Book Reviews 311

Hildred Geertz
Storytelling in Bali. Leiden/Boston: Brill [Verhandelingen van Koninklijk Instituut
voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 304], 2016, xiii + 534 pp. isbn 9789004328624,
price: eur 125.00 / usd 162.00 (hardcover, ebook).

The language and culture of Bali have always attracted considerable atten-
tion within Indonesian Studies. Artistic expressions in architecture, literature,
music and dance are obviously among the main characteristics that trigger the
interest of the tourist visiting this island. Consequently, the title of the book
might suggest an intricate and deep analysis of the Balinese literary variants
of the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. However, this is exactly what
the book does not do. Rather, it seeks to analyze an oral storytelling tradition
one surely surmises exists on the island, but can never fully access unless one
is Balinese. Outsiders like myself, who lack a profound knowledge of Balinese
language and culture, can only learn about such a phenomenon through the
research of others who do have this knowledge, but above all, consider infor-
mal storytelling important enough to report about.
The book under review has five chapters that take 166 pages altogether. The
following 344 pages contain an appendix with biographical data on the painters
and storytellers in the Bateson-Mead collection and an appendix with the texts
of the stories that the paintings included in the book refer to. The final 32 pages
consist of the bibliography and an extensive index.
Chapter one is an introduction to the book itself. Already in this first chapter,
Hildred Geertz points out a salient feature of storytelling in Bali. It connects the
island’s political reality to its daily rural life. This theme permeates the book.
Chapter two provides an extensive ethnography about the life of the story-
teller-painters in the 1930s. The site of the research is Batuan Gedé, a village
in the south of Bali, abbreviated in the book as Batuan. Although referring to
other sources for a more elaborate discussion, the author describes the village
society as distinguishing aristocracy clans from commoner clans, rather than
using the traditional India-based partition into three castes, and above all its
mystical world-view as being populated with potentially malevolent “powers”
that form the context in which informal storytelling took place. The painting
tradition appeared parallel to the early development of a tourist industry on the
island and was principally a means of extra income next to traditional farming.
Academic research planned in 1936–1938 by Gregory Bateson and Margaret
Mead intended to focus on customary behavioral patterns in parent-infant
interaction. The collection of paintings evolved later in the research’s progress,
for which a questionnaire was devised to note down information that was
provided by the artists. Hildred Geertz’s razor-sharp account on how Gregory
© aone van engelenhoven, 2018 | doi:10.1163/22134379-17402008
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc license
at the time of publication.
312 Book Reviews

Bateson misinterpreted a painting of a cremation procession (pp. 43–44) shows

that both anthropologists actually had no interest in or had no knowledge
whatsoever of the narrative background of these paintings. The chapter closes
with short biographies on eighteen of the twenty eight painters.
Chapter three discusses the links between dance-drama, oral story-telling,
and the tales connected to the paintings in the collection. Seven genres are dis-
tinguished and discussed separately. A distinction is made between narratives
in the Kawi language that are related to Balinese literary heritage and the stories
in colloquial Balinese. Only the paintings of Arja and Satua tales are memories
of actual oral story-telling sessions that were held in vernacular Balinese. The
other ones in some way or another relate to Bali’s literary heritage. Text 711.54
at the end of the book (pp. 508–510) is the only accidental example that nar-
rates the plot of a Barong and Rangda dance normally deemed too dangerous
to portray. Hildred Geertz describes a story-telling scenario where tales were
transmitted in a father-to-son context and visual depictions function as ‘evoca-
tions’.
Chapter four analyzes the tale types introduced in the previous chapter and
is the heart of the research underlying this book. Inspired by Kirin Narayan’s
work on story-telling in South Asia, Hildred Geertz identifies eight ‘repertoires’
for story-telling (p. 98): fear of sorcerers, ambivalence about kings, (in)effec-
tiveness of priests, tensions among fellow villagers, strains between men and
women, problems within the family and the remembrance of certain ancient
events. Each ‘repertoire’ is exemplified by some tales from appendix i at the end
of the book.
Chapter five is the shortest chapter; it contains only three pages and provides
the conclusions of the book. One key takeaway is that there remain many
unstudied oral narratives in Balinese society, simply because researchers are
unaware of their existence.
Two appendices comprise the bulk of the book. Appendix 1 lists all story-
tellers who submitted paintings to the Bateson-Mead collection, and also some
who did not submit a painting. Beside their biographies, reference is made
to their paintings and the texts that they provided. The tales are categorized
as “literary” and “non-literary”, following the classification set out in chapters
three and four. Appendix 2 provides all texts connected to the paintings, but
also others that are all kept in the Margaret Mead Archives in the Manuscript
Division of the Library of Congress in Washington. They are all annotated and
sometimes provided with photographs of the paintings concerned.
This book uses the unexpected tactics of approaching a hidden oral tradition
by means of analyzing the tales related to paintings. A prospective audience
should keep this fact in mind, because these are not transcriptions of oral per-

Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 174 (2018) 291–362

Book Reviews 313

formances themselves. Nonetheless, I highly recommend this book to anyone

interested in Indonesian or Balinese folkloristics. The extensive databases in
both appendices provide an essential reference for story-telling research in
insular Southeast Asia.

Aone van Engelenhoven

Leiden University
a.van.engelenhoven@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 174 (2018) 291–362