Anthropologists, historians, linguists, literature specialists, and political scientists who study Indonesia rarely read deeply in the ethnomusicology research about the country, even the literature on such famous sectors as Balinese gamelan music. Written with an awareness of that unfortunate situation and with the aim of closing some scholarly lacunae, ethnomusicologist David D. Harnish's book is based on two decades of fieldwork on a festival held on Lombok Island that includes both Balinese and Sasak music and ritual dance. The Sasak are the majority indigenous population on Lombok, a small island directly east of Bali. The Balinese living there today are the descendants of East Balinese colonists who expanded their royal realms eastward in the seventeenth century.
The days-long ritual that Harnish has been following since 1983 is called Pujawali. It occurs annually in Lingsar Village and brings Muslim Sasak participants and their musical and dance worlds into tense contact and...
