Kebalian: The Dialogic Construction of Balinese Identity

$42.00 SGD

Michel Picard

Short-listed for the Euroseas 2026 Humanities Book Prize

What is it to be Balinese? Over the past 100 years, the Balinese have been challenged by colonial occupation, political turbulence, and most recently tourism. In response, they have come to rely on the idea of Kebalian, or Balinese-ness. Kebalian is likened to a tree whose roots are religion (agama), the trunk tradition (adat), and the fruits, Balinese culture (budaya). How did the Balinese come to see their identity in these terms?

To understand how their sense of Balinese-ness came to be, Michel Picard makes a close reading of the dialogues the Balinese have engaged in both among themselves and with outsiders—Dutch orientalists and colonial administrators, Javanese nationalists, Muslim schoolteachers, Christian missionaries, Hindu gurus, artists and anthropologists, Indonesian government officials, tourists and tourism operators. He conducted over a hundred interviews with Balinese opinion leaders, officials and religious reformers.

A key through line in the construction of Kebalian is what Picard identifies as a twofold process of ‘religionization’ and ‘Hinduization’ that began with the first years of the incorporation of Bali into the Dutch East Indies, and became more urgent with Indonesia's independence. Kebalian today encompasses the tension between those Balinese eager to defend their own customary ritual practices and advocates of Hinduism as a world religion, who deny that such local traditions qualify as agama. The book presents a fascinating picture of religious change, identities in motion, and culture as it takes form. Scholars of religion, cultural change and Southeast Asian area studies will find this a fascinating and important volume.

“Bali has long enjoyed a special standing in Indonesian studies, and no scholar has done more to deepen our appreciation of Balinese history and culture than Michel Picard. In this beautifully written book, Picard provides his most panoramic account yet of the forging of Balinese identity and religion in modern Indonesia.” -- Robert W. Hefner, Boston University

"Kebalian is the culmination of decades of research on how Balinese have defined themselves in the modern world. It is a magisterial study that gives voice to the Balinese intellectuals who shaped the island in the twentieth century. Anyone interested in the forces that formed Indonesian culture and identity should read it." – Adrian Vickers, University of Sydney

"This book makes a convincing case that Balinese Hinduism wasn’t some ancient thing the Dutch discovered and protected. Instead, it was actually built by the categories the Dutch brought in, splitting religion from custom in a way the Balinese had never done before. The author provides a comprehensive analysis of the intellectual and institutional processes that constituted the making of contemporary Balinese religion, tradition, art and culture. It traces how outside (colonial and national forces) formulated new paradigms which forced Balinese intellectuals not only to redefine their own world according to new categories like ‘culture’, ‘art’, ‘religion’, ‘tradition’, but also to make sense of the differences between these. " Euroseas 2026 Book Prize Shortlist Citation

Michel Picard, PhD, is a retired researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a founding member of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CASE) in Paris.

Publication Year: 2024
472pp / 229 x 152mm
Paperback
ISBN: 978-981-325-242-4