Custodians of the Sacred Mountains : Culture and Society in the Highlands of Bali

Bali is a fascinating island. Within one cultural sphere major contrasts exist side by side and form as such an ideal laboratory for anthropological research. Only a few hours drive from the centre of globalized tourism at Kuta beach, which was in October 2002 hit by a terrorist attack, one can find in the mountain area of inland Bali ancient temple systems and ritual networks which date back to the ninth century AD. The mountain Balinese, or Bali Aga, who managed to reproduce these old structures, have by and large been ignored by Western scholars who focused their studies mainly on south Bali with its distinct flavour of Hinduism and aristocratic court culture. Seen from the south, the Bali Aga looks like a cultural backwater, a relic of the past. Thomas Reuter reverses this image by arguing that mountain Bali was actually the breeding ground of the first Hindu-inspired kingdoms, centuries before the influences of the Javanese kingdom of Majapahit took root in the southern part of the island. He also demonstrates that mountain Bali was never isolated and marginalized. Instead, there was a complex relationship in which new power holders in the south recognized and respected the ritual authority of the sacred mountain temples. Some of these ritual networks maintain their autonomy and show a remarkable degree of continuity. Reuter claims that his book is the first comprehensive ethnography of the Bali Aga, but this is somewhat misleading because he fails to mention the monograph by his colleague Samuel Wälty on the area of Kintamani which was published in 1997. Despite this minor omission, Reuter’s book is not only a milestone in the anthropology of Bali but also an important contribution to the comparative study of Austronesian societies. Theoretically embedded in what we may call the “Canberra School of Austronesian Anthropology” the book analyses the ritual domains, or banua, of mountain Bali in terms of dualism and precedence. Dualism