Negara:

...Then, the Westerner reasonably asks, what was there for the negara, the state, to do or to be...

...I know little of Bali beyond what Geertz reports here and I cannot evaluate the astuteness of his ethnographic work...

...What the Balinese state did for Balinese society," Geertz writes, "was to cast into sensible form a concept of what, together, they were supposed to make of themselves: an illustration of the power of grandeur to organize the world...

...But here as elsewhere, Geertz has the knack for finding the world in a grain of sand, precisely because he seeks out social and cultural phenomena where people enact, dramatize, intensify, and revivify their sense of what the large world is and means...

...the aim of king and court was to make themselves into facsimiles of the divine order...

...And is "display'' its aim and not the means to some other end...

...Geertz's task in Negara is to acquaint us with some of these better reasons and to suggest that we might well rethink and reinterpret the bases of our own politics too...

...Nothing dreamt of in Max Weber's philosophy will do...

...The reader who would like an introduction to Geertz would do better to read his Interpretation of Cultures . But Negara, too, shows breadth and boldness...

...They expressed a view of the ultimate nature of reality and in so doing sought to shape life to conform to it...

...While the text is a mere 136 pages, it includes four maps and eleven diagrams and it is followed by 121 pages of notes, 8 pages of glossary, 22 pages of bibliography...

...He offers here not only an esoteric monograph but a challenge, a provocation to political thought...

...The lesson is that Balinese social structure is complex...

...Now Geertz tells us not only that religion and art and games are cultural systems but that the state (in Bali) is, too...

...The palace was a replica down to the smallest detail of the universe itself and the human relation to it...

...Art does not celebrate social structure or offer useful doctrine but "materializes a way of experiencing...

...He tells us about local-level political administration (banjar), the irrigation societies (subak), and the temple organizations (pemaksan...

...The membership of the banjar, subak, and pemaksan in any locale, for instance, did not coincide but intersected and overlapped, cutting across hamlets...

...Or do we share some of the obsession of the Balinese with status...

...The larger claim is more provocative still- that whatever the peculiarities of Balinese politics, Balinese politics "like everyone else's, including ours" is symbolic action...

...The theater of state ceremony tried to "present an ontology and, by presenting it, to make it happen-make it actual...

...And must we then rethink what we mean by politics...

...While he confines this observation to Bali, he also means to attack directly the assumption of most Western political theory and social science that symbols and ceremonies of power are secondary to the main issue of social domination and material interests...

...Geertz is a rare anthropologist indeed to have published original es-says not only in the usual journals of his own discipline but to have written on art in Modern Language Notes, on common sense in the Antioch Review, on theater and games in The American Scholar, on trade and barter in American Economic Review, to note just a few of his recent Religion is sociologically interesting not because it mirrors the social order (which it does not) but be...

...The Balinese cockfight's function is not to assuage or heighten social passions but "to display them'' and so provide for the Balinese a self-interpretation...

...The Dutch discovered that the princes fully agreed on what the boundaries were...

...Is it true or sometimes true in our own politics that power serves pomp and not pomp power...

...He has reached far beyond disciplinary borders for an audience and has had a profound influence on sociology and history as well as anthropology...

...government just what I. F. Stone has suggested, a matter of "ego" and "macho" rather than of international power struggle...

...All of this is important to Westerners because, to make the most modest claim, Western political and social thought does not have categories or concepts adequate to understand the Balinese state...

...With this as background, Geertz moves on to the "perbekel" system by which local government was linked to the negara and within which different "houses" or lineages struggled for supremacy...

...For instance, is the recent Salvadoran escapade of the U.S...

...Geertz teases here...

...Not very much- and absolutely everything...

...Geertz does not casually title its last chapter, "Bali and Political Theory...

...Geertz retells an anecdote of how the Dutch administrators of the south Celebes once called in two warring princes to straighten out the boundaries of their princedoms once and for all...

...Religion, for Geertz, formulates in symbols an image of the world that accounts for the puzzles and paradoxes of the human predicament-and it is sociologically interesting not because it mirrors the social order (which it does not) but because it shapes the social order...

...Are we to keep interpreting our own politics as matters of power and economics only...

...In Bali, as Geertz says, "power served pomp, not pomp power...

...Still, he does not bask in the limelight but continues to produce professional monographic studies of both Indonesia and North Africa...

...Anthropology for Geertz is an interpretive study of the "texts" people create in their daily games and rituals, language and politics...

...Most of Negara is an annotated guide to cliques and cleavages in nineteenth century Balinese society...

...Negara" is the name for the "state" in nineteenth century Bali, a state peculiarly focused on ceremonialism and ritual...

...This is not as mysterious as it sounds but is a good deal more important than it may appear...

...This complex network of powers and allegiances cannot be aptly called bureaucracy or feudalism or pat-rimonialism...

...Negara is a new interpretation of nineteenth century Bali...

...The king in Bali was a corporeal god...

...Geertz here declares the state to be what elsewhere he has claimed for art, religion, ideology, common sense, and games-that it is a cultural system...

...Geertz discusses the divisions and links between gentry and peasantry, kinship groups, and political and economic patron-client relations...

...efforts...

...For Geertz, the negara and the state ceremonials which were both its best expression and its reason for being, were "metaphysical theater...

...The subject is nineteenth century Balinese politics, not one of the hottest topics on the intellectual circuit, nor one of the most accessible, even for anthropologists...

...Of which this is one...

...But had they not fought over the land...

...Still, the book is of general interest for the simple reason that it is written by Clifford Geertz, the most lucid, original, broad, and provocative of contemporary Ameri-ucan anthropologists, perhaps of an-thropologists anywhere in the world...

...cause it shapes the social order...

...This repeats a familiar Geertzian formula...

...Geertz makes this assertion in the final paragraph, tantalizing the reader to return to each previous paragraph and to wonder, is this also true of our politics...

...There was no overall unitary government but a "knotted web of specific claims usually acknowledged...

...One of the princes replied, "Mijnheer, we had much better reasons to fight with one another than these shabby hills...

...The negara was "a ceremonial order of precedence imperfectly impressed upon a band of sovereigns...