The Journal of Asian Studies the Bali Bombings Monument
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The Journal of Asian Studies http://journals.cambridge.org/JAS Additional services for The Journal of Asian Studies: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here The Bali Bombings Monument: Ceremonial Cosmopolis Jeff Lewis, Belinda Lewis and I Nyoman Darma Putra The Journal of Asian Studies / Volume 72 / Issue 01 / February 2013, pp 21 43 DOI: 10.1017/S0021911812001799, Published online: 18 March 2013 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021911812001799 How to cite this article: Jeff Lewis, Belinda Lewis and I Nyoman Darma Putra (2013). The Bali Bombings Monument: Ceremonial Cosmopolis. The Journal of Asian Studies, 72, pp 2143 doi:10.1017/ S0021911812001799 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/JAS, IP address: 130.194.214.47 on 10 Apr 2013 The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 72, No. 1 (February) 2013: 21–43. © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2013 doi:10.1017/S0021911812001799 The Bali Bombings Monument: Ceremonial Cosmopolis JEFF LEWIS, BELINDA LEWIS, AND I NYOMAN DARMA PUTRA In 2003 a monument was erected at the site of the 2002 Islamist militant attacks in Kuta, Bali. Government and other official discourses, including the design brief, represent the monument as an integrated and culturally harmonious public testimony to the victims. However, the monument is also a discordant association of ideas, meanings, and political claims. While originally designed to subdue insecurity, the Bali bombings monument, in fact, constitutes a site of powerful “language wars” around its rendering of memory and its presence in Bali’s integration into the globalizing economy of pleasure. This paper examines the ways in which the monument is being articulated and “consumed” as a social and cultural marker for the island’s tourism geography. The paper pays particular attention to the increasing diversity of Bali’s visitors and the ways in which a precarious “cosmopolization” of the Kuta-Legian area is being experienced and expressed at the monument site. INTRODUCTION HE BALI BOMBINGS MEMORIAL commemorates the first of two Islamist attacks that took Tplace in 2002 and 2005. On October 12, 2002, a van loaded with explosives was deto- nated outside the Sari nightclub in Legian Street, Kuta. At about the same time, and just across the street, a pedestrian bomber detonated his backpack in Paddy’s Bar. At Paddy’s the explosion ignited propane gas bottles, creating an intense fireball that burned alive many of the nightclub patrons who had survived the initial blast. The official death toll for the Sari Club and Paddy’s Bar bombings was around 202, though the actual figure may have been higher as many non-Balinese Indonesians were personae non gratae and were never counted in the official figures. Around eighty-eight Australians were killed; the other major nationalities included Indonesian, British, American, Japanese, Brazilian, German, and French. The 2002 bombings critically damaged Bali’s reputation as a safe, peaceful, and har- monious tourist destination and had a devastating effect on the tourism industry and local livelihoods. These events triggered an unprecedented social and economic crisis. For local Balinese, the bombings were also associated with a deeper cosmological imbalance. The notion of “Bali harmony” that had for several decades underpinned the exponential Jeff Lewis ([email protected]) is Professor of Cultural Politics in the Global Cities Institute, School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. Belinda Lewis ([email protected]) is Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion, School of Primary Health Care, Monash University, Melbourne. I Nyoman Darma Putra ([email protected]) is Professor of Language and Culture, Faculty of Letters, Udayana University, Bali, Indonesia. 22 Jeff Lewis et al. growth in Bali’s tourism economy was called into question. In the wake of the tragedy, there was considerable reflection amongst the Balinese themselves about rapid sociocul- tural change associated with rampant and uncontrolled tourism development; serious environmental degradation; uneven distribution of wealth; growing social inequalities; and increasing economic, ethnic, and religious tensions between the Hindu Balinese and “outsider” migrants from other parts of predominantly Muslim Indonesia. Within this context, the Bali Tourism Authority and religious leaders conducted extensive inter- faith, ritual cleansing ceremonies designed to restore a sense of harmony and focus on the unique characteristics of traditional Balinese culture that would contribute to Bali’s capacity to deal effectively with the tragedy. The unresolved social and cultural conten- tions that had inevitably been generated by Bali’s modernization, increasing cosmopoli- tanism, and engagement with a globalizing economy were largely played down (Lewis and Lewis 2009b). The Bali bombings memorial was constructed in 2003 during the three months before the first commemoration service for the 2002 attacks. Both the memorial and first commemoration were conceived in terms of broader processes of cosmological cleansing, economic recovery, and restoration of a social harmony. Set within the teeming tourist cosmopolis of Kuta, the Bali memorial was designed to reconcile the underpinning violence, contentiousness, and impact of the attacks, creating an authorized homology that would contribute to spiritual, social, and cultural healing. The diverse design elements and historical-cultural references of the memorial were drawn together to create a homogenizing narrative, or “homology,” which aimed to give a sense of cohe- sion and unity.1 This communion of aesthetic and cultural elements would transform the horrors of the past into a comprehensible but powerful narrative that distinguishes right from wrong, order from calumny, and pluralism from sectarianism. As Spiro Kostof (1987) has noted, such memorials are generally designed to transform the diverse and complex details of conflict events into a more integrated vision of history (see also Logan and Reeves 2009; Mare 2002). There is a long scholarly lineage of critique focused on this privileging of a particular perspective of the past as “official history” (Fou- cault 1977b).2 In many respects, this is precisely the “official” objective of the Bali bombings monu- ment. For those who commissioned and designed the monument, the site would not simply commemorate the victims of the attacks; it would advance a common narrative of peace and reconciliation against the ideological discord and violence that had precipi- tated the atrocity of the bombings. Thus, the Badung Regency, which presides over the Kuta district, commissioned a memorial that subscribed to national government aspira- tions on security-building, unified pluralism (espoused in Pancasila, the ideological 1We are using the term “homology” to describe these homogenizing narratives. As indicated, the term refers to an attempt to homogenize cultural pluralism and diversity, drawing various dis- courses and narratives into a form that subsumes the parts within a more unitary “sameness.” The term is the reciprocate of what Georges Bataille ([1957] 2001) describes as “heterology,” which is an assembly of narratives that maintain a degree of independence and autonomy. 2The privileging of a particular perspective of the past as “official history” has been variously defined as “ideology” (Benjamin [1940] 2005), “discourse” (Foucault 1977b), “writing” (de Certeau 1988), and the “imaginary” (Taylor 2004). Each of these scholars has undertaken critical analysis of the ideological dimensions of “official history” and its political and social implications. The Bali Bombings Monument 23 framework of the Indonesian state), and Bali’s community and economic restoration (Hitchcock and Putra 2007; ICG 2003; Lewis 2006). The memorial’s homologous narra- tive conceptualized the atrocity in terms of an official ideology and memory that would (re)synthesize the disparate parts of Indonesia that had succumbed to the force of global- local contentions and political violence. Bali’s own frequently cited disposition to “harmony” was therefore to be mobilized for national reconciliation and local recovery; the official memory of the events would fortify Bali’s own radical “cosmopolization” and integration into the global tourist economy.3 This conception of official memory and the conciliatory force of Bali harmony, however, remains problematic (Allen and Palemo 2005; Hitchcock and Putra 2007; Lewis and Lewis 2009b; Robinson 1995). Indeed, the symbolic ordering that seeks to organize and homologize the meaning of the Bali bombings monument has neither obscured nor reconciled the complex cultural elements that comprise “the bombings” as memory and representation, specifically within the peculiarly disjunctive spatial and cultural context of Kuta, Bali. Indeed, the monument’s primary narrative of unity, harmony, and reconciliation is perpetually subverted by counter-narratives that invoke the very contentious issues and cultural tensions that the monument is designed to over- come. Thus, the diversity and complexity of cultural threads, memories, and practices that constitute the Kuta ethnoscape and its plethora of political dispositions continually challenge and destabilize the ideological and cultural homology that brands the island’s tourist economy of pleasure. At their most acute, these language wars are expressed in the