Common Era Gregorian calendar or the ways in which minimum wage
laws affect ordinary workers.
But when we turn to a society like Bali it is necessary to set the stage
bya discussion of the calendar and the ordinary worker’s allegiance to his
or her village temple. Similarly, we can take a lot for granted when we dis-
cuss religious beliefs in North America that we cannot simply take for
granted when discussing the “BuddhistHindu” religious beliefs of ordin-
ary Balinese. In this paper it has not been possible to go into depth in the
discussion of Balinese life. However, the references include an array of
important studies that have provided a background that has supplemented
my own personal experiences I did try to personally experience the temple
festival as a social construction of meaning in a society which, although
permeated by a huge influx of foreign tourists (as well as Indonesian tour-
ists) every year, has nevertheless maintained premodern, traditional beliefs
and practices. The Balinese temple festival (odalan)despite all modifica-
tions due to a degree of relative prosperityprovides a window to a
distant past that we can today no longer experience so directly in many
places on earth.
While I am not a professional anthropologist (with a Ph.D. in anthro-
pology), as a sociologist I have previously done “anthropological ethno-
graphic fieldwork” in Indonesia (Bakker, 1992).My work on the Bajo
people (Bajau, Sea Nomads) helped prepare me to do this ethnographic
study of one temple ritual. Reading the semipopular, nonacademic work by
Eiseman (1990)also gave me a way of comprehending what I was seeing.
Bali has much to teach; but, we have to know how to listen and to see
what is there, without imposing overly abstract models (“grand theory”)
but yet, at the same time, being open to generalizations that go beyond the
immediate phenomena. When I say “we” I primarily mean social scientists
interested in Symbolic Interactionism as a “research paradigm” (Bakker,
2014 ).
But I also would like to reach students and those sociologists, cross-
cultural psychologists, and anthropologists who do not consider themselves
Symbolic Interactionists per se. To switch to a slightly different academic
vocabulary, we need to know about the tentative ideal types (and ITMs)
that can provide a baseline for our empirical research. No matter which
aspect of Balinese life we study we need to be aware that little indicators
can lead to awareness of much broader, historically rooted patterns. There
is a back and forth effort between induction and deduction in studies that
are more than exploratory. Once we know quite a bit, the additional
nuances of a cock-fight or a temple ritual are not just a matter of thick
108 J. I. (HANS) BAKKER