Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, sociology, and related fields.
They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.
Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in anthropology, ethnology, sociology, ASEAN studies, gender studies, and related fields.
Kinship in Bali by Hildred Geertz and Clifford Geertz is a book by two American anthropologists.
Professor Hildred Storey Geertz studied Balinese and Javanese kinship practices and Balinese art in Indonesia. She taught anthropology at Princeton University in New Jersey, the United States of America (USA).
Professor Clifford James Geertz was an influential cultural anthropologist who taught at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
The TU Library collection includes several other books about different aspects of the anthropology of Indonesia.
The TU Library also owns other books by the authors, including Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali, which argues that the pre-colonial Balinese state was not an oriental despotism, but an organized spectacle.
The noble rulers of the island were less interested in administering the lives of the Balinese than in dramatizing their rank and political superiority through large public rituals and ceremonies. These cultural processes did not support the state, he argues, but were the state.
The authors conducted extensive ethnographic research in Southeast Asia and North Africa.
In Kinship in Bali, they note:
Balinese kinship customs and practices are, on first encounter, puzzlingly irregular and contradictory. The ethnologist can find very little agreement among his informants on many basic substantive issues, such as what forms of groupings of kinsmen the Balinese recognize, or what the essential structural characteristics of these groups are thought to be. Two fully cooperative and intelligent Balinese from the same village may give completely variant accounts on matters that the ethnologist believes to be crucial to his formulations. They may give strikingly different descriptions of the organization of the same concrete group of kinsmen, or they may even use completely different terms to identify that group. On a more abstract level, the same two informants may give entirely different lists of the various kinds of kinship groupings that they know’ about. If the ethnologist attempts to solve his perplexities by ignoring analyses by Balinese of their own kinship relations and by painstakingly collecting information on actual groupings of kinsmen through genealogies and censuses, he finds new and equally puzzling inconsistencies. For instance, he might find that some persons belong to large, organized kingroups which have corporately owned common property, a social unity and identity recognized by the rest of the village, and an authority structure of leaders and members, while others within the same village have no such kingroups and are organized, instead, only into loosely related networks of elementary families. He would find, further, on studying the corporately organized kingroups, that the members of only some of them have any detailed knowledge of their genealogical relationship, while the members of others have no interest in their forebears earlier than their own grandparents, nor in tracing their precise relationships to living persons whom they recognize as kin; that the memberships of some corporate groups are sharply localized while others have members scattered over a wide area in many different villages. These variations cannot be explained by regional differences, for Bali is a small island, and all Balinese share the same general beliefs, the same overall world-view, the same broad ideas on how their society is, and should be, arranged. It is clear, then, that the first theoretical problem presented by the study of Balinese kinship is that of discerning some underlying principles which can account for this highly variable set of kinship practices. Allied to the task of finding unity in diversity—if there be any—is that of explaining the occurrence of each variant form of kinship organization. While these are, of course, essential issues in any study of social organization, they appear to be more pressing and difficult in the case of Bali. Our main strategy for uncovering such an underlying order in Balinese kinship practices has been to make an analytic separation between the cultural dimension of this order and the social structural. By “the cultural dimension” we refer to those Balinese ideas, beliefs, and values which are relevant to their behavior as kinsmen— ideas, beliefs, and values that are abstracted from and distinguished from the actual regularities in that behavior, from the concrete interpersonal relationships which obtain “on the ground” among particular kinsmen. The relevant ideas, beliefs, and values are those having to do with, for instance, the perceived nature of the connection between parent and child, or between deceased ancestors and living persons, or between individuals who share (or think they share) a common parentage or common ancestry. Taken together, these assumptions form a culturally unique conceptual framework that the Balinese use to represent, to understand, and to organize their social relation ships with their kinsmen. […]
Because of the narrowness and specificity of this system of prestige stratification, the term “caste” when applied to Balinese social organization is only roughly appropriate, and in some ways misleading. While the Balinese terms for some of the customs concerned and some names for ranks have been borrowed from India, the actual system is quite different. There is no intricate division of labor, no reciprocal exchange of goods and services according to ascribed membership in different status groups. The titles are not generally associated with occupations and. with the exception of the Brahmana priests, possession of a title never entails exclusive right to an occupation. While possession of the same or similar title can become the basis for formation for certain kinds of organized groups (most particularly, the corporate kingroups we shall discuss at length below), titles in themselves do not signify membership in any such group. Further, the relative rank of titles is far from fully agreed upon by all. There are very few customs of ceremonial avoidance between persons of different title, and, with the exception of foods which have been offered to ancestral gods in certain rituals and which may be later consumed only by the worshipper and his family, there are no restrictions on commensality between holders of different titles. The titles are broadly classified into two general categories, the titles of gentry and the titles of commoners.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)