Martin Ramstedt

Hindu Bonds at Work: Spiritual and Commercial Ties between India and Bali

The article focuses on the spiritual capital negotiated in the Indian-Indonesian networks of an Indian Hindu missionary currently living in Bali. These networks bridge different social groups and thereby foster—like the American mainline Protestant churches examined by Robert Putnam—the conditions for transnational community building and commerce. The value of spiritual capital is gauged against the backdrop defined by the rise of Hindu nationalism and a new economic agenda in India since the end of the 1980s. Parallel to these developments, Indonesian Hindus began to grow wary of the growing influence of Islam and Islamism in their country.

Processes of disembedding and displacement: anomie and the juridification of religio-ethnic identity in post-New Order Bali

This article applies Karl Polanyis observation of a double movement of law in the history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe to an analysis of Balis integration into the global cultural economy. It describes how the increasing disembedding of the islands tourist industry from local norms and institutions, and the parallel disjuncture between Balinese religiosity and Indonesian state religion have created a condition of increasing collective anomie that has in turn provoked endeavors to juridify the Balinese religio-ethnic identity. Conceding the partial success of the juridification process that has been facilitated by the recent governance reform, and that has indeed effected a significant degree of re-embedding both tourism and religion into local culture, the article argues that not only has the anomic condition not been attenuated; the potential for internal conflict and division has even been enhanced.

Discordant temporalities in Bali's new village jurisdictions

In Balis new village jurisdiction that came about as a by-product of Indonesias recent decentralisation process, a magical worldview has been juridified that is intrinsically linked to traditional Balinese ritualism. The juridification of the magical worldview and the ritualism that comes with it not only attest to increasing legal pluralism in contemporary Indonesia but also bear evidence to rising interlegal tensions by showing how important norms of the national legal system, such as gender equality, religious freedom, and equal rights for all Indonesian citizens, are effectively challenged by lower level legislations. Preoccupied with the continuous actualisation of eschatological reference points in Balis past, Balinese ritualism – together with local customary law in which it is firmly embedded – has become a major source of law in the islands new village jurisdictions. Casting modernist Hindu cosmologies and notions of time as potentially threatening to the ritual purity of the realm, the juridified traditionalist norms have exacerbated the existing discord between traditionalist and modernist Hindu Balinese, seriously disadvantaging the latter. This article explores the emic logic, the political circumstances, and some of the socio-cultural ramifications of this development by paying particular attention to divergent social notions of time implied in the conflict.

Colonial encounters between India and Indonesia

Three different factors accounted for colonial encounters between Indians and Indonesians in the first half of the twentieth century: (1) desire to profit from the colonial plantation industry in North Sumatra, (2) scholarly imaginaries of an ancient Indian colonialization of the archipelago and (3) common interest in socio-cultural reform on the basis of alternative education integrating the best from East and West. It was the last two factors that led to real exchange and more enduring relations between Indian and Indonesian as well as Western intellectuals, particularly in the wake of Rabindranath Tagores visit to Java and Bali in 1927.

Anthropological Perspectives on the Normative and Institutional Recognition of Religion by the Law of the State

The negative effects of economic globalisation and the emergence of a host of post-Cold War political crises, accompanied by a drastic increase of global migration, have in many parts of the world, including the US, Canada, and Europe, spurred social movements lobbying for some or greater normative and institutional recognition of religion by the law of the state. Arguing that the resultant new religion-based legal pluralism must be theorised in the light of the increasing colonisation of the life-world by law (Habermas), I then discuss the different positions scholars have taken in the trans-disciplinary debate on “legal pluralism” since the late 1950s. In the course of this chapter, I seek to make three additional points: (1) once religious norms are accommodated in state law, they usually undergo a significant degree of transformation; (2) the term “law” should be reserved for state law only, not to obfuscate the hegemonic claim of the state and of the international community of nation states in the competition between different normativities; and (3) the common blackboxing of the category of “religion” by law-makers and scholars of “legal pluralism” alike has abetted the obscuration of the unequal treatment of religious communities in many countries.

Law and religio-ethnic identity in post-New Order Indonesia

With this theme issue, we hope to contribute to the theorizing of the construction of religious and ethnic identities and concomitant processes of identification in postNew Order Indonesia, by zooming in on how law has increasingly shaped the boundaries for selfing and othering. This dynamic attests to what John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff have called the judicialization of politics – or lawfare – accompanying the turn from state capitalism to a neo-liberal model in many parts of the world. Such a mounting judicialization of politics has indeed also marked the transition from Suharto’s crony capitalism to decentralizing Indonesia. It very much undergirds the fact that law is not only an instrument for conflict resolution. It also helps constituting difference, by identifying sameness and alterity through the stipulation of ‘legitimate’ qualities, powers and constraints of selves and collectives. Law thereby serves as a weapon with which to mobilize or neutralize identities of self and other. Identities are hence by jurisdiction positioned in a particular way in the socio-political field. In view of the coexistence of multiple legal systems within any given society today, and certainly within post-New Order Indonesia, individuals as well as collectives will seek to forum shop between normative orders in order to assert themselves and their interests. Any identity is thus ‘a nodal point of a conglomeration of conflicting discourses’ that in instances of legal articulation can prompt certain semantic shifts linked to alternate strategies of identity (or subject) positioning. As the legally articulated identity positions enact certain norms contingent on the specific power relations of

Religion and disputes in Bali's new village jurisdictions

Since the recent decentralization process in Indonesia, instigated by interim president B. J. Habibie in 1999 and implemented between 2001 and 2004 under the presidencies of Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Sukarnoputri, spells of new intra-communal disputes have troubled the Hindu—Balinese constituency on the predominantly Hindu island of Bali, adjacent to islands with predominantly Muslim populations. These disputes have unintentionally been prompted, I argue, by a nativist nomospheric project1 pursued by an island-wide alliance of Balinese political leaders, lawyers, businessmen, and Hindu intellectuals. This alliance took advantage of the legislative latitude provided by Indonesia’s new national laws on regional autonomy that had not only set the decentralization process in motion but had also accelerated the accommodation of Islam in Indonesian state law (Ramstedt, 2012). The Islamization of the Indonesian state had, in fact, motivated the alliance to seek to inscribe a reimagined Hindu—Balinese cosmology onto the legal space of Bali Province in order to keep the island Hindu. It eventually succeeded in doing so by bringing about the enactment of new provincial regulations that facilitated the resacralization of Bali, to the extent that a whole set of ritual, social, and aesthetic norms, believed to bring about local well-being, has meanwhile been installed as formal law in newly instated autonomous village jurisdictions.