Bali lives or dies on a myth. Whether because of its representation as culturally unique in art and scholarship or because of its promotion as a safe, tourist-friendly destination, Bali long enjoyed a privileged position in relation to neighboring islands in the Indonesian archipelago. That reputation changed on October 12, 2002, when a bomb detonated in a popular nightspot and claimed more than 200 lives, most of whom were foreign visitors. Overnight, Bali fell from Eden to paradise lost. Yet all of these narratives—from hermetically sealed isle to victim of global terror—tend to flatten Bali's complex history, reproducing it as an island of timeless culture and removing any sense of agency from the Balinese themselves.
The “muted worlds” in the subtitle of Thomas A. Reuter's edited volume promises to attend to this theme of agency. And through ethnographic and historical research, the attention to Balinese voices is a promise on...
