Abstract
Since the recent decentralization process in Indonesia, instigated by interim president B. J. Habibie in 1999 and implemented between 2001 and 2004 under the presidencies of Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Sukarnoputri, spells of new intra-communal disputes have troubled the Hindu—Balinese constituency on the predominantly Hindu island of Bali, adjacent to islands with predominantly Muslim populations. These disputes have unintentionally been prompted, I argue, by a nativist nomospheric project1 pursued by an island-wide alliance of Balinese political leaders, lawyers, businessmen, and Hindu intellectuals. This alliance took advantage of the legislative latitude provided by Indonesia’s new national laws on regional autonomy that had not only set the decentralization process in motion but had also accelerated the accommodation of Islam in Indonesian state law (Ramstedt, 2012). The Islamization of the Indonesian state had, in fact, motivated the alliance to seek to inscribe a reimagined Hindu—Balinese cosmology onto the legal space of Bali Province in order to keep the island Hindu. It eventually succeeded in doing so by bringing about the enactment of new provincial regulations that facilitated the resacralization of Bali, to the extent that a whole set of ritual, social, and aesthetic norms, believed to bring about local well-being, has meanwhile been installed as formal law in newly instated autonomous village jurisdictions.
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© 2013 Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann Martin Ramstedt, and Bertram Turner
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Ramstedt, M. (2013). Religion and Disputes in Bali’s New Village Jurisdictions. In: von Benda-Beckmann, F., von Benda-Beckmann, K., Ramstedt, M., Turner, B. (eds) Religion in Disputes. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318343_7
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