Responding to Decentralisation in the Aftermath of the Bali Bombing

Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

Anthropology and Museum Studies

Publication Date

2007

Abstract

This article focuses on a local Balinese initiative, the ‘Traditional Village Committee Project’, in which local elites joined with village assemblies to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by Indonesia's decentralisation programme. Through the initiative, traditional village units under leadership of the local prince responded to threats of radicalised politics and loss of tourism revenue. But beyond these responses to immediate political and economic threats, the project provided a venue for local factions to engage with broader discourses concerning environment, gender and democracy. These were soon framed as a ‘Balinese approach’ that cannot be dismissed as mere invented tradition. In all, the Balinese initiative illuminates decentralisation's possibilities for a local empowerment.

Comments

This article was originally published in The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Due to copyright restrictions, this article is not available for free download from ScholarWorks @ CWU.

Journal

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

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