Voicing Selves: Ethics, Mediation, and the Politics of Religion in Post-Authoritarian Bali
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This is an ethnographic study of the voice as a resource for forming devout Hindu selves in contemporary Bali, Indonesia. Through case studies of three forms of Hindu chant, I show how vocal performance has been taken up—by the state, by religious authorities, and by vocalists themselves—as a tool of ethical reform and a technology of ethical striving. I argue that the voice has become a privileged medium for imagining and inhabiting new subjectivities in Bali. I contextualize my study of voice within a broader investigation of religion as both a disciplining force and an enabling resource in the lives of Balinese Hindus. Bringing ethnographic attention to a variety of practices through which Balinese Hindus interact with the world they call niskala, the world of invisible deities, and spirits—including ritual exchange, prayer, and the study and performance of religious texts, among others—I show how human-niskala relationships are constituted through, and structured by, hegemonic institutions and discourses, while at the same time, they create spaces of possibility for individuals to engage in creative forms of self-making and world-making. By examining how these relationships are imagined and manifested across different spheres of religious authority, I shed light on the ethical pluralism of religious life in contemporary Bali. This study focuses on religious pedagogies of voice as a particularly productive site for investigating the coming-into-being of new kinds of selves. Because of its connection to language, and, by extension, to texts, the voice has been deployed as both an object and a tool in state-sponsored projects of religious reform in Bali, which emphasize interiority as the core of religious selfhood and foreground texts as the proper source of religious knowledge and moral guidance. Religious forms of vocal performance and training are also an important space in which sensory and affective dispositions are formed. Highlighting the sonic and bodily materiality of vocal expression, as well as its linguistic and textual aspects, I argue that the semiotic, sensory, and affective affordances of vocal performance and training play an important role in shaping the kinds of ethical selves that are imagined and cultivated in Bali today.
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Madrid, Alejandro L.
McGraw, Andrew Clay