• 2 I wish to thank the editorial board of Archipel for having accepted this review article in spite of (...)

2This review essay is devoted to the latest book by Richard Fox on the fascinating and little-investigated subject of non-textual uses of letters (aksara) in contemporary Bali.2 It takes this wide-ranging publication as a point of departure for contributing to the ongoing debate between the “theorists” and the “philologists” in the wider disciplinary framework of Area Studies. This debate, in fact, hardly exists in the field of (Old) Javanese and Balinese studies, notably because no philologist has hitherto replied to the critique of the discipline that has been advanced over the past decade or so by theorists—Fox being the most prolific and representative of them. Taking up this desideratum, my critique inevitably reflects my own scholarly background and methodology, namely the study of the religious history of Java and Bali from a textual and comparative perspective.

• 3 A thematically linked edited volume stemming from the same project is Hornbacher and Fox 2016.
• 4 See Fox 2011.

3As its evocative title suggests, the book explores “through a study of Balinese script as employed in rites of healing, sorcery, and self-defense […] the aims and desires embodied in the production and use of palm-leaf manuscripts, amulets, and other inscribed objects” (p. 2). Containing research carried out in the framework of the collaborative research project “Material Text Cultures” at Heidelberg University,3 the book under review alternates ethnographic case studies (mostly drawn from the anonymous Balinese village community fictively referred to as “Batan Nangka”) with theoretical reflections. It is, therefore, much more than a book on aksaras from the perspective of anthropology, reflecting as it does the author’s longstanding interest in the study of religion, media, and philosophy in the context of contemporary Bali and Indonesia.4

• 5 Pollock 2006.

4The book consists in eight chapters, earlier versions of two of which (chapters two and three) were previously published elsewhere. As the author remarks, each chapter “may be approached as a (more or less) self-contained exploration of script and writing, as taken in from a particular vantage” (p. 23). The first chapter sets the stage by providing a concise introduction and voicing some key points and questions, intermixed with ethnographic cases—for instance, Prof. I Gusti Ngurah Bagus’ inaugural lecture in Anthropology at Udayana University in 1980 on the letters of the Balinese syllabary as a point of departure to unravel local understandings of aksaras alongside the imperatives of state bureaucracy. Chapter two revolves around the themes of religious and cultural complexity, presenting aksaras and Balinese “ways of life.” Chapter three, having discussed what “life” means in the Balinese context, presents some immanent examples of usages of aksaras. Chapter four focuses on theories of practice generally and the Caru Ṛṣi Gaṇa ritual specifically; according to Fox, this ritual reflects not only a degree of complexity, but also a wide array of seemingly contradictory purposes. Chapter five continues the discussion of the idea of practice, closely reviewing the theories of Bourdieu and MacIntyre and applying them to the Balinese context, as well as proposing to approach the Caru Ṛṣi Gaṇa as one of the regular activities “that make up the practice of maintaining a houseyard.” Chapter six critiques the idea of “tradition” as set forward by both Western and Balinese scholarly (and non-scholarly) circles, presenting the case study of Ida Wayan Oka Granoka’s Grebeg Aksara ceremony and his wider project of re-orienting Balinese tradition. Chapter seven deals with translation (for instance, of such polysemic Sanskritic Balinese terms as atma or suci) and the inevitable reification entailed by the terminology used in scientific writing. Chapter eight recapitulates each preceding chapter, elaborates on a critique of Sheldon Pollock’s Sanskrit Cosmopolis5 and his definition of philology as “making sense of texts,” and concludes with “a few unresolved issues.”

• 6 A case in point is Fox’s critical remark that to understand “practice” as “what people do” would en (...)

7First, as an academic practicing a more “traditional” type of scholarship, I have found the dominance of theory over empirical data to be a distracting factor, as well as the markedly deconstructivist approach to be at times extreme.6 My reading of the book has left me with the impression that aksaras have been virtually taken by Fox as a pretext to embark on theoretical discussions. Thus, the book primarily reflects the author’s concern to push his deconstructivist theoretical agenda, and only secondarily makes “a positive contribution to the scholarship on religious uses of script in Indonesia and the wider Malay region” (p. 2). As Fox admits, while the “argument is presented with detailed attention to the materials from Bali,” the “examples have been chosen for their pertinence to problems of broader import” (ibid.), his ethnographic approach to Balinese uses of script being mainly “directed by a set of broader theoretical questions around the nature of communication, agency and practice” (p. 7). This may be a reasonable compromise, but some readers might find it to be a deterrent.

• 7 For instance, Rubinstein 2000; Hunter 2016; Acri 2016.

8Undeniably, the ways in which aksaras are (and were) used in Bali constitute an extensive subject; recognizing that the vastness and complexity of the material is such that it is impossible to provide an exhaustive account of the subject, Fox “picks up where […] others have left off, to reflect further on Balinese uses of script and writing” (p. 7). While this is a fair description of the essence of the book, Fox appears not to have always meaningfully (and, sometimes, fairly) engaged with the work of his predecessors—especially philologists. For instance, Fox occasionally refers to a handful of pertinent secondary sources,7 but draws hardly any data from them, in spite of claiming to apply anthropological thinking to philology and codicology in order to “unsettle received understandings of textuality and writing as they pertain to the religious traditions of Southeast Asia” (p. 2). This body of work on aksaras discusses relevant primary sources that could have been brought into a fruitful conversation with the ethnographic research carried out by the author.

• 8 See Acri 2016.

11Fox embarks on a critique of Pollock’s Sanskrit Cosmopolis on the ground that, philology being understood as “the discipline of making sense of texts, there is some question as to whether this approach is suitable for thinking about nonliterary uses of writing” (p. 9). Fox’s application of the “language ecology” framework in chapter two seems promising indeed; however, his denial of the role of philology, as well as of the transregional interplay between Sanskrit language and culture and their vernacular counterparts in the premodern Indic world, to understand non-textual uses of writing in Bali can be countered by pointing out that the religious (as well as material) cultures of many Southeast Asian societies have been influenced by the textual funds of transregional Indic religious traditions. When approaching the “magical,” non-textual uses of script, we cannot avoid confronting ourselves with the constellation of ideas and practices derived from prescriptive texts that set an historical precedent.8 Fox’s prejudice against a narrowly conceived philology hardly does justice to the complex dynamics that have contributed to shape Balinese ideas and practices both historically and at present, and leaves us with many unanswered questions. Asking one such questions, namely “whether these ‘texts’ were always meant to be read—that is, whether it was their textuality, so construed, that mattered the most in the assemblage and use of these inscribed objects,” Fox attributes to Pollock and his followers a propensity for “naturalizing a philological orientation to writing,” glossing over “philologically noncompliant uses of script and writing,” and obscuring “a range of equally important uses of writing on the subcontinent and beyond” (p. 181), such as amulets and other forms of script magic throughout Southeast Asia. Fox may be blamed in his turn for glossing over the textual material and related practices that are not strictly compliant with his views, thus unduly naturalizing non-textual usages of script.

• 9 On which see, for example, Creese 2014; Darma Putra 2014.
• 10 For instance, in table 4.1 (p. 87) the Śaiva syllables Sa Ba Ta A I, which are central in Balinese (...)

12As stressed by Fox, Balinese script undeniably has many lives beyond the purely “textual” dimension. However, the author’s lack of historical analysis has seemingly prevented him from asking, and elaborating on, the relevant question as to whether these lives are continuities or rather revivals. Fox thinks that recent conceptions of writing as a neutral medium for the transmission of textual meaning are linked to academic philology, reformed Hinduism, and local politics, as opposed to “traditional” practices of apotropaic writing and other non-textual uses of script. While this is often the case, there is room to hypothesize that, in some cases, the other way around may be true. Recent research, as well as my own observations in the field over the past twenty years, suggest that the ritualization of literacy linked to manuscripts, as well as the focus on textual performance that we can witness in contemporary Bali,9 reflect a recent trend associated with the rise of movements affirming Balinese identity and the widespread introduction of new media—an emblematic case of “invented tradition.” Furthermore, in both Java and Bali, it is in the contexts where book-manuscripts are no longer used as “books” or textual media, that is, when their scripts and languages are no longer understood and actively used by a community of readers, that these objects become more prone to being sacralized and associated with magical or ritual uses. This is the case, for example, of pre-18th century Indic palm-leaf manuscripts in contemporary Java, even in Islamic contexts. Similar dynamics are at play in contemporary Bali—where, one should keep it in mind, very few people can read kawi script, let alone understand the language, and where a divide at the elite level between “traditionalists” and “modernists” appears to exist. Many specialists of Balinese manuscripts, including competent Śaiva priests (pedanda siwa), but also lay intellectuals and men of letters trained in both “traditional” and academic settings, regard palm-leaf manuscripts as media primarily intended to be read and reproduced for the knowledge they contain rather than ritual objects to be worshiped or used for magical purposes—not the least because many texts have little to do with religion, ritual, or magic, being rather appreciated mainly for their poetic, literary, or narrative qualities, or as sources of legal or otherwise practical knowledge. These objects are often handled, stored, and guarded with great care, but not necessarily used as talismans or ritual paraphernalia, let alone considered “living entities.” Thus, to see magic and efficacy everywhere would be unwarranted. Furthermore, pace Fox (p. 5), aksaras are not powerful and sacred per se, but only when they are written or pronounced as mantras in particular sequences or configurations, e.g. provided with nasalizations and manipulated mentally or visually during meditative practices. Regrettably, taking for granted the (still limited) work by previous scholars on the subject, as well as the reader’s previous knowledge, the book remains silent about the “inner workings” of the science of aksaras in connection with psychophysical practices, and provides hardly any concrete examples of configurations of scripts, diagrams, etc.10

• 11 Witness, for instance, the idea that “the common translation of atma—as ‘soul,’ ‘spirit,’ or ‘self’ (...)
• 12 The explanation given by the informants, i.e. “that’s just how it is,” is particularly telling in t (...)
• 13 For a critique of this idea, elaborated in previous anthropological literature, see Acri 2011.
• 14 See White 2005: 3.

13An aspect of Fox’s book that I find somewhat baffling is the author’s general characterization of Balinese culture and ritual praxis as a chaotic, incoherent, and often-contradictory complexity that cannot be reduced to any underlying system.11 Whenever he has a chance, Fox offers a critique of the notion that contemporary ideas and practices would be informed by a (more or less coherent) cultural system carried forward by the Old Javanese and Balinese literature that has been preserved and produced on the island since the premodern period. For instance, he questions “the idea that day-to-day practices are simply an instantiation of an underlying philosophy (e.g., as explicated in one or another tutur manuscript)” (n7, p. 184); having expressed his puzzlement at the Caru Ṛṣi Gaṇa’s ritual “seemingly incongruous juxtaposition of battle, exchange, transformation, and cleansing,” he elaborates his idea of Balinese ritual representing a set of “multiple incongruities,” and further speculates that “one might be inclined to think that Balinese were similarly adrift when it came to the purposes animating their religious rites” (pp. 119–20). He goes so far as to affirm that, although it would not be impossible to “formulate a consistent interpretation […], doing so would introduce a form of coherence recognized neither by the ritual manuals nor by those performing the rites” (p. 101); and that “one can certainly imagine an overarching conceptual framework that would render these ideals compatible with one another. And yet, as we saw, this would introduce a degree of coherence that was not only absent from the commentaries themselves but also resisted by many of those who followed them” (p. 103). The above statements reveal the fallacy of confusing expert and non-expert views: taking his informants at face value and avoiding to dig deeper when they direct him to those who know the doctrines written in the texts,12 Fox seemingly ignores or downplays the specialization of work characterizing Balinese ritual, which involves multiple agents, from the “workforce” to those who “know the meaning.” Furthermore, having failed to grasp the underlying coherence of the system of Balinese ritual, he concludes that it has little if any coherence on the one hand, and unwarrantedly takes for granted the non-systematic, non-intellectual, and fragmentary character of the texts on the other, accepting the received idea that they constitute place-and-person-specific documents.13 While Fox blames philology for unreflectively imposing Western categories on the Balinese, to give up the very possibility to understand the “others” by depriving them of a coherent and resilient cultural heritage providing the mental framework through which the world is organized strikes me as a no less subliminally ethnocentric and exoticizing perspective. The abandonment of the endeavor of actually reading and interpreting the texts (something that many Balinese have luckily continued to do for the past several hundred years) on the one hand, and the rejection of historical investigation on the ideological grounds of the postmodernist/deconstructivist theoretical paradigm on the other, carries the inevitable disadvantage, as David White aptly puts it, of inhibiting “any opening to the other whatsoever.”14 My conviction is that no amount of critical self-reflectivity can resolve this fundamental impasse.

• 15 This distinction corresponds to what Tanselle (1989: 69–70) called “text of work” and “text of docu (...)
• 16 Acri 2011.

14Throughout the book, Fox portrays Balinese religious culture as being dominated by a distinction between state-bureaucratic representations of “Hindu religion” (Agama Hindu), “characterized by a moralizing monotheism that aspires to the universal status of world religion,” and “the innumerable rites and related activities that permeate day-to-day life on the island […] often inextricably tied to a particular locale, incorporating aims and ideals that anthropologists and other regional specialists have more commonly associated with the less rigorously institutionalized activities of healing, sorcery, and self-fortification” (p. xiii). While this characterization is per se not incorrect, this strictly dichotomous order does not take into account other textual genres and social milieus that could make the picture more complex and multifarious—for instance, the genre of philosophical and theological texts called tattvas, or the most esoteric-minded among the pedanda siwa. Fox questions the historical existence of a canon, and attributes the idea of a “text” transcending the bounds of matter and its physical presence to the advent of the modern (i.e. Western-influenced), reformed version of Balinese Hinduism, which would stand in contrast with older ideas of script and writing (p. 48). This does not seem to be the case, for there are reasons to believe that premodern authors and scribes could differentiate between a text as an abstract entity and a text in its immanent instantiation (i.e. a given manuscript);15 furthermore, as I have argued in previous publications, there existed a shared, transregional body of systematic texts expounding both India-derived Śaiva doctrine and internalized yogic practice in Java and Bali.16 This body of texts took a life of its own in Bali from the Majapahit period onwards. I can see very little if anything in them in terms of expressing local contingencies or referring to realia, ritual practices, or social agents. In fact, they come perilously close to the Western “philological” conceptions of textuality critiqued by Fox.

• 17 A preliminary attempt, focusing on the Balinese offerings called bhūtayadnyas, is Acri and Stephen (...)

15A concrete example of the perspective critiqued above is provided by Fox’s discussion of the ritual of the Caru Ṛṣi Gaṇa. Having advanced a few questions relating to the explanation of various actions and stages of the ritual, such as the final noise-making, Fox notes that an answer could be attempted by looking at the Balinese palm leaf manuscripts containing texts with ties to Javanese and South Asian Indic heritage, as well as the “evidence of Indic precedent in the form of rites employing similar paraphernalia, procedures, and terminology,” and that “[s]uch recourse to textual precedent has figured prominently in the scholarship on Balinese religion and culture, as this often appears to provide a degree of certainty and order that has otherwise proven elusive” (p. 93). After a digression on a conversation with a Balinese priest that highlighted tropes that are not self evidently compatible, Fox returns to the issue by examining the text Bama Kertih (pp. 99–100), which according to him “offers neither theological interpretation nor additional information,” and can be read as notes for a performance, which are relevant only for the ritual utility and specific circumstances (p. 100). While these eminently practical texts do exist, and form a not insignificant portion of the extant corpus, one cannot ignore the existence of other texts specializing in theology, i.e. tattvas (and, to a lesser extent, tuturs). To look for theological interpretations in the former genre of texts would be like looking for theological discussions in a Holy Mass guide, then, having found none, concluding that Catholicism possesses neither theological texts nor a proper theology. We should not forget that Balinese religion—and especially its theological and philosophical foundational core—was until the mid-50s an initiatory, highly esoteric tradition (and still remains so among the traditionalist pedandas), possessing a fragmentary textual canon as well as a body of knowledge and practices transmitted orally. Very few encyclopedic works have survived to the present, and what we have is a vast array of texts specialized in various domains, so one has to read a significant sample of the whole corpus to get an idea of the system informing its theology and ritual life. Similarly, different agents (viz. pedandas, pemangkus, resi bhujanggas, balians, commoners, etc.), using different genres of texts, reflect various know-hows and specializations. As a philologist, I feel that rather than regarding Balinese ritual as “a multiplicity of apparently incongruous aims and ideals” (pp. 101, 103) to be approached in terms of “practice” or “practice theory,” an outstanding desideratum to fulfill would be the documentation (through philology) of this body of material and its interpretation in the light of the premodern religious paradigm reconstructed from relevant texts from Bali, Java, and their Indian prototypes. The texts would then be studied by anthropologists to see how they are read and performed in various contemporary Balinese social milieus, or if they reflect any living Balinese realities.17 Rather, Fox’s main concern is to demolish “philological” notions of textuality, in spite of the fact that, he admits,

• 18 Where the magical usages of scripts are, according to him, treated as non-Buddhist cultural accreti (...)
• 19 On which see De Simini 2016.
• 20 Hunter 2016; Acri 2016.

18This lack of historical and comparative perspective is not surprising given Fox’s programmatic refusal to accept such reified and totalizing concepts as “tradition” (such as the “unifying” translocal Indic religious traditions, “tantric traditions,” and “Hindu-Buddhist traditions,” p. 124), textual or historical precedent, as well as his anti-cosmopolitan stance. The last is perhaps the logical corollary to Fox’s conception of heterogeneity, incoherence, and chaos as essential features of Balinese culture and religion, which reinforces the perception of the same as exotic and unique phenomena—reflecting some sort of Balinese “exceptionalism”—that can only be studied in their own terms rather than as a part of wider cultural flows of ideas and practices across southern Asia. In his deconstructivist endeavour, Fox affirms that “[s]tudents of Southeast Asia have long recognized that unifying terms such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Tantrism, and animism do not adequately reflect the heterogeneity of the region’s history and culture” (p. 79). Without naming these students, Fox labels these terms uncritical and oversimplifying; concomitantly, he does not acknowledge or unpack the indebtedness of these Balinese ideas and practices about language and script to Indian prototypes, in spite of the fact that most of the usages of aksaras that he describes are apparently derived from the medieval South Asian religious traditions, more specifically notions and practices of purity and power current in Śaiva and Buddhist tantric paradigms across medieval South and Southeast Asia, as well as parts of Central and East Asia. Fox briefly mentions only the comparative potential of Mainland Southeast Asia in the Pāli Buddhist milieus of Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar,¹⁸ or the affinities with Southeast Asian’s Islamic traditions, or again Indic, Persian, and middle eastern contexts, overlooking what are to my mind more directly pertinent prototypical instances from Indic tantric traditions. A discussion of the literature on yantras, or the Buddhist (i.e. Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna) and Śaiva “cult of the book,”¹⁹ or again the Śaiva script-mysticism from India and Bali²⁰ would have contributed important elements to the discussion.

• 21 And yet, contrast what seems to be an apt defense of such a laden word: “we need tradition, or some (...)
• 22 Acri 2016.
• 23 Fox translates the expression winangun urip (referred to a duck or chicken at the center of the off (...)
• 24 This is, in fact, implied in Fox’s brief characterization of the “totalizing amalgamation” reflecte (...)

19This programmatic erasure of historical and textual precedents, based on the critique of “a certain commonsensical understanding of the-past-in-the-present that is grounded in essentializing metaphors of cultural influence and the transmission of ideas” (p. 122), as well as of the concept of “tradition,”²¹ makes it difficult to do justice to Balinese complexity. It is quite clear that the phenomenon of script in Bali was shaped by historical dynamics that cannot be adequately appreciated uniquely from the perspective of Balinese ethnography, which has often limited the documentation and analysis to the level of interviews, and accepted at face value the (non-expert) informants’ reports to build a theory of Balinese culture without investigating both Old Javanese texts and the specialized human custodians of the esoteric traditions they carry as the ultimate sources of knowledge. Fox’s book is no exception—a case in point is the vague explanation of the ritual of inscribing letters onto the body provided by the invitees to a wedding as having “something to do with purifying (B. nyuciang) the newlywed” (p. 36). Pace his claim that “establishing provenance for a given practice may prove more problematic than it appears, and this for reasons that are at once evidentiary and theoretical” (p. 9), a comparison with Indian traditions (both premodern/textual and living) would reveal close parallels with the tantric notions and praxis of purifying the body through akṣaras called bhūtaśuddhi.²² The same could be said with respect to the “holy numbers” (recurring in Balinese ritual, architecture, etc.) that amount to a “sacred geometry” found also in India and in other Indic contexts (for instance, ancient Javanese sacred architecture), which rests on the edifice of Śaiva ontology and cosmology revolving around a set of correspondences between micro- and macro-cosmos. Similarly, the Balinese concept of “a life force in buildings” (p. 45), suggested to Fox by the fact that one of the functions of amulets is to “animate” (ngidupang), and that the expression maurip “alive” is associated with some elements of the ritual offerings (p. 43),²³ may reflect not just a form of “new animism” (n41, p. 196) but older (both Indian and Javanese-Balinese) Śaiva concepts of micro-macrocosmos, emanation of the universe from the paramount deity, and the concept of an universal consciousness (cetana) abiding in every living and non-living entity, trapped in materiality (acetana) and prone to disaggregation. Fox, noting how aksaras are related to every level of reality, claims that scholarly literature has reproduced lists of links among letters and colours, directions, deities, etc. in broadly Indic traditions of South and Southeast Asia, yet “it has offered comparatively little insight into the rationale for elaborating such complex systems of associations” (n28, p. 195). This is not the case, for the systematics of such associations can be easily traced back to tantric Śaiva ontology, cosmology, and subtle physiology. Yet Fox approaches the matter by looking “at the procedures in which these series are employed and the purposes they are meant to serve” (ibid.), thus stopping at the first level of analysis and the immanent aspect of the phenomenon without undertaking any comparative and historical endeavor, and thereby remaining comfortably within the boundaries of Western theory—namely, which Western thinker could provide us with the key to “make sense” of these ideas and acts. Along similar lines, the “typically Balinese” way of thinking and argumentation through associations, neologism, and homophony that is embodied in reading clubs (mabasan), among many other instances of Balinese cultural life, does not represent the virtuosity of one brilliant yet highly idiosyncratic thinker (i.e. Granoka) whose rhetoric style overflows with “terminological superfluity,” but a central and resilient feature of Balinese culture, which apparently has much in common with the Sanskritic practice of nirvacana or semantic analysis (sometimes depreciatively referred to as “folk etymology”). Fox’s (p. 150) invocation of Sweeney’s theory of “residual orality” in the Malay cultural context to explain this Balinese cultural feature does not hit the mark, failing as it does to do justice to Balinese hermeneutical practices and their indebtedness to Old Javanese textuality.²⁴ Even worse, it seems to me that it subliminally falls into the trap of exoticism, assuming as it does a quintessential opposition between Western (and Indic) literacy vs. Southeast Asian orality—whereas Bali has, in fact, one of the highest number of manuscripts per capita in the Indic world. To resume: the above examples illustrate that the obliteration of the importance of Indic religious and textual traditions, and (Śaiva) Tantra in particular, in Bali as the driving force that has shaped much of the premodern and modern paradigm, may be regarded as “the elephant in the room.”

• 25 As McGrane put it, “[a]nthropology lives by seeing and interpreting everything as culture-bound [.. (...)
• 26 For instance, Fox asks whether Balinese ideas of power and efficacy are “additive to an underlying (...)
• 27 On the other hand, I have appreciated Fox’s honest formulation (by way of a “thought experiment”) o (...)

20A final point of criticism I would like to raise is that the author often seems to take a sort of “higher moral ground” when criticizing philology. For instance, he denounces a disjuncture between philological enquiry and the practices of composition, copying, and performing that generated its object of study (p. 78), but in spite of his efforts to practice a self-reflecting and dialogic anthropology he does not sufficiently stress that ethnography, Euro-American academic writing, or any discipline based on the Western scientific paradigm indeed (including postmodern theory/deconstructivism itself) carry the same disjuncture.25 Fox, subscribing to Rubinstein’s view that “kekawin philology as practiced to date undermines the religious beliefs and values upon which kekawin composition has been based,” states that “[i]f this were really so, it may be worth reflecting a little more carefully on the foundations of our work and its consequences—both intended and otherwise” (p. 78). This call for self-reflectivity is certainly legitimate, however it remains a gesture as no concrete steps are taken to follow it through.26 I cannot agree more on the statement that “despite protestations to the contrary, it seems the day-to-day practices of critical enquiry all too often exempt themselves from the ‘theory of practice’ they intend to foist on Others” (p. 52)—Fox’s own work is no exception. Similar considerations apply to his statement—intended to critique such entrenched Western assumptions as an instrumentalized conception of writing, the nature of language and text, etc.—that “indeed it is only by virtue of an unexamined presumption to superior comprehension that these analytical procedures may continue to be ‘applied’ transitively to other people’s practices, as if from a place apart” (p. 182).27

• 28 This negative stance towards philology is apparent in Fox’s characterization of my contribution (Ac (...)
• 29 This concept is related to the ritual performances of mūrwa kāla and ruwatan in Java, and both stem (...)
• 30 “Despite the proliferation of taxonomy in formal representations of the island’s religious and cult (...)
• 31 This expression is used by Fox when quoting a sentence by Clifford Geertz describing an Indonesian (...)
• 32 Insightful glimpses of this system have been offered by Basset 2010 and 2015.

21Perhaps the answer to Fox’s question as to whether cultural analysis is “ultimately incapable of escaping the strictures of an objectifying scientism” (p. 122) is bound to be a “no.” Unless we gave up the Western pretension to a “higher” scientific truth and enact a “cognitive shift” so as to embrace the metaphysics, cosmology, and conceptions of magical efficacy that give meaning to the Balinese worldview and agency, any call for self-reflectivity amount to mere (and ultimately useless) gestures. Unless this is done (assuming it can be done indeed, which is a huge question mark), no claims can be made of any scholarly methodology or theoretical approach—including those aiming at deconstructing and problematizing Western intellectual and disciplinary paradigms—to being less removed from Balinese sensibilities. An ethnographic account, based on observation and interviews, of the practices of living subjects relating to the universe of Balinese “magic” in an academic book, as well as the theorizing about them, is no less an act of “epistemic violence” than a critical edition of a text. Similarly, to approach Balinese complexity (at the micro- and macro-ethnographic level) uniquely in the light of its social and cognitive dimensions shaped by dynamics of power, i.e. through an “analysis of rival styles of practical reasoning” drawn from MacIntyre (p. 79), seems reductionist to me, and quite removed from the Balinese sensibilities that the author tries to defend from the epistemic violence of philology.28 I for one think that instead of interpreting Balinese ritual in the light of the ideas of this or that Western theoretician, or worse still dismissing it as a congeries of contradictory aims, it would be more useful to approach it in the light of the emic religious paradigm, first of all the emanationist theory of the Śaiva ontic levels (tattva) and the concept of somya.29 These concepts are either directly explained in the doctrinal texts (also, perhaps not coincidentally, referred to as tattva), or indirectly provide, and enable in the background, the philosophical frameworks on which the ritual and mythological texts rest. These cosmological and philosophical notions provide the rationale of many aspects of Balinese life, for instance the island’s ritual calendar, and are also reflected in mythology and folklore, as well as the visual and performative arts. This approach might actually do justice to the Balinese way of doing things—probably more so than Fox’s invocation of Collingwood to explain the five stages of Balinese rituals (p. 84). If we are open enough to actually pay attention to these emic paradigms we would realize that Balinese habits of thought and action, far from being unsystematic, chaotic, incoherent, heterogeneous, and non-classificatory30 in nature, reflect quite a different kind of order and complexity, i.e. a “totalizing amalgamation” (p. 149)31—or dynamic taxonomic system of classification, indeed—that has been shaped by the “fractal,” “mandalic,” or “cabalistic” (rather than Cartesian) mechanics characterizing many Indic cultural systems, and especially Tantra.32

• 33 Hobart 1996.

22Frankly speaking, I find it quite surprising that Fox does not seem to realize (or take trouble with) how theoretically-driven Western scholarship has ended up not only feeling so far removed from the realities it describes, but also perpetuating the asymmetrical “relationship between the Euro-American intellectual and local intellectuals.”33 To put Chomsky’s generative grammar on equal footing with Balinese “life of letters” is a nice gesture (p. 81), but does little to help us to take the Balinese “at their word.” (pp. 23, 182). If one really wants to give the Balinese a voice, solipsistically attempting to deconstruct Western categories through a Western paradigm seems of limited usefulness, and it does not automatically lead to actually understanding the (epist)emic paradigm underlying Balinese conceptions and practices. Fox asks a lot of interesting questions, but provides few concrete answers. Perhaps a more transformative type of paradigm is required by Western scholars in order to think and act like the Balinese, and translate this thinking and acting into scientific prose. In the absence of that transformation, the “middle ground” I invoked above, namely reading and trying to make sense of texts in their contexts, seems to be our best bet to elicit a fruitful encounter between Bali and the West.