what Weber calls “ideal types” and which I tend to think of as “Ideal Type
Models” (ITMs).
I would never have been able to begin to interpret the interactions I was
witnessing if I had not known the “symbols” that made that interaction
meaningful. Hence, Symbolic Interaction, which is often used only to study
one’s own country or region, is also extremely helpful as a set of techniques
for studying the vestiges of a quite different historical background in
another cultural setting. Even though Indonesia is modernizing and devel-
oping rapidly, each time I hang out in Bali is a further iteration of the
direct confrontation with aspects of life situations quite different from
modern industrialized nation-states of the “North.”
CONCLUSION
The goal of this discussion has not been to provide a monograph on the
temple ritual called the odalan. Instead, I have provided enough illustrative
material to make it clear how rich the sacred temple ritual of even one type
of temple in one Balinese village can be. I can imagine many researchers
doing dozens of studies with the same kind of depth exhibited in Jane Belo’s
excellent research from the 1930s.Belo (1966 [1953a])originally published
her solid ethnographic account of the whole odalan cycle in one village in
1953, based on research conducted before World War II. More such thick
description would be useful. I can imagine a series of Ph.D. dissertations
that examine a whole set of odalan’s. But the irony is that we do not hold
up Belo as an example of a researcher who truly did thick description.
Instead, we rely on a very brief sketch of part of an event at one place in a
famous work by Geertz, originally published in 1972 and reprinted in a set
of essays in 1973.Geertz (1973)is a very worthwhile book but his comments
on thick description need to be considered carefully in light of broader
methodological and theoretical considerations. To some extent he himself
does that; but, he also sometimes elides the most important questions.
The overall goal isscientia(Wissenschaftin German). In order to do
good “science” we must use good theory and good methodology. That
means we have to pay very careful attention to our exemplars. When we
hold up a specific example of ethnographic research to students as excellent
“thick description” we should not assume that the example is actually as
relevant as some superficial readings of Geertz’s essay have led many
people to believe.
106 J. I. (HANS) BAKKER