists, to whom Bali has remained idyll’. She further suggests that ‘Bali still exploits its reputation as a paradise, but now to boost its own affairs … the narratives told in Bali of this Balinese success in Paris are different from the colonial story’ (ibid.: 330). Similarly, the interpretation of the exposition by a Balinese multidisciplinary artist living in contemporary Dutch society differs from its varied interpretations in Bali. Suaka, rather than interpreting the exposition through the critical lens of exoticized otherness, uses it to celebrate the longevity of Western appreciation for what he firmly believes to be a Balinese cultural heritage. This is not to say that he is unaware of foreign influences on Balinese visual and performing arts but that, for him, these influences do not make the different forms of expressive culture any less Balinese. Through Suaka’s rendition of historical networks of interaction in the formation of Balinese classical arts and their representations, we can see how the longstanding celebration (if not exoticization) of Balinese art becomes greatly valued and appreciated as Balinese cultural heritage in itself. In this conceptualization, the colonial Dutch government’s choice to have a Balinese group represent the colonial Dutch East Indies is interpreted as the recognition of the value of Balinese cultural traditions above others. In other words, the Dutch were 3 Bloembergen (2006: 7) notes that at the Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris 1931, the Netherlands highlighted Balinese architecture and dance to emphasize the continuity of Hindu civilization. At the time, Bali was seen as an heir to the ‘noble civilization of ancient Buddhist and Hindu India’. Bloembergen argues that this represented a change in the way the Dutch were representing indigenous cultures in the Dutch East Indies, moving away from earlier representations of ‘primitive to civilized and artistic’.

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Image 3 Komang Suaka in his studio

Photo: Ana Dragojlovic, 2006

intentionally raising the Balinese culture above that of their other colonies. Thus, the longstanding appreciative understanding for Balinese art forms becomes a basis for staking claims to a sense of historical proximity and intimacy between the Balinese and the Dutch. In this chapter, I focus on I Komag Suaka’s artistic endeavours in order to further discuss personal and collective struggles over diasporic kebalian and home-building practices for Balinese people in the Netherlands. In what follows, I position Suaka’s biography, which is particularly important as the case of an artist with an ethnic background, in a culture that has been very strongly identified with art and being artistic. Second, I situate the artist’s work within discussions about art and citizenship, aiming to broaden debates about ‘ethnic art’ and what it means to be a long-distance cultural

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specialist. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Suaka’s installation My Home is Your Home in order to explore the tensions and controversies through which he navigates his aesthetic expression, from the position of a Balinese long-distance cultural specialist through to the rejection of the subject position of ‘ethnic artist’ as offered to him in Dutch post-coloniality.

I Komag Suaka – Balinese Artist in Dutch Post-Coloniality Following Suaka’s performance at the pasar in Utrecht, he offered to participate in my research and invited me to visit him in his studio in The Hague in early 2004, where he was also living at the time. After showing me the most recent canvas he was working on, Suaka immediately offered a brief introduction to his background and artistic trajectory (even though I had heard most of it in Utrecht) and gave a performance I would witness many more times during my fieldwork when Suaka was introducing himself. He stated: I was born in Bali, and for Balinese people, visual and performing arts are a part of everyday life. This was recognized by the Dutch, Germans, and Americans in the 1920s. I dance Balinese classical dance but my paintings are not classical Balinese. I was educated at the art academy in the Netherlands.

This brief statement makes an important link between ethnicity and the arts and their longstanding appreciation in Euro-American contexts. It also situates Suaka as a long-distance cultural specialist who lives and works both within and outside of Balinese classical arts frameworks. After I emphasized that as an anthropologist I was interested in obtaining his detailed life history and in getting to know his world, Suaka offered a longer and much more complex narrative – one that is situated within a shifting continuum of ethnic essentialism, pleasure in engaging in embodied practices that characterized his life in Bali, and struggles to be classified as an ethnic artist. In what follows, I offer Suaka’s life narrative as shared to me in our first conversation, accompanied by insights I gained during my subsequent fieldwork. In 1992, a young I Komang Suaka migrated to the Netherlands to join his Dutch wife and their recently born son. Suaka was born in the Buleleng regency (in North Bali) into a large family that included his father, his father’s five wives, and their children. As the exact dates or years of birth

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were not of a particular importance at the time, Suaka only knows that he was born sometime between 1967 and 1971. From a young age, Suaka had a keen interest in learning to paint, but his very humble background did not provide him with the opportunity to attend a school where this would be possible, either in Bali or elsewhere in Indonesia. Suaka’s lifelong passion for artistic creation had begun in his childhood when his maternal grandmother taught him classical Balinese dance. For Suaka, the urge for artistic creativity is something he perceives not only as part of his family inheritance but also as a central part of Balinese culture. Narrating his early childhood and his inclinations towards dance at the time, Suaka pulled out from his shelf a book entitled Balinese Character, A Photographic Analysis by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (1942). Opening the book to a page with photographs of young children learning to dance (ibid.: 85), he stressed how Mead and Bateson, famous American anthropologists at the time, had recognized the uniqueness of Balinese culture and took a keen interest in it. Expressing his appreciation for Mead and Bateson’s attention to detail, Suaka admired their photographic plates showing ‘Hand Postures in Daily Life’, ‘Hand Postures in Dance’, and ‘Hand Postures in Arts and Trance’ (ibid.: 96-104), arguing that this was an invaluable visual collection about Balinese people in the early twentieth century. Suaka also noted that he recognized many similarities between the book and his own upbringing, his process of learning how to dance, and the road to becoming an adult. Mead and Bateson’s book, however, was not the only work about Bali published in the early twentieth century that Suaka possessed. Suaka’s life narrative smoothly shifted towards a narration of the Euro-American ‘discovery’ of Balinese culture in the early twentieth century as he continued to take out books from his shelf, carefully explaining the importance of each of them as he spoke. He ascribed particular importance to a collection of photographs and prose writing about everyday life entitled Bali by Gregor Krause (1883-1959), which was first published in the 1920s and subsequently translated into many languages and reprinted numerous times. Trained as a medical doctor, Kraus left his homeland of Germany in 1910 to travel through Asia and in 1912 became employed by the Netherlands Indies army (Vickers 1989: 99-101). Kraus emphasized the organic relationship between people, environment, religion, and art, pioneering a genre of photography-based publications about Bali that is still used today.4 With pride, Suaka showed 4 Suaka also had several similar books that were published in the Netherlands in the first part of the twentieth century, the most well-known of which is Bali by Nikola Drakulić and Max Bajetto (1951) and Bali: The Imaginary Museum: The photographs of Walter Spies and Beryl

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me the original publication of Dance and drama in Bali by Beryl de Zoete and Walter Spies (1938). Spies (1895-1942), a Russan-born German painter, moved to live in Bali in 1927. His collaborator, De Zoete (1879-1962), was an English ballet dancer, dance critic, and researcher. Like Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk, Spies had a great influence on the image-making of Bali. Adrian Vickers has written that ‘Spies saw Balinese as universally artistic, enabling them to make painting, dance or music part of the rhythm of daily life, along with working in the fields, feeding pigs, bearing children or cooking. For Spies, this art was a prayer to the “holiness of life”, a deep spirituality in the community’ (ibid.: 117). Compellingly, Vickers argues that this summarizes the romantic image created about Bali in the 1920s and 1930s. For Suaka, however, as for many of his fellow Balinese living in the Netherlands, such popular writings figure as solid ground on which to claim the uniqueness of Balinese culture, both past and present.5 Suaka shared his knowledge of the Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk collection kept at the Leiden University library and had several conversations about it with then Professor Hedi I. R. Hinzler at Leiden University. Looking at Traditional Balinese Culture (1970), a collection of articles written by Euro-American artists and academics who lived in Bali in the 1930s, including work by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, Jane Belo, artists Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete, and musicologist Colin McPhee, I came across a paragraph that had been ferociously highlighted by Suaka. Suaka explained to me that the paragraph described the Balinese body in relation to Balinese classical dance particularly well, as follows: The Balinese are plastically gifted to an extraordinary degree, and their power of rendering movement, whether in stone or pencil or the evolutions of the dance, is equally astonishing and rare. Whatever he may be, idle or at work, sitting at home, in the market or the temple, or walking on roads or devious footpaths, squatting naked on a rock in the river de Zoete by Michael Hitchcock and Lucy Norris (1995). The most prominent publication of this kind published in the last decade is Bali: Paradise Rediscovered, edited by Lawrence Blair (2003). 5 While not many Balinese are in possession of numerous publications from the 1920s and 1930s, many have recent reprints of Island of Bali written by Miguel Covarrubias, originally published in 1937. Covarrubias was a Mexican writer and caricaturist deeply influenced by Walter Spies. This book has been long recognized as a crucial text in establishing Balinese reputation as an island of dreams and cultural and natural beauty (Vickers 1989). In BalineseDutch families, this book – along with a more recent, popular two-volume work entitled Bali: Sekala and Niskala by Eiseman (1989) which discusses Balinese religion, art, and customs – serve as educational tools about Balinese heritage and culture.

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in the act of making offerings to the stream, carrying heavy burdens, or playing under the waterspout, cutting down a palm tree or perched without support on its narrow crown still trembling from the shock of decapitation, the Balinese is so perfectly in harmony with his surroundings and so graceful in his poise that we almost have the impression of a dance. (De Zoete and Spies 1970: 260)

Suaka was also compelled to introduce me to more recent works about Balinese performing and visual arts which were particularly praising and both instructive and illustrative, such as Balinese Dance in Transition, Kaja and Kelod by I Made Bandem and Frederik Eugen de Boer (1981) and Balinese dance, drama and music: A guide to the performing arts of Bali by I Wayan Dibia and Rucina Ballinger (2004). His large library also contained more recent anthropological work that he did not find appealing, determining it as too specific and focused on the Balinese high caste. Suaka’s performative life narrative, produced in relation to a large body of work about Balinese art and culture, is crucial as an example of self-production for a long-distance cultural specialist in Dutch post-coloniality. Suaka ascribed value to the universalizing character of the early writings on Balinese culture as a broader picture that is easy to comprehend for both non-Balinese and Balinese people themselves who might lack pan-Balinese identification. As a worker in the tourist industry, and given that he was an aspiring artist, Suaka was well aware of the Euro-American artists and anthropologists in Bali whose books he now owns but had no access to their publications in Bali until he moved to the Netherlands. It is important to acknowledge here that Suaka’s appreciative take on literature, critically discussed elsewhere as producing paradisiacal images of Bali (Vickers 1989), also needs to be seen in relation to a struggle to maintain pan-Balinese identity politics within Banjar Suka Duka. Following our prolonged conversation about Euro-American appreciation of Balinese arts in the early twentieth century, Suaka continued to share his migratory trajectory with me, which started within Bali itself and later led him to the Netherlands. Suaka left his parental home as a teenager and moved to south Bali in search of a job in the tourist industry. Socializing with other young Balinese men who, like himself, made a meagre living by working in the informal tourist industry, Suaka learned to speak English and play the guitar. During this period, Suaka abandoned classical dance in search of other musical genres such as rock’n’roll and reggae. In fact, it was not until he moved to the Netherlands that he reconnected with Balinese classical dancing. This renewal of his engagement in a familiar embodied practice provided

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Suaka with much needed comfort during the first few difficult years in his new country. Coincidentally, the market for visual consumption of Balinese classical dance was becoming a site of active home-building by other Balinese people in the Netherlands. In 1993, Suaka commenced his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague (Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten). Finishing in June 1998, Suaka was the first student of Asian background to be awarded cum laude. Suaka often reiterated how much he wanted to study: I came here following my wife and because I wanted to be present in my son’s life but also because I really wanted to study. It is sad I could not get this kind of education at an art academy in Bali, but you see, studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague was great in many ways. I was exposed to different theories and philosophical approaches; I met artists from all over the world. That was great! But I often felt I had to prove something, like it was not enough that I wanted to be just an artist. My professors were always going on and on about me being a ‘Balinese artist’. Of course, I am proud to be Balinese but it always bugs me that I could not be seen just as an artist, a person.

Suaka greatly enjoyed his studies and particularly liked the fact that, aside from drawing and painting, he was also exposed to art history and philosophy. However, some of the presumptions his teachers had of him proved to be challenging: [To my teachers] I was somehow very Eastern in my style. I was very disappointed with that – I did not want to be seen as ‘Eastern’. At that point, I started to think that I was in a way imprisoned by my own background, that I would always be labelled by this ‘Eastern-ness’ in my style.

His teachers’ employment of the East/West binary scheme revealed how, despite the dramatic changes that the world underwent in the twentieth century, an entrenched academic critique (e.g. Said 1978) of historical binaries still existed and informed the educational system. In Suaka’s case, it signalled and othered his aesthetic endeavours. What Suaka was experiencing was, however, hardly unique to the particular art academy he was attending, or indeed to the Netherlands in general. Writing about Asian-Canadian artists in Canada, Keith Wallace has noted a continuing logic of othering: ‘Now, if one is of Asian descent, there exists an expectation to reflect one’s Asianness in the artwork’ (quoted in Antoinette

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2005: 63). Clare Harris, in her work with Tibetan diasporic artists, has noted how art markets show a ‘voracious appetite … for difference and distinctiveness, in terms of individual and collective cultural style’ (2013: 34). Under these circumstances, an artist’s ethnic background is perceived as a potential asset for the art world – a world that constantly pursues uniqueness and distinctiveness. Harris has shown how, paradoxically, Tibetan artists are simultaneously seen through their placeless-ness and situated within frameworks that associate artists with a particular place. According to Harris, Tibetan artists, like Suaka, had hoped that their art in the diaspora might escape the limitations otherwise imposed in their home locations (Harris 2012). However, the f ield of art education and the art markets of their adopted countries (and internationally) persist in approaching their work through their own frames of reference and localized cultural logic. While it would certainly be misleading and counterproductive to deny cultural specificities to diasporic artists, there is nevertheless a need to recognize that their art practices are aesthetic endeavours that should not be understood solely through the essentialist lens of their ethnic culture. After completing his studies, Suaka’s work was displayed throughout the Netherlands, and Suaka himself continued to perform Balinese classical dance independently and, though less frequently, with the Bali Ayu dance group. On several occasions, he even performed in a show inspired by Japanese classical theatre, his ‘Asian appearance’ having facilitated his casting. On my first visit to his studio, Suaka showed me some of his completed paintings, feeling compelled to reiterate, ‘When it comes to paintings I am not a classical Balinese artist’ and cautioning me not to expect to see paintings of Balinese landscapes (geographical or mythological), motifs from Balinese-Hindu cosmology, or scenes from Balinese classical dance in his studio – as is commonly associated with classical Balinese paintings.6 Many of Suaka’s Balinese friends had suggested that such a direction in his work would make his art career more lucrative. Looking at a wide spectrum of Balinese artists in Bali, Jean Couteau (2011: 280-282) has noted that many middle-aged artists of rural background are predominantly focused on identity politics and cultural memory in their work. This preoccupation with 6 These features are commonly associated with classical Balinese paintings. Scholars have shown that what has been widely considered as the Balinese style of painting has developed as a fusion between indigenous and imported models (Geertz 1994; Vickers 2002).

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ethnic identity can also be seen with artists educated at the Java academy during the period 1965-1980. While nothing in Suaka’s studio contradicted his statement that he was not a ‘Balinese artist’, he was nevertheless eager to restate this point to me several more times, as many people who did not know his work (especially fellow Balinese people in the Netherlands) presumed that his work would be more explicitly Balinese in style and have the exploration of ethnic identity at its centre. However, as this chapter demonstrates, while Suaka’s work is concerned with the exploration of identity, his endeavours are translocal rather than just preoccupied with the identity politics present in the work of artists based in Bali. Suaka’s investment in the exploration of kebalian in Dutch post-coloniality is partially driven by his own struggles and partially imposed by public art funding expectations of ‘ethnic artists’. Doubling as his living space, Suaka’s large studio had a bedroom made of wood panels and dry tree branches and was sparsely decorated with blackand-white checkered poleng material. This particular cloth is widely used in Bali to wrap around guardian statues and kulkul drums in temples as well as trees and stones in which spirits are believed to reside, in addition to being used as clothing. The colours and design of the cloth represent the cosmic duality of good and evil.7 Among his paintings and three-dimensional objects from his installations, I noticed a small altar unusually framed in a glass box which contained a small bottle with red liquid in it. Komang explained its meaning to me: That is a long story. My maternal grandmother was a dancer, as was my mother. I believe I have inherited my painting and dancing talents from them. I think it is in my blood. So this small altar symbolizes the blood connection, but it is ‘caged’ in a glass, meaning that I can share it with others but I cannot escape it – I have to keep painting and performing. But unlike my grandmother and mother, I live here, and that has changed me in various ways …

What is important here is that Suaka’s artistic expression does not negate his Balinese background or its general aesthetics. What troubled him 7 Geertz has argued that the philosophical framework that underpins Balinese practices is based on the assumption that the universe is made of a single force called sakti. Sakti can serve ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ forces at the same time; it is at once medicine and poison and can take numerous forms, from human beings to any other form found in nature. Thus, ‘demons’ are not necessarily entirely malevolent, and ‘gods’ are not wholly benevolent. Rituals are undertaken with the aim of persuading these volatile beings to look kindly on the supplicators (Geertz 1994: 81).

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by being labelled as ‘Eastern’ in his style was how this not only echoed colonial hierarchies but also lumped together divergent art traditions under a generalized, racialized, and exoticized category of ‘East’. Inspired by James Clifford’s seminal work (1988) on the relationship of ethnography and art, art historian Hal Foster has argued that non-Western contemporary visual arts has often treated the ‘artist as ethnographer’, with both the artist and the work becoming the object of a specific geography and culture rather than being recognized for their independent aesthetics (1996: 92-113). Hanging high upon the wall of Suaka’s studio, just above his canvas, was a plangkiran which Komang had brought from Bali. A plangkiran is a miniature shrine commonly seen in buildings in Bali used to hold offerings, pottery jugs, and incense sticks. The plangkiran in Suaka’s studio was decorated yellow, red, and white. In Bali, offerings are presented on plangkiran on a daily basis, but for Suaka, this was an uncommon ritual, the exception being before his dance performances. In addition to the plangkiran, a ceramic water vessel (carat-coblong) was also kept on the altar, containing holy water (tirta), a presence in his house he found very important. After every annual trip to Bali, Suaka returns to the Netherlands bringing holy water, but he also makes his own by saying mantras and burning incense. While performing the water purification ritual, Suaka wears the two rings he inherited from his paternal grandfather, which are commonly stored on the plangkiran. The two rings are, without exception, part of his costume for performing classical Balinese dance. Suaka uses the holy water in many different situations, from sprinkling it over his canvases before commencing a new piece of work and blessing his work when it leaves his house to blessing his newly bought bass guitar. As such, Komang’s studio and home environment is an informal welcoming space where obvious affiliations with his Balinese background are present, allowing him to engage in familiar embodied practices. It is useful here to mention John Clark’s argument that ‘We should … not think only of the artist as the transmitter and transformer of what he or she has learned discursively but also as an embodier of the experiences that otherwise escape representation’ (2013: 26). While explaining his usage of the holy water, Suaka also felt compelled to stress that although he appreciated many aspects of Balinese Hinduism, he was also very aware of its dogmatic and restrictive sides. Similarly, Suaka saw certain restrictions in his fellow overseas Balinese friends’ thoughts about Balinese artists; he saw their opinions as much more limiting than the expectations of artists that exist in Bali:

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Many people here think I am not Balinese any longer because I do not paint rice fields and scenes from Balinese mythology … but they know that there are Balinese artists in Bali who produce works of art that are not classical in style.

These expectations of cultural nationalists from Banjar Suka Duka (of which Suaka has been an adherent since its establishment) have been particularly difficult for Suaka to deal with, highlighting his personal and collective struggles over kebalian in Dutch post-coloniality. From the cultural nationalist perspective, Suaka’s detachment from ethnic themes is seen as both economically unwise and ultimately unpatriotic. On one occasion, when a group of Balinese friends was visiting him in his studio and trying to convince him to make at least a few paintings more ‘Balinese in style’, Suaka presented them with a paragraph he had highlighted in Island of Bali by Miguel Covarrubias, well known to many and much valued for its accessibility to a general audience: The Balinese are extremely proud of their traditions, but they are also progressive and unconservative, and when a foreign idea strikes their fancy, they adopt it with great enthusiasm as their own. All sorts of influences come from outside, Indian, Chinese, Javanese, have left their mark on Balinese art, but they are always translated into their own manner and they became strongly Balinese in the process. Thus the lively Balinese art is in constant flux … But the traditional art also remains, and when the artist is tired of a new idea, they go back to the classical forms until a new style is again invented. (Covarrubias 1937: 163-4)

At this point, it is pertinent to note that struggles over modernity and tradition within Balinese performance and visual arts are longstanding ones (Vickers 1996). President Suharto’s New Order regime (from 1966 to 1998) developed a bureaucracy that was responsible for ‘preserving’ and ‘upgrading’ cultural traditions and heritage. This involved several government departments, state-run art academies, and various associated councils, all of which had the task of organizing a range of festivals and competitions to celebrate the diversity of cultural heritage, resulting in numerous transformations of ‘cultural’ performances (Vickers 1989). However, this insistence on the ‘perseverance’ of ‘traditional’ cultural forms also resulted in new and innovative art forms (Picard 1996a: 134-63, 1996b; Noszlopy 2003). Moreover, as Noszlopy (ibid.: 3) has pointed out, new cultural forms are quickly transformed into ‘new traditions’ (tradisi baru), because that which is seen

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as ‘tradition’ is ascribed with a higher cultural capital and valued more. Despite Suaka’s dissatisfaction with the level of appreciation he received (or rather, did not receive) for his paintings from his Balinese friends, I heard people refer to his work as within the framework of ‘new traditions’ (tradisi baru) on many occasions. Similarly, many of my interlocutors used the same expression to refer to the various forms in which the notion of Balinese-ness is performed in the Netherlands, from Galungan-Kuningan celebrations and food preparation to dance performances and the visual arts. Ongoing discourses about tradisi baru are central to the conceptual reconfiguration of kebalian overseas on both the personal and collective level.

Foreignness, the Arts, and Citizenship I Komang Suaka’s artistic endeavours in Dutch post-coloniality are saturated with the possibilities and challenges that artists of Balinese background can face. It is important to situate his work not only within the Balinese migrant community but also within the framework of the Dutch state, which sees art and its various possibilities as an important aspect through which active citizenship can be embraced by those of foreign backgrounds. During the 1990s, when most of Suaka’s artistic work was produced, the international art world began to celebrate the figure of the artist as ‘culturally hybrid’ (Becquer and Gatti 1991), and most of the funding Suaka received in this period was based on his claim of inhabiting the hybrid space of the nomadic artist. As Hall Foster has noted, art-making throughout the 1980s and 1990s was driven to ‘push practice and theory from binary structures of otherness to relational models of difference, from discrete space-time to mixed border zones’ (1996: 178). This is resonant of the highly influential notion of hybridity and ‘third space’ put forward by cultural theorist Homi Bhabha in the early 1990s (1990, 1994). In his applications for art subsidies, Suaka always wrote that he lived ‘between’ cultures. His self-identification was driven by what he knew would appeal to those in charge of art funding at the time. His emphasis on ‘between-ness’ and expectations that such positionality needed an obvious visual metaphor of cultural affiliation might not have been something Suaka would have otherwise always chosen to do. On the contrary, while he comfortably embraced and embodied his Balinese background in his everyday life and in the classical Balinese dance he performed, he aspired to be more than just ‘an ethnic artist’ in his art. In fact, Suaka did not just strive for a position of ‘between-ness’; he wanted ethnic neutrality to be

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the framework through which his paintings would be received. Hall Foster (1996), like many others, has pointed out the analytical shortcomings of the hybrid model that fetishises the space of the in-between and ‘not only privilege[s] the mixed but, more problematically, presuppose[s] a prior distinction or even purity’ (1996: 277). In her work on diversity in the Dutch art sector, Sandra Trienekens (2004) demonstrates how a division between autochtoon and allochtoon artists (as derived through genealogical and acquired means) has a concrete application in art policy as well as in the status and funding of artists and art organizations. Art committees working with allochthonous artists or arts organizations operate under the frameworks of ‘interdisciplinary’, ‘intercultural’, ‘multicultural’, or ‘participatory arts’ (this last one being community arts), while the public art sector, which works with autochthonous artists, deals with more generic categories such as ‘theatre’, ‘dance’ or ‘music’. As Suaka’s strategy for art funding demonstrates, public funding for allochtoon artists and arts organizations favour a mix of Western and non-Western cultural traditions – that is, hybridity (Trienekens 2004; see also Essed and Trienekens 2008: 59-60). The politics and policies of public funding for the arts in the Netherlands reflect the ways in which Western museums and art galleries more generally utilize the multiculturalist idea to display work by more non-European artists by selecting those who ‘demonstrate appropriate signs of cultural difference’ (Fisher 1994: 34). Fisher argues that, in this way, non-Western artists are reduced to ‘spectacle[s] of essentialist racial or ethnic typology’, and their ‘individual insights and human value’ are ignored, while the ‘work of white European artists is never exposed to such treatment’ (ibid.). Thus, Fisher argues, non-Western artists serve as ‘geo-ethnic entertainments’ that produce and maintain the unequal intellectual hierarchies between the art practices of Europeans and non-Europeans. Suaka is not alone in his aspirations to be more than ‘an ethnic artist’ and to have his artistic creativity approached beyond ethnic identifications. In their trenchant critique of the Dutch public art sector, Eltje Bos and Sandra Trienekens (2014) discuss the ongoing marginalization of nonWestern artists and art organizations. Basing their analysis on the lived experiences of non-Western artists in the Netherlands, they identify three major strategies that most artists employ. Their first category consists of artists who utilize the ‘I’ll stick to my group’ strategy by opting to receive private funding and catering to their own ethnic group, mainly through the performance of music and theatre productions from their country of origin. In their second group are artists who apply the ‘art/identity as politics’ strategy and endeavour to make their claims for a position

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in the public sector ‘as they are’. In their third category are artists who employ the ‘beyond identity’ strategy, which Bos and Trienekens (2014) link with Rosi Braidotti’s notion of nomadic subjects: these artists do not want their ethnic background to be the only basis on which their aesthetic endeavours are judged. In many ways, Suaka’s aspirations might echo this third, ‘beyond identity’, strategy, but this classification seems somewhat narrow, as he (and presumably others) wants his background to be seen and recognized, but not more than if he was from, say, Friesland (a province in the northern Netherlands) or France. Suaka wishes to avoid not only the ethnicization of the Dutch public art sector but its racialization as well. Essed and Trienekens have persuasively argued that ‘[t]here is the whiteness of the Dutch Art sector, where art with a capital ’A’ stands for white, Dutch, European’ (2008: 53). It is also important to note that the same artist can employ a multiplicity of strategies, which, from the artist’s point of view, is not necessarily hierarchically structured, unlike what Bos and Trienekens propose. Looking from the perspective of public funding for art, Bos and Trienekens (2014) presume that dance performances belonging to specific cultural traditions would exclusively be performed for audiences of that ethnic/ cultural tradition when performed by diasporic subjects. While this might often be the case, it is important to note that Balinese classical dance performances find various applications, from Balinese-Hindu ceremonies, Balinese-Dutch social gatherings, Indies events, and political events of the Dutch right wing to performances at private social gatherings of Dutch citizens who have no kinship ties with Bali or Indonesia at all (as we have seen in chapter three). This broad appreciation for Balinese expressive culture provides Balinese dancers with relatively frequent opportunities to engage in their culturally specif ic, embodied performances. Rightfully, scholars have argued that aesthetic performances can serve to make allegiances to both ancestral culture and integration into a new country (Leonard 2000), but it is important to note that these cultural performances are not necessarily designed to appeal exclusively to their own ethnic audiences. Sites for the performance of Balinese expressive culture widely exceed Balinese or Indonesian ethnic frameworks, standing instead as sites through which a sense of post-colonial intimacy is constituted through mutual interaction between Balinese subaltern citizens and autochthonous Dutch citizens. It seems that the expressive cultures of other non-Western allochtonen are mainly relegated to their own ethnic frameworks or that of the (dramatically fading) multicultural context in the Netherlands, which Žižek convincingly argues ‘condones the folklorist

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Other deprived of its substance … the tolerance of the Other in its aseptic, benign form, which forecloses the dimension of the realm of the Other’s jouissance’ (1997: 29).

The Installation My Home is Your Home I Komang Suaka’s art installation entitled My Home is Your Home was held at the Supermedium gallery in The Hague in April 2007. Like many other places where contemporary art is displayed, the Super Medium gallery has the aesthetics of a blank container that aspires to neutrality. The installation is unique for Suaka’s work in its explicit engagement with the notion of home and convoluted feelings of (non-)belonging. Suaka’s exhibition was comprised of seven parts, each located in separate but interconnected rooms – ‘Entrance exit’ (Ingang uitgang), ‘The origins’ (De oorsprong), ‘The beginning’ (Het begin), ‘The road’ (De weg), ‘The day’ (De Dag), ‘The fantasy’ (De fantasie), and ‘The memory’ (De herinnering).

Image 4 ‘The origins’ (De oorsprong), My home is your home installation

Photo: Komang Suaka, 2007

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Image 5 ‘The beginning’ (Het begin), My home is your home installation

Photo: Komang Suaka, 2007

Making the same space a point of both entrance and exit (Ingang uitgang), Suaka questions linear understandings of time, suggesting instead that arrivals and departures might be – and often are – far more ambiguous than what the linear model might suggest. This intended ambiguity opens up many interpretations and many ways of moving within space. In his own case, this reflects Suaka’s frequent comments that, prior to having physically moved to the Netherlands, he was ‘introduced’ to the Dutch while still in Bali, implying colonial history. The section entitled ‘The origins’ (De oorsprong) is a space made of white walls on which is drawn a single vertical line resembling a prison fence of barbed wire. The way in which the barbs are drawn gives the impression of young sprouting plants aspiring to move upwards. In the middle of the room, close to the wall and opposite to the entrance, is a large yellow standing lamp above a square shaped platter on which a white cloth is drenched in water. All of these are references to Suaka’s Balinese origins – from the yellow that is exuberantly present in Balinese-Hindu ceremonies to the white cloth and water used for the purifications that are central both to everyday life in Bali and also to Suaka’s life in the Netherlands. The barbed

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Image 6 ‘The road’ (De weg), My home is your home installation

Photo: Komang Suaka, 2007

wire reflects his sense of ‘being imprisoned’ by his background through being treated as an ‘ethnic artist’, while the barbs sprouting like plants reflect the prospect of new possibilities. ‘The beginning’ (Het begin) references Suaka’s movement to the Netherlands and the beginning of his career as an artist. Featuring dry wood branches spread on the floor in front of a large wall-sized canvas on which provisional lines of a painting are drawn, Suaka creates a spatial distinction between the artist and his canvas. He recycles dry branches in his studiohouse to introduce the physical presence of raw, natural materials which are lacking in the urban environment but which were abundant in the part of Bali where he grew up. The physical barrier made with the branches references his early struggles to find his own way in his adopted country, all the while being labelled as ‘Eastern’. The white cloth, the string of light bulbs unattached to electricity, and a set of black-and-white photographs are all representative of the materials with which Suaka experimented in his early work and life. ‘The road’ (De weg) comprises cloth collages on white walls and a vast array of books, including novels, travel writings, books on art history,

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Image 7 ‘The day’ (De dag), My home is your home installation

Photo: Komang Suaka, 2007

anthropology, languages, music, and spirituality, and different kinds of magazines – scattered upon the floor, around which visitors were expected to walk. These books are emblematic of the sources of knowledge not available to him in Bali; their positionality on the floor reflect the artist’s desire to abandon his excessive consumption of knowledge obtainable though books in which he engaged at the beginning of his life in the Netherlands. As a consequence of the road that the artist has travelled, the section that follows – ‘The day’ (De Dag) – reflects the simplicity of a rich daily sociality wherein friends gather around a tea-table to eat, drink, and play music, celebrating the values of extended sociality and music rehearsals in which Suaka extensively engaged prior to this installation. This phase of his artistic endeavour also reflects his chronic exhaustion with the economy of arts and a desire to dedicate his time to the pleasure of art production where playing music, painting, and socializing are celebrated as an art of living: I want to live a simple life; I want to share this with people who appreciate and respect each other … who share rather than compete among themselves. Many people are well educated here – they read, they have

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Image 8 ‘The fantasy’ (De fantasie), My home is your home installation

Photo: Komang Suaka, 2007

right rhetoric about justice, human rights, and all that – but what’s the use of all that knowledge? There is not less violence and fewer wars in the world! As an artist, you can be made and unmade by critics overnight. I am over that; I don’t want to be burdened by the competition of the art world. I do simple jobs in order to make money and I enjoy making music with my friends and painting what I feel, not what might become a new fad.

In its structure, ‘The fantasy’ (De fantasie) resembles ‘The road’ (De weg), with books and magazines scattered across the floor, a black-and-white checkered Balinese poleng cloth framing the room, and a set of pajeng (ceremonial umbrellas used in Balinese-Hindu rituals) accompanying it. However, here the density of books on the floor makes it almost impossible for a visitor to walk through this section without stepping on them. Here, Suaka’s abandonment of the acquisition of knowledge found in books is taken a step further by associating written knowledge with prescriptive and dogmatic teachings. Suaka presumes that such knowledge is present all over the world, including in his native Bali. For the artist, the production of

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Image 9 ‘The memory’ (De herinnering), My home is your home installation

Photo: Komang Suaka, 2007

dogmatic knowledge occurs on an everyday basis and constitutes a major source of discrimination, racialization, marginalization, and violence in contemporary societies. Thus, Suaka invites visitors to physically walk over the books in a metaphorical denouncement of the dogmatic and prescriptive knowledge they represent and the histories and values inscribed in them. The impossibility of such an endeavour – even metaphorical – is what gives this section its title – ‘The fantasy.’ ‘The memory’ (De herinnering), is the final section in Suaka’s installation. Set in an empty dark room with a small bundle of poleng cloth in the centre, folded paper next to the exit, and a stool covered in Balinese ceremonial yellow cloth nearby, it aligns memory with an empty darkness and implies the almost insignificant, ambiguous presence of his Balinese background in Suaka’s present. Here is the original home of Bali, represented as distant and fading – as a failure of his memory to remember the home from which the artist came to the Netherlands. I Komang Suaka made this installation in the midst of the most heated debates about the integration of foreigners and the failures of multiculturalism that the Netherlands has seen in the past century. It is of significance

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to note that Suaka decided to relocate to Bali only a year later. In many ways, the installation is a reflection of the artist’s personal journey with a particular focus on his life in the Netherlands. Some art critics and visitors described the installation as creating a feeling of alienation to the art – a feeling of not being welcome – and interpreted this as inconsistent with the installation’s title My Home is Your Home. The critics and visitors thus presumed that homes are always welcoming, comfortable places. Others were surprised to find the installation by an artist of Balinese background to be so confrontational, failing to rise to the expected form of ‘happy hybridity’. Suaka’s intentions for his installation were multiple. First, his aesthetic was meant to be didactic in attempting to subvert and eventually dismantle the idea of a happy Balinese artist who masterfully navigates through spaces of expected ‘in-between-ness’. Like other Balinese long-distancecultural specialists, Suaka was concerned with the presumed image of an idealized Balinese culture that many Westerners cultivate – an image that produces a sense of pride and superiority over other non-Western foreigners in postcolonial Dutch society but which also inspires a sense of urgency to show the many other ways of being Balinese that exist in the world beyond the romanticized imagination. Second, the artist invited viewers to feel alienated within their own home country and society and to question the knowledge presented to them as absolute truths. At the same time, Suaka was entirely pessimistic about the probability of the latter (hence, ‘the fantasy’). Nonetheless, Suaka endeavoured to highlight that strangeness and alienation are constitutive of the notion of home both for those who live their whole lives within one nation-state and for those with international migratory trajectories. In this, he echoes Sara Ahmed’s observation (2000) that movement and strangeness within the home itself have to be taken into consideration. Thus, our approach to the notion of home and belonging needs to incorporate feelings of estrangement and intricate senses of (non-)belonging. In her seminal work Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, Avtar Brah cogently argues that ‘“home” and belonging may be integral to the diasporic condition, but how, when, and in what form questions surface or how they are addressed is specific to the history of a particular diaspora’ (1996: 193). As scholars of critical diaspora and migration studies have shown (Clifford 1994; Brah 1996), ‘home’ in migration is not something that is left behind, nor is it necessarily something with which migrants can or wish to maintain an active relationship. Brah refers to homing desires as ‘a desire to feel at home in migration’ (1996: 180). The installation My Home is Your Home explores ways in which the

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artist moves through and inhabits a translocal space and, more broadly, provides insight into the intricately interwoven possibilities, struggles, hopes, challenges, and failures of making-home and feeling-at-home for subaltern citizens in Dutch post-coloniality. Like other Balinese performers, Suaka utilizes the historical networks of art production that exist between Balinese and Euro-American artists as well as the longstanding celebration of Balinese culture through the tourist industry and the international art world, supporting these as integral parts of Balinese cultural heritage in itself. In this way, Suaka is an active proponent of diasporic kebalian in Dutch post-coloniality, as he is intricately linked to the historical claims to proximity between Balinese and Dutch people. Simultaneously, Suaka struggles with contemporary forms of otherness that are produced through ethnicized and racialized ethnic arts frameworks. As we have seen, Suaka is not a nomadic subject detached from his ethnic background but is instead in conflict with institutional reproductions of otherness in art which limit the subject positions of artists of allochtoon background to that of the ethnic ‘other’. In this way, the position of a long-distance cultural specialist such as Suaka is generated through a slippery continuum of possibilities that are simultaneously subject to numerous constraints and limitations.



Anxieties about Marginality

In late May 2014, Ibu Dani, a long-term interlocutor of mine, came to visit me in my home in Leiden. As soon as she entered the house, I noticed how exceptionally upset she was. She handed me a bag with ingredients for the kangkung, tempe, and babi ketjap1 we were planning to cook that evening and exclaimed, fuming: ‘Too many ignorant foreigners live in this country! This is too bad … too bad I tell you. Are you writing about this!?’ She then explained what caused her outburst of anger. On the way to my house, Ibu Dani had stopped at the local supermarket to buy the ingredients for our meal. Walking between the aisles, she accidentally brushed past a woman she referred to as ‘black allochtoon, Surinamese’. Later on, being in a hurry to get to my place, as she explained, she tried to pay for the purchase as quickly as possible and continue on her journey. At that point, ‘the Surinamese woman’ told her she should watch her manners and stop pushing her way around, claiming that Ibu Dani was trying to push in front of her in the cue for the cashier. The comment about her bad manners outraged Ibu Dani. ‘Me, bad-mannered! Me!? I am not just any brown woman! I am Balinese! Everybody knows we are kind, polite people … I have lived here for 20 years, I know my way around!’ She continued to explain how she did not want to be bossed around by a ‘Surinamese woman’ when it is a known fact that Surinamese people are problem-makers. Ibu Dani made this clear to the woman with whom she was having the argument. ‘Do you know what she said?’ continued Ibu Dani. ‘“You bloody Wilders [Geert Wilders, right-wing politician, leader of the Party for Freedom] voter, you should all go back from wherever you came from.” She said that to me! To me! Sometimes I think Wilders is right. Some foreigners are horrible! Really horrible.’ Ibu Dani’s encounter with ‘the Surinamese woman’ neatly encapsulates how everyday situations can become sites of struggle over home and belonging and over claims to Balinese people’s self-image as being kind and polite. Suggesting that she was ‘bad-mannered’, the woman had stripped Ibu Dani of her claims both to Balinese-ness – as an ethnic self-image which presumes to be the ‘best-of-all-the-rest’ – and to the cultural competency Ibu Dani believed she had proved she possessed as an integrated Dutch citizen. Both of her claims (to Balinese-ness and to translocal belonging) were in this encounter marked as failures. Ibu Dani’s attempt to authenticate herself 1

An Indonesian dish made of water spinach, fermented soybean, and pork.

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as a ‘good migrant’ by voicing her ethnic background did not change her interlocutor’s opinion about her. Instead, she was associated with a rightwing politician, which subsequently inspired her to even consider taking up that subject position herself. Absorbed in their self-image, many Balinese people are often oblivious to their own active production of hierarchies of value (Herzfeld 2007) and to the acts of everyday racism in which they are active participants rather than neutral observers. Ibu Dani’s narrative reminded me how challenging it can be to live up to the expectations of being a Balinese person – an embodiment of poise and refinement – and how unstable and fragile Balinese claims to intimacy with others can be (based on others’ appreciation of their culture). Rather than being a given, the idea of Balinese people being the ‘best-of-all-the-rest’ is deeply rooted in anxieties about marginality that permeate everyday Balinese experiences. We can certainly agree that the image of Bali and its people remain closely linked to the idea of cultural uniqueness perceived to be threatened by radical Islam. Indeed, Balinese subaltern citizens’ reinforcement of this threat is an attempt to generate a sense of proximity between Balinese people and their non-Muslim, non-Balinese interlocutors – most importantly, the Dutch. Yet, Balinese proximity to foreignness (allochtony) remains an ongoing source of concern and apprehension. Ibu Dani’s statement that she is ‘not just any brown woman’ poignantly speaks of how close many Balinese people might be to the figure of a marginalized foreigner – someone who is non-white, speaks Dutch with a heavy accent, and works alongside other recent non-Western foreigners. Anxieties about Balinese migrants’ potential failures in cultural integration loom large not only for Balinese individuals but also, as we have seen, for their ethnic Dutch partners and in-laws, who feel morally obliged to carefully monitor the actions and statements of their Balinese others in order to suggest modifications either of behaviour or of their understanding of the world, which would be more in line with ‘a regular, normal family’ (normaal gezin). As the detailed ethnographic material presented in this book demonstrates, being Balinese in Dutch post-coloniality is situated in manifold modalities of pedagogical citizenship and trained intimacy, all employed to distance Balinese people and their families from the condemned caricature of unwanted, socially inept, backward foreigners. These engagements serve subject production, embedded in multiple negotiations of home-making practices. Balinese people’s persistent engagement in the (re)production of cultural hierarchies in which the Balinese culture and people are positioned above others go hand in hand with their anxieties that such subject positions are

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not recognized or appreciated by others. At the same time, being Balinese in post-colonial Dutch society is also about learning how to transform marginalization into an advantage, to make one’s life easier while still resisting certain forms of marginalization but only insofar as this resistance does not cause serious damage to the Balinese self-image. Thus, we can say that the political potential of subalternity (Padey 2008) in the case of Balinese citizens in Dutch post-coloniality is constrained not only by the governmental regulation of foreigners and foreignness (and the public discourses it produces) but also by Balinese migrants’ self-monitoring, which serves to preserve the Balinese self-image. However, as Ibu Dani’s encounter has shown, everyday interactions are slippery continuums wherein self-monitoring can escape and contradict desired representations. For Balinese subaltern citizens, colonial histories and their interpretations are focused more on the Balinese understanding of power and temporalities than on a need to engage in broader public demands for accountability over colonial violence. These historical contingencies are crucial for Balinese citizens’ interpretative understandings of the post-colonial world in which they live. In my view, Balinese subaltern migrants’ knowledge production about personal and collective, contemporary and historical agency is hierarchically structured and, to a certain extent, serves Balinese claims to occupy the position of the ‘best-of-all-the-rest’. In Balinese renderings of power relations, we need to pay close attention to how historical agency is interpreted – namely, in a way that does not conceptualize Balinese people as victims of a deadly colonial conquest but rather conceptualizes both themselves and the Dutch as part of an ontological understanding of the world wherein visible and invisible realms co-exist. In these renderings, ultimate power (kesaktian) lies with the royal kris and its extraordinary power to act of its own accord and to foresee the future of Balinese translocal belonging and settlement in the former colony. While some people are invested in reaffirming their claims as real and legitimate (particularly those who hope that their multiethnic children will relate appreciatively to Balinese ontology), for others, the history of Balinese and Dutch encounters is a given and outside of the agentic possibilities of any single individual or even of the Balinese collective in Dutch post-coloniality. Yet, at the same time, the ultimate power that Balinese people credit to the kris – and the will of the kris to allow itself to be captured by the Dutch as much as its current quiet existence in a museum, with Balinese people ‘not knowing what the kris has in mind for the future’ – offers a dramatic reversal of power relations between the colonized and the colonizer, allochtony and autochthony. To some extent, this understanding gives the impression

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of a future full of possibilities, but it must be remembered that, in this rendering, the ultimate power lies with the kris and the invisible world. Alternatively, we could approach the Balinese understanding of kesaktian and the mobility of the kris as a resistance to the power of both colonialism and globalization. This approach once again puts Balinese people and their culture in a position of exclusivity and uniqueness. The Balinese self-image has been developed over many decades through numerous local debates over kebalian. In a similar way, enactments of Balineseness in post-colonial Dutch society (which is a complex matrix of migrants with many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds in their own right) have their own specificities. My focus on Dutch national concerns with foreigners and foreignness was not intended to undermine or ignore the existence of ethnic Dutch citizens who seek to distance themselves from right-wing populist political parties, racism, and xenophobia. Still, this group of individuals seems to be a declining minority, both in the Netherlands and the European Union. The recent European elections (held in May 2014) have shown that anti-immigration sentiment is not declining but rather rising in the European Union, along with Europeans’ concerns about their own fragile economic, political, and identity-based unity. In the wake of the most recent European elections, the English novelist and filmmaker Hanif Kureishi stated: The immigrant has become a contemporary passion in Europe … easily available as a token, existing everywhere and nowhere, he is talked about constantly … Too superstitious, ambitious, worthless and strange – deposited outside the firmament of the acceptable – the migrant is degraded to the status of an object about whom anything can be said and to whom anything can be done. One thing is certain about him: he will not only rob you of your wealth and social position, he will be monstrous and obscene in his pleasures. These jouissances, it goes without saying, he has obtained at your expense. (2014)

This broader and heightening European f ixation on immigration and immigrants will inevitably affect reconfigurations of Balinese diasporic kebalian and almost certainly intensify Balinese cultural nationalism.

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‘Being Balinese Opens Many Doors’ (Balinees zijn opent vele deuren) In early June 2014, I attended the Tong Tong Fair in The Hague. Strolling around the huge event venue, I ran into Pak Merta, the former exile and political activist of the left. Our conversation moved from the recent changes that had taken place in the Balinese organization Banjar Suka Duka and his most recent visit to Bali to how the Tong Tong Fair had changed in recent years to now incorporate a separate ‘Indonesian’ section. Discussing the fair, Pak Merta proudly announced that there were 48 performances with the name ‘Bali’ taking place at the festival. Most of the 48 performances, he claimed, involved Balinese subaltern citizens and, to a much lesser extent, non-Balinese artists from the Netherlands and those visiting for the occasion from Bali. With a great sense of dignity and satisfaction, Pak Merta talked about the appreciation that Balinese culture and people have enjoyed. ‘Being Balinese opens many doors’ (Balinees zijn opent vele deuren), he stated. From that point on, our conversation shifted towards the increasing popularity of right-wing politician Geert Wilders, his party, and the growing xenophobia in the Netherlands. Pak Merta shared his concerns about a number of Balinese exiles who had passed away in the Netherlands and might not be able to ‘go back home’ – in other words, who might not receive the appropriate cremation ceremony in Bali. In many parts of Bali, he argued, those labelled as communists in the 1960s are still stigmatized today, and those who pass away rarely receive the appropriate cremation ceremony. Pak Merta quickly dismissed as isolated cases my comment about recent actions taken by small networks in Bali for the acknowledgment of mass violence that had taken place in the 1960s, arguing that such initiatives do not create real change. Not having much hope that questions about violence against alleged communists in Bali would ever receive the attention it needs, Pak Merta abruptly shifted our discussion to ask whether I had heard about Ibu Nini becoming acquainted with Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister. Ibu Nini and I have known each other for many years. At our meeting earlier in 2014, she updated me on changes in her life that had taken place since we’d last met and invited me to come to a well-known Indonesian restaurant in The Hague where she had been working since mid-2013. Describing her place of work, Ibu Nini emphasized the restaurant’s longevity (in operation for 37 years) and its cosy and intimate (gezellig) colonial atmosphere. She went on to say:

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The food is fine, not great, but we are super polite to the customers. You know the colonial way (she gesticulates, bowing a little). They like it, the Dutch … we are booked out all the time, especially by people who work for government departments. Ministers and similar …

Her narrative, which serves subject production, is f irmly based in the re-affirmation of an ongoing sense of proximity and familiarity between Dutch and Balinese people that draws on the echoing effects of colonialism in the Dutch East Indies. Ibu Nini’s successes as a Balinese long-distance cultural specialist are regularly announced by her statements and visual images via Facebook, which appears to be the main social medium through which Balinese people communicate across diasporic spaces, as much as with families and friends in Bali. The encounters she describes are saturated with an appreciation of Balinese culture and serve to positon Ibu Nini as a Balinese person who embodies the poise and refinement characteristic of established images of Balinese people and culture; in other words, as a prominent Balinese long-distance cultural specialist. Her social media posts receive a lot of attention when she posts images of herself and well-known Dutch dignitaries. For example, on one occasion she posted a photo of herself with Prime Minister Rutte, proudly announcing: ‘Isn’t my friend lovely? Me and Prime Minister Mark Rutte’. (Is mijn vriend lief of is hij niet lief?? Ik and Minister President Mark Rutte … [original text]) (June 2014)2

The photo was not the first time that the prime minister had come to the restaurant, and it was these frequent visits of his and her ongoing communication with him that prompted her to use the word friend (vriend) to state her own sense of proximity to him. The comments that followed her post served as a confirmation of the Dutch sense of familiarity, appreciation, and longstanding longing for the Dutch East Indies, including Bali. At the same time, these discussions and discussions similar to them are sites of knowledge production that reiterate common imaginations about Balinese culture but also reconfirm claims to Balinese translocality which, far from being seen as a failure of Balinese assumed uniqueness, is seen as one of its many qualities. Collective public engagements in Balinese expressive 2 Mark Rutte, the leader of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie – VVD) has been the Dutch prime minister since 2010.

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culture are frequently reported by the media in Bali in a celebratory tone, stressing the wide applications of Balinese cultural expressions in the Netherlands and Balinese translocality itself. Balinese cultural expressions reveal the capacity of Balinese subaltern citizens to simultaneously be active citizens in the Netherlands, maintain the idea of the banjar community, and continue the production of the culture that is so widely appreciated by others. Information about the appreciation of Balinese culture is regularly shared via social media and reported in newspapers in Bali, stressing the wide applications of Balinese cultural expressions in the Netherlands and Balinese translocality itself. Balinese subaltern citizen’s performances at the Tong Tong Fair in 2014, for example, received extensive coverage in the Balinese paper Metro Bali.3 These engagements serve the production of a personal sense of belonging for Balinese subaltern citizens and facilitate ongoing home-making practices. Despite, or perhaps because of, the heightened sense of instability about the claim that ‘being Balinese opens many doors’ that we have seen throughout this book, neither intimacy nor the idea of Balinese self-image are stable or given but rather need to be authenticated and (re)claimed. Simultaneously, methods of authenticating these claims are processes constitutive of subject making and intimation (Boym 1998) through which feelings of being-at-home and feeling-at-home are generated. I opened this book with Ibu Mariani’s usage of kinship terminology to refer to colonial and contemporary relationships between Balinese and Dutch people, which seems to turn post-colonial critiques upside down. This family metaphor was used in European colonies to determine and maintain power (McClintock 1995: 48; Young 1995: 4; Locher-Scholten 1994; Gouda 2001: 12) by justifying colonial hegemony through the portrayal of colonized adults as childlike. Balinese kinship claims seem also to be in radical opposition to the expectations of subaltern subjectivities endorsed by a group of prominent subaltern scholars in the 1980s who endeavoured to write alternative histories ‘from below’ (Guha and Spivak 1988) by seizing on the notion of rebellion and resistance. At the same time, my interlocutors’ engagement with the past did not lack the verbal expression of sentiments as presented by Ann Stoler and Karen Strassler (2000) in their discussion about memory work in Java. Balinese subaltern citizens’ claims to proximity, which emerged so prominently in my ethnographic material, cannot be situated within binary oppositions of remoteness and proximity, resistance and passivity, 3 See for example http://metrobali.com/2014/06/09/banjar-suka-duka-nederland-di-tongtong-festival/ retrieved on 12 June 2014.

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harmony and disorder. Rather, I argue that post-colonial intimacy generated by Balinese subaltern citizens is produced relationally and needs to be situated within the specificities of Dutch colonialism in Bali and Balinese understandings of historical agency as well as wider understandings of Balinese culture as paradisiacal and Balinese people as peace-loving, the Balinese and Dutch common sense of threat and vulnerability from radical Islam, and the existence of an Indies cultural landscape in the Netherlands, characterized by its rich and complex colonial inheritance that has been developing since the 1950s. Thus, post-colonial intimacy here needs to be seen as a wide spectrum of dynamic relationships that are experienced as familiarity, proximity, and closeness and generated through a continuum of dis-harmony and tensions. In Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, Stephen Greenblatt (2010) urges scholars of mobility studies to pay attention to a major paradox inscribed in practices of the mobility of peoples, ideas, objects, images, and texts. The paradox with which he is concerned is one in which mobility and exchanges are accompanied by a need for rootedness and belonging; the feeling of being at home. 4 Following this, I argue that the production of diasporic kebalian in Dutch post-coloniality should not be equated with mobility as ‘detachment’ and ‘liquidity’ (Bauman 2000; Urry 2000), ‘nomadic’ identities (Braidotti 1994), or the ‘creolisation’ of global culture (Hannerz 1996; Featherstone 1995). Rather, these are processes of re-rooting and translocal belonging, which are ongoing processes through which home-building – as an active engagement of working out, arranging, articulating, and dealing with divergent modalities of feeling at home in multiethnic, multiracial families – is generated. This book offers an anthropological perspective on Balinese people and their deepfelt longing to belong both to Bali and in the Netherlands, inscribed with a profound sense of the need to live and authenticate personal and collective notions of kebalian. Balinese subaltern citizens in the Netherlands wish to be (and to be seen as) culturally unique, peaceful, and above all ‘goede allochtonen’ – the ‘best of all the rest’, regardless of the compromises they need to make to have such claims be accepted as both viable and durable.

4

See also Schulte Nordholt 2011b.

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Author’s Biography

Ana Dragojlovic in an anthropologist working at the intersections of mobility, post-colonial and critical race studies, feminist and queer theory, and masculinity studies. She is currently working on a project that focuses on therapy cultures, particularly as they relate to historical violence with interests in affect, embodiment, and subjectivity. Her regional specialization reflects her interest in diasporas and empires and includes Indonesia, the Netherlands, the Dutch East-Indies, and Afro-Asian connections (particularly in relation to the Afro-Caribbean). She is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Index Page numbers in italic refer to photographs. Notes are indicated by ‘n’ with the relevant page and note numbers, for example ‘125n16’ indicates note 16 on page 125. actor-network theory 50, 124 adat (custom) 23, 31, 54, 62, 125n16, 144-45; see also ajeg Bali; Balinese culture; kebalian (Balineseness) agama (religion) 23, 31, 54, 62, 125n16, 144-45; see also ajeg Bali; Balinese Hinduism; kebalian (Balineseness) Ahmed, Sara 42, 68-69, 171 Aidit, D.N. 69 ajeg Bali 31, 144-45; see also Balinese nationalism allochtonen citizens 37-39, 72, 107-08, 119, 122, 163-64, 172 amnesia 141-42; see also memory and forgetting aphasia 141; see also memory and forgetting archival collections 53-54, 63-64, 69-70 art and artists 65-66, 86, 157-60, 162-65, 172; see also Balinese culture; Dutch East Indies: art and artefacts; Resobowo, Basuki; Suaka, I Komang articulation 49-50 Atini, Ibu 89-98 autochthonous citizens 37, 39-40, 120, 163-64 babu (domestic servant) 93-97 Bali Dutch colonization 24-30, 93, 112-13 events of 1965-66 56, 62, 72, 138 Japanese occupation 24, 30 kingdoms 27-28 mass killings 28, 32, 56, 72, 138 province and regencies 33 see also Balinese culture; Indonesia Bali Arts Festival (Pesta Kesenian Bali) 81 Bali Ayu dance group 82-86, 88, 127, 156 Bali (Krause) 154 Balinese Character, A Photographic Analysis (Bateson and Mead) 154 Balinese culture 79-82 books about 154-56 concepts of 30 dance 81-86, 88, 133, 134-35, 150-51, 154-56, 164; see also Puputan, Val van Bali dress 51-52 festivals 34, 45, 51-54, 62, 66-68, 71, 81 foreign influences 30-31, 161 gamelan orchestras 48, 67-68, 133, 136 hierarchy and egalitarianism in society 62, 71-72

lessons in 86-87, 89-91, 92 representations of 24-25, 28-30, 35, 78-82, 87, 146-47, 150-52, 155, 171 tradisi baru (new traditions) 52, 124-25, 161-62 wedding ceremonies 73-75 see also kebalian (Balineseness) Balinese ethnic identity see ethnic identity: Balinese Balinese Hinduism cosmology 112-14, 116, 124, 159 Dutch family shrine 88-89 Hindu-Javanese civilization 28-29 offerings 52n2 origins 125 rituals 51-53, 160 see also Galungan-Kuningan festival Balinese left see Indonesian left; political exiles Balinese migration to the Netherlands 31-34, 53-54, 58; see also political exiles Balinese nationalism ajeg Bali 31, 144-45 ‘long-distance nationalism’ 54, 59-61, 63, 66, 71 Balineseness see kebalian Balinese people caste system 33 conceptualization of power 112-13 gender relations 121-22 intelligentsia 29-30 perceptions of (by others) 35, 72, 75, 87, 91-92, 110-12, 122-23, 136-38, 180 population in Netherlands 32, 48-49 self-image 39, 72, 75, 85, 143-44, 147, 173-80 see also Balinese migration to the Netherlands; kebalian (Balineseness) Balinization (Baliseering) 24, 29 Bali Tourism Study 80 banjar, role of 54-55 Banjar Suka Duka network 34, 51, 54-55, 61-62, 72, 156, 161 political stance 62, 66-67 Barong Landung performance 125 Batavian Society Museum 102-04, 114 Batavian Society of Arts and Science 102-03 Bateson, Gregory, Balinese Character, A Photographic Analysis (Bateson and Mead) 154 Baulch, E. 80n5

200  Be[com]ing Dutch exhibition, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 106-07 Berlant, Lauren 39, 44, 77 Beyond the Dutch: Indonesia, the Netherlands and the Visual Arts, from 1900 Until Now exhibition, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2009-10 106-07 Bijl, Paul 132, 138-39, 141 biopolitics 26 of otherness 40 Black book of the Netherlands overseas (Vanvugt) 131 Bloembergen, M. 150-51 books about Bali 154-56 Bos, Eltje 163-64 Brah, Avtar 47, 99, 171 Bringing history home: Postcolonial identity politics in the Netherlands project 105-06 British Empire 142 budaya (culture) 23, 31, 54, 62, 125n16, 144-45; see also ajeg Bali; Balinese culture; kebalian (Balineseness) Buru Island, Indonesia 70 caste system 33 China and Balinese culture 125 relations with Indonesia 58n7 Sino-Soviet relations 58 Christianity 29 Cindy, Ibu 86-87 citizenship concepts of 77 Dutch see Dutch citizenship Indonesian 33-34 ‘subaltern citizen’ concept 25-26 civic groups, traditional see banjar, role of civic integration courses 39, 119 Clark, John 86, 160 class status 121-23 Cohen, Cathy 98 ‘colonial aphasia’ 141; see also memory and forgetting colonial heritage see Dutch colonial heritage colonial policies see Dutch colonialism: policies Colourful City Choir 127, 135, 137, 139-40 Common Cultural Heritage Policy 46, 102, 104-05 Communist Party of Indonesia see Indonesian Communist Party compensation for war victims 129-30 Consentrasi Gerakan Mahasiswa Indonesia (CGMI) see Indonesian Student Movement Concentration cosmology, Balinese-Hindu 112-14, 116 Covarrubias, Miguel 79 Island of Bali 155n5, 161 cultural integration cultural brokers (Balinese) 98

Beyond Bali

family teachings in Netherlands 121-23 Netherlands policies 37-41, 119 see also multiculturalism cultural intimacy 43-44, 93, 126, 148 cultural landscape 41, 45, 84-85, 180 cultural specialists ‘long-distance cultural specialists’ 39-40, 82-86, 178; see also Suaka, I Komang cultural tourism 30-31, 80 culture, Balinese see Balinese culture dance 81-86, 88, 133, 134-35, 150-51, 154-56, 164 Bali Ayu dance group 82-86, 88, 127, 156 see also Puputan, Val van Bali Dance and drama in Bali (De Zoete and Spies) 155 Dani, Ibu 173-74 Dekker, Eduard Douwes see Multatuli the Delegation 58 De Zoete, Beryl, Dance and drama in Bali (De Zoete and Spies) 155 domestic workers 93-97 Doron, Assa 125 dress (Balinese clothing) 51-52 Dümpel, Inge 134, 136-37, 144 Dutch citizenship 37-41, 118-19 active citizenship 75-79, 98-99, 111 allochtonen citizens 37-39, 72, 107-08, 119, 122, 163-64, 172 autochthonous citizens 37, 39-40, 120, 163-64 see also cultural integration Dutch colonial heritage Common Cultural Heritage Policy 46, 102, 104-05 ‘shared cultural heritage’ (Dutch-Balinese) 46-47, 101-03, 107, 126 Dutch colonialism Bali 24-30, 93, 112-13 colonial administration 29-30 dance commemorating see Puputan, Val van Bali ‘forgotten colonial histories’ 129-32, 138-39, 141, 146-48 policies 28-29 post-colonial interpretations 127-28; see also post-colonialism publications and media about 41, 130 publicly memorable events 139 and puputan 28, 109-10, 112, 117, 135-44 research studies 41 see also Dutch East Indies Dutch culture civic integration courses 39, 119 family teachings 121-23 see also Balinese culture; The Netherlands Dutch East Indies art and artefacts 41, 45, 102-04, 108-09, 150-52

201

Index

model colony 41 publications and media 41, 130 Second World War 130-31 see also Bali; Dutch colonialism; Indonesia Dutch national identity 35, 38, 40-41, 46, 76, 102, 105, 107-08, 118, 122-23 Dutch peacekeeping missions 136 Duuren, David van 117 Eastern Bloc countries 57-58 East Timor 60 egalitarianism in Balinese culture 62, 71-72 eksil see political exiles Engelfriet, Aad 131 ethnic identity 158-59 and art 158-60 Balinese 29-31, 35, 56, 81, 89-91, 125n16, 126, 145 Dutch 38-39, 118 Javanese 93-97 race and racial identities 37-38, 90, 96, 119-21 see also Balinese people: self image; Dutch national identity ethnicization of domestic workers 92-97 European education 29-30, 33 exhibitions 46, 101-02, 104, 106-12, 126 exiles see political exiles Exposition Coloniale Internationale, Paris 1931 150-51 Facts and Opinions about Indonesia (Indonesie Feiten en Meningen) 60 families, transnational 37-38, 118-25 family migration policies, Dutch 38-39, 118-19 festivals 34, 45, 51-54, 62, 66-68, 71, 81, 83 15 August 1945 Foundation and memorial events 131 films 41, 80n5, 81, 130, 149 Fisher, J. 163 forced migration 32-33 foreignness 38-40, 122-23, 162-65, 173-74; see also otherness forgetting, acts of 128-29, 141 ‘forgotten colonial histories’ 129-32, 138-39, 141, 146-48 Fortuyn, Pim 36, 36n10, 76, 108 Foster, Hal 160, 163 Foucault, Michel 26, 50, 77, 118 Friederich, Rudolf H.T. 29 Galungan-Kuningan festival 34, 51-54, 62, 66-68, 71 gamelan orchestras 48, 67-68, 133, 136 Het Gebaar (The Gesture) 130 Gede, Pak 67 Geertz, Clifford 159n7 Negara: The Theatre State in NineteenthCentury Bali (Geertz) 112-13 Gogh, Theo van 31, 76, 108

Gottowik, Volker 125 government, technologies of 26 Gramsci, Antonio 25 Greenblatt, Stephen 180 Hage, Ghassan 99 The Hague 48-49 Hall, Stuart 49-50 Harris, Clare 86 heritage colonial see Dutch colonial heritage research projects and exhibitions 104-12 Herzfeld, Michael 43-44, 93, 148 Hinduism Balinese see Balinese Hinduism displaced by Islam in Java 28-29 Indian 28, 125 ‘history turn’ 41, 102, 105 home home-making 40, 70-71, 78, 87, 99, 179-80 ‘homing’ 47-48 notions of 47-48, 68-69 notions of, in art 165-72 homosexuality 74n3 same-sex marriage 73-74 Howe, Leo 125 identity see Dutch national identity; ethnic identity imperialist nostalgia 107 India and Balinese Hinduism 28, 125 status of Parsis 82 Indies culture 83-84; see also Balinese culture Indo-Javanese theatre 84n10 Indonesia citizenship 33-34 events of 1965-66 32, 55-57, 62, 66, 71-72 exiles’ long-distance nationalism 54, 59-61, 63, 66, 71 foreign policy 57 mass killings 28, 32, 56, 72, 130 narratives of history 66 New Order 55-59, 63, 66n16, 70, 80, 161 see also Bali; Dutch East Indies Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) 56, 58, 69-70; see also Indonesian left Indonesian cultural objects 101-05 Indonesian Documentation Collection 69 Indonesian Embassy in the Netherlands exiles’ connections with 48, 61-62, 66-68, 71-72 Indonesian left 54-66 archival collections 53-54, 63-64, 69-70 interest in 59-61, 63 legacy, support for 64, 69-71 stigmatization/suppression of 55-57, 66, 70-71, 177 see also political exiles

202  Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI) 56 Indonesian National Museum 101-102, 104 Indonesian Student Movement Concentration 70 Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past, Amsterdam, 2005-06 (exhibition) 46, 101-02, 104, 108-12, 126 Indonesie Feiten en Meningen (journal) 60 In search of silenced voices (records of exiles) 69 integration see cultural integration intelligentsia 29-30 International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam 70, 105 intimacy 43-45 invisible and visible worlds 112-14, 116, 124 ‘invisible empire’ 142 Islam 28 anti-Islam attitudes 36, 75, 90-91, 107-08, 119 Dutch/Balinese fear of (islamophobia) 74, 76 threat of radical Islam 31-32, 35, 144 Island of Bali (Covarrubias) 155n5, 161 Kadek, Pak 67, 71-72, 119-20 kebalian (Balineseness) 23, 30-32, 55, 61-62, 71-72, 80-81, 91, 124-27, 144, 161-62, 172, 176, 180; see also Balinese people: self image kebudayaan (concept of Balinese ‘culture’) 30; see also Balinese culture Ki Bangawan Cangguh (special kris of kinship) 115 klayaban 55n5; see also political exiles Knol, Meta 106-107 Komitee Indonesia 60 Korn, V.E. 29 Krause, Gregor, Bali 154 kris (daggers) 103, 109, 114-16, 117-18, 125 special kris of kinship 115 labour market 94-96 Landsberg, Alison 45 Lan, Pei-Chia 96 Lastri, Ibu 92-93, 96-97 Latour, Bruno 50, 124 Leiden Museum of Ethnology 101, 104 Lembaga Kebudajaan Rakjat (LEKRA) 69-70 libraries see archival collections Lietrinck, F.A. 29 life narratives collections see archival collections ‘long-distance cultural specialists’ 39-40, 82-86, 178; see also Suaka, I Komang ‘long-distance nationalism’ 54, 59-61, 63, 66, 71 Lopulalan, Frans 135 Luhrmann, Tanya Marie 82 marginality, anxieties about 173-76 Mariani, Ibu 34, 179

Beyond Bali

massacres 28, 32, 56, 72, 130, 136n10, 137; see also puputan Mead, Margaret, Balinese Character, A Photographic Analysis (Bateson and Mead) 154 Meertens Institute 105 memory and forgetting 128-29, 140-141 Merta, Pak 59-61, 63, 177 Middelkoop, Eimert van 104 migrants in the Netherlands problematic 38, 40-41, 45, 75, 85, 90, 173 Turkish/Moroccan 34, 37, 85, 95, 122 undocumented 94-96 see also political exiles migration Dutch immigration policies 37-39, 118-19 ‘homing’ 47-48 see also political exiles missionaries 29 Moluccans 140-41, 143-44, 146 Moroccan immigrants 34, 37, 85, 95, 122 Multatuli 132-33 multiculturalism 40-42, 85, 102 criticisms of 36, 76, 107-08 see also cultural integration museum collections 41, 101-04; see also exhibitions Muslims see Islam My Home is Your Home installation (I Komang Suaka) 165-72, 165-170 Nakamura, F.M. 86 Naradha, Satria 145 national identity see Dutch national identity; ethnic identity nationalism ajeg Bali 31, 144-45 ‘long-distance nationalism’ 54, 59-61, 63, 66, 71 National Museum, Jakarta 101-02, 104 National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden 101, 104 Navaro-Yashin, Y. 50, 124 Negara: The Theatre State in NineteenthCentury Bali (Geertz) 112-13 The Netherlands Balinese population 32, 48-49; see also Balinese migration to the Netherlands citizenship see Dutch citizenship colonialism see Dutch colonialism Common Cultural Heritage Policy 46, 102, 104-05 compensation for war victims 129-30 cultural integration policies 37-41, 119 immigration policies 37-39, 118-19; see also Balinese migration to the Netherlands; migrants in the Netherlands self-representation 139, 141 Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research 106

Index

Network of Visiting Teachers on World War Two in Southeast Asia 131 networks 34, 61, 124 actor-network theory 50, 124 see also Banjar Suka Duka network New Order in Indonesia 55-59, 63, 66n16, 70, 80, 161 Nini, Ibu 177-78 niskala (invisible world) 112-14, 116 Non-Aligned Movement 57, 57n6 Nordholt, Henk Schulte 24 nostalgia, imperialist 107 Nyoman, Pak 34, 61, 143 offerings (ritual offerings) 51-53 Ong, Aiwa 26, 77 orchestras 48, 67-68, 133, 136 otherness 26, 30, 40, 44, 76, 85, 107-08, 143-45, 164-65, 172; see also foreignness Pandey, Gyanendra 123 Paris Colonial Exposition 1931 150-51 Parsis 82 Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI 56, 58, 69-70; see also Indonesian left Partai Nationalist Indonesia, PNI 56 Pasar Malam events 83 Pedersen, Lene 115 People’s Cultural Institution 69-70 Perhimpunam Pelajar Indonesia (student organization) 57 Perhimpunan Dokumentasi Indonesia (PERDOI) 69 Pesta Kesenian Bali (Bali Arts Festival) 81 Picard, Michael 23, 30, 80, 125 PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) 56, 58, 69-70; see also Indonesian left plangkiran (shrine) 160 PNI (Indonesian Nationalist Party) 56 poleng fabric 149, 159, 169-70 political exiles 32, 33, 53-60, 177 archival collections 53-54, 63-64, 69-70 attitudes to Indonesian Embassy 48, 61-62, 66-68, 71-72 ideologies 61-62 interest in 59-61, 63 long-distance nationalism of 54, 59-61, 63, 66, 71 sorrow and loss 63-66 post-colonial intimacy 23, 43-45, 146-48, 178-80 post-colonialism 42-43 post-colonial pedagogies 39-40, 75, 78-79, 82, 89-92, 126 power, conceptualization of 112-13 power, objects of see kris (daggers) PPI see Perhimpunam Pelajar Indonesia (student organization) prosthetic memory 45 publications see archival collections

203 puputan 28, 109-10, 112, 117, 135-44 Puputan, Val van Bali (The Fall of Bali) (dance performance) 127, 132-42 Balinese response 142-44, 146-47 race and racial identities 37-38, 90, 96, 119-21; see also ethnic identity Raffles, Sir Thomas Stamford 28 Rahaket, Johnny 127, 132-33, 136, 138-41, 144-46 Regt, Marina de 96 Resobowo, Basuki 60, 65-66 rituals 51-53, 88-89, 159n7, 160 rootednesses, concept of 35n9 Rosaldo, Renato 107 Rose, Nikolas 117-18 Rouffaer, G.P. 29 Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences 105 Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies 105 royal regalia 102-04, 109, 114-18 Russian Sino-Soviet relations 58 Rutte, Mark 178 same-sex marriage 73-74 Santikarma, Degung 145 Sari, Ibu 94-95, 97-98 Scheffer, Paul 107 Schengen Agreement 119n12 Schomper, Pans 36n10 Second World War compensation for Dutch nationals in Dutch East Indies 129-30 memorialization of 130-31 sekala (visible world) 113-14, 116 servants 93-97 Setia, Ibu 127, 133, 142 Setiawan, Hersri 63, 69-70 Shared Cultural Heritage project 101-02 shrine in Dutch family garden 88-89 Sites, Bodies and Stories: The Dynamics of Heritage Formation in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia and the Netherlands project 106 social class 121-23 Société Centrale pour l’Equipement Touristique Outre-Mer 80 South Pacific (film) 80n5 Spies, Walter 74n2, 74n3 Dance and drama in Bali (De Zoete and Spies) 155 Stichting Gastdocenten WOII ZO Azie 131 Stoler, Ann Laura 141-42 students 32-33, 55, 57, 61 ‘Sukarno’s students’ 54-55 see also political exiles Suaka, I Komang 149-51, 152, 153-65 biography 153-58 library 154-56

204  My Home is Your Home installation 165-72, 165-170 subaltern citizen, notion of 25-26 Suharto, President of Indonesia 55-56, 161 Sukarno, President of Indonesia 53-56, 58, 80 ‘Sukarno’s students’ 54-55; see also political exiles Sukerti, Ni Wayan 36, 36n10 Surinamese people 95, 173-74 Sutiyo, Sarmadji 63, 69 tempo doeloe 83 toko 83-84 Tong Fair 83, 177, 179 tourism 28, 30-31, 33, 79-80, 82 tradisi baru (new traditions) 52, 124-25, 161-62 Traditional Balinese Culture (book) 155 translocality 35-36, 78, 87, 90, 92, 124-26, 178-80 transnational families 37-38, 118-25 transnationality 35n9, 36 Trienekens, Sandra 163-64 Tsing, Anna 96 Turkish immigrants 34, 37, 85, 95, 122 Tuuk, Herman Neubronner van der 29, 110-11, 155 USSR Sino-Soviet relations 58 van: Names incorporating prepositions such as ‘van’ or ‘van der’ are sorted under the next component of the surname: see Gogh, Theo van; Middelkoop, Eimert van; Tuuk, Herman Neubronner van der

Beyond Bali

Vanvugt, Ewald, Black book of the Netherlands overseas 131 Vickers, Adrian 25, 28-29, 56, 71, 74n3, 110, 155 violence and atrocities 135-40, 146-48; see also puputan Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali (Wiener) 112-13, 115-16 visible and invisible worlds 112-14, 116, 124 voluntary migration 32-33 Vroman, Leo 136 war see puputan; World War II Wayan, Pak 61, 73-75, 114, 116 wedding ceremonies 73-75 Wemyss, Georgie 142 Wertheim Foundation 60 Wertheim, Wim 60 Wiener, Margaret J., Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali 112-13, 115-16 Wilders, Geert 108, 173, 177 World War II compensation for Dutch nationals in Dutch East Indies 129-30 memorialization of 130-31 xenophobia see foreignness; otherness Yani, Ibu 84 Yulia, Ibu 133, 142 Žižek, Slavoj 85, 164-65 Zoete, Beryl de see De Zoete, Beryl