Beyond Bali : expanding postcolonial visions of intimacy and performance in the contemporary Netherlands

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnography of Balinese individuals living in the Netherlands and their non-Balinese partners. It examines Balinese peoples’ cultural identification beyond Bali in relation to gender and class and the socio-economic and political circumstances of migration. I argue that Balinese culture is historically changing in a creative interplay with foreign influences, specifically Dutch colonialism, the Indonesian state and tourism. Acknowledging significant differences in how Balinese men and women invest in and relate to Balinese culture, the thesis explores the processes of identification in both the domestic sphere of conjugal intimacies and the public performance of dance, feasts and rituals. It further examines several nodes of transnational interactions between Bali and the Netherlands, exploring how histories of empire have shaped and reshaped contemporary imaginations of Oriental and Occidental places. I focus on how contemporary cross-cultural exchanges create fluid spaces of ambivalence, struggle and negotiations based on the interaction of bodies historically inscribed with particular meanings of gender, race and economy. I suggest that novel categorisations and policies towards non-Western foreigners in the Netherlands are producing a new racism and influence the subjectivity of those so labelled. State polices inflect race, class and gender through powerful discourses that shape personal expectations and subjectivities in everyday life. Show more