The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  A few months earlier, he had taken a BBC film crew to a few tree houses he knew in the Korowai-Kombai area for a series called Going Tribal. Bruce Parry, the Brit in front of the camera, had gone through all the more grueling Papuan rituals and ordeals, eating sago grubs and bird’s eyes, having his nose pierced with a sago thorn, that sort of thing. Hilarious. It made Papua look tamely “awful” for a TV audience, but of course there was nothing in it. The BBC had gone in neurotic, protected, and unadventurous, and the Papuans had played along as good sports. I grudgingly confessed I’d seen the Bruce Parry show and laughed my socks off. Another hapless Limey in the forest.

  “But still, I felt bad about the BBC thing. What horse-shit.”

  “Is it because we can’t stand to think there is a place we don’t dominate? So that even if we don’t really dominate it we can humble it by making it into spectacle?”

  “That’s exactly it, man. Whereas Papua is something else. You can’t film it. How can you film it?”

  There was the Irish writer, Redmond O’Hanlon, who had written about Irian Jaya. And there was the American writer Tobias Schneebaum, who had lived among the Asmat of the south coast in the 1950s and recorded his time there in Wild Man and Where the Spirits Dwell. Schneebaum, a controversial Eisenhower-era homosexual and a friend of Norman Mailer, had actually ventured inland from the Asmat in the 1970s and encountered a remote Kombai in the deep forest, at a time when the Kombai were virtually unknown—official contact with them wasn’t made until 1979. For the documentary Keep the River on Your Right, the New York filmmakers Laurie and David Shapiro had taken him back to the Asmat in 1998, where he had rediscovered an old Papuan lover.

  “But,” Woolford said, “that wouldn’t be the Papua I know. The Asmat are fantastic people, the greatest carvers in the South Seas, but it’s touristified now. I wouldn’t take you there.”

  In the film we see Schneebaum working on a tourist boat plowing between Bali and Papua, giving lectures about the Asmat to the giggling horde and trying to enjoy the onboard pool. “I dislike tourism,” he says at one point, “but it’s a living. I have always been broke and I prefer it that way.” So he was like Woolford to some degree. Woolford’s last client to Papua had been a British investment banker who had thanked him afterward for changing his life. They had gone in alone to the Kombai, and the banker—a man bored with all other touristic venues—had rediscovered his taste for life. The very rich are often like that.

  “Because everywhere is like everywhere now. It’s all a bore.”

  “So they want a transformation?”

  “Don’t we all? Well, the romantics among us. I like that idea of rediscovering a taste for life.”

  He patiently rolled a cigarette. One could deduce the rest of the thought’s vector: “We’ve fucked the world up comprehensively. It’s a shit hole almost everywhere now.” In the rain, the Balinese slipped around the goalposts, laughing as they became invisible. The amiable decor of the Tukmak could have been in San Diego, as could most of the clientele. It seemed pretty obvious that an American could live in Ubud with ease, without the friction of strangeness. It was a cheap alternative to the rat race back home. But Woolford’s reasons had more to do with Papua. You couldn’t live in Papua, that was too radical, too wearying. No Internet connection, for one thing, and so impossible to run a business from there. But it was only four hours from here.

  “Which,” he said, “is difficult to grasp.”

  After our drink, I went up alone to the junction of Monkey Forest Road and Jalan Raya, Ubud’s main intersection near to which stand the Ubud Palace and temples like the Pura Desa Ubud and the Merajan Agung. Temples on one side of the street, chic bistros on the other. It was now night, and dance performances were starting up in the temple grounds. These traditional dances are the only form of nightlife in Ubud outside of a desultory bar scene. Instead of discos and strip clubs, it’s Rangda and Barong dances enacting ancient myths.

  It was one of these that I sat down to watch next to the Ubud Palace. Rangda is a witch figure who threatens pestilence on a country; she is shown as a demon with a three-foot tongue, straw hair, and breasts that hang down to her waist. Her rival is the Barong, a priest who takes the magical form of a kind of Chinese lion. The two battle it out while acolytes of the Barong try to attack the Rangda, who uses her magical power to make them turn their daggers—or krisses—against themselves. Like the audience, I was soon lost. If this was the heart of Balinese culture, I and we had no idea what it consisted in. I recalled, though, that Mead had loved these same Rangda and Barong dances when she lived in Ubud and that she had even taken the witch as a central figure in her anthropology of Bali, explored in books like Balinese Character. She had also encouraged Jane Belo to study the mysterious trances that occurred during performances. The dance eventually became the most loved and studied of all Balinese forms. Photographers of the prewar years, like Thilly Weissenborn, featured them over and over. Gradually, dance became Bali’s signature—its traveling dancing troupes were the first thing the West saw of the island in New York and London.

  Mead was not the only lover of Rangda dances. They were also much studied by the German artist Walter Spies, who reproduced their sinister ambience in his paintings of Bali life in the 1930s. And it is not by accident that the tourist authorities in Ubud now stage such dances—their centrality, as it turns out, owes everything to Mead and Spies. This is also true of Ubud itself. For if Ubud is today the center of Bali’s cultural tourism, it was this charming German homosexual who made it that. As the Bali scholar Adrian Vickers says, “Single-handedly Spies made Ubud the alternative area for genteel tourism, the center of an artistic lifestyle.”

  It’s often assumed that tourism is a system that is imposed by large economic concerns, usually hotel and resort chains, and with a brutal suddenness in the postwar era. Bali shows that this is not always the case. For Ubud, the island’s heart, grew out of the enthusiasms of a small circle of artists, writers, musicians, and anthropologists.

  It was they who created the “magic” Bali that has now become its dominant image. Clifford Geertz once wrote that Bali was the greatest treasure-house of magical beliefs and customs in Asia. The intellectuals who flocked there in the late 1920s and 1930s would have agreed. They wanted a paradise of archaic belief centered on a village culture, and they largely found what they were looking for. As Geoffrey Robinson, a scholar of Balinese political history, puts it:

  It was during these years of the Pax Neerlandica, as some colonial officials liked to call it, that the image of Bali became firmly entrenched both in popular descriptions and in scholarly works. The 1920’s and 1930’s in particular were years in which a variety of experts in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, archaeology and religion came to work in Bali and developed an elaborate and respectable portrait of the island as a sort of “Last Paradise,” even when they saw evidence to the contrary.

  The Dutch had formally taken control of the island in 1908 after decades of failed invasions and partial victories against Bali’s indigenous rajas, or kings. The first tourists soon arrived on the Dutch steamship line, sailing from Suez in boats like the Cingalese Princess.

  But the new overlords were confronted with a dilemma. After the First World War, the influences of nationalism and communism began to be felt. The Dutch did not want to involve themselves in yet more bloody repressions—a more sane modus operandi, to their mind, was the reinstallation of the deposed native royal families and ruling classes.

  They therefore devised a thing called the Ethical Policy, which could be roughly interpreted as a commitment to preserve the heritage of the people they were ruling against their wills. It had its roots in the nineteenth century and in European scholars who had settled in Bali to study its Hinduism and its ancient scripts. The first of these, curiously enough, was the same Warren Hastings who had created Calcutta—he was given stewardship of Bali between 1811 and 1818. As in Calcutta, Hastings thought to revive Hindu l
earning; as in India, the idea of the romantic village was quick to take hold. He was followed by an eccentric band of Orientalists—misfits like Baron Wolter van Hoëvell, the wandering alcoholic Mads Lange, and the doctor Julius Jacobs, who first “discovered” a Bali of picturesque dancing girls and male whores.

  These scholars—the Ethici, as they were known—soon came to think that Bali was a kind of fossilized remain of the older Hindu culture of neighboring Java, which had since fallen under the regrettable sway of a more modern Islam. It was therefore a precious time capsule, a museum of antiquities that had to be saved from oblivion. This was true not just of its artifacts and its scriptures written in Kawi, the ancient language of Java, but of all aspects of its ritual and mythological life. Friedrich Liefrinck extolled the virtues of the pure Balinese village, an idea that later convinced the Dutch that it had to be restored.

  In the period between the two great world wars, the Dutch gathered up the visions of the Ethici and turned them into a political policy of sorts, regrouping the scattered rajas and their families and relegalizing the caste system. This recreation of tradition, which was not necessarily tradition at all, served to reassert a conservative social order that could better resist the inroads of aggressive modern ideologies from more restless Java. The photography of the ’20s is awash with gorgeously attired royal families—many of them looking like stunned deer in the proverbial headlights—bare-breasted dancing girls and restored temples, a Bali remade as exotic, ancient, and timeless. This was the Dutch colonial artifice, and an essential part of its script was the notion of a unique island that was both outside history and unscarred by its violent conflicts. Bali was the eternal village: folklore, witches, trances, sexuality, and art.

  Dutch power was able to maintain this fantasy until the Japanese came storming up Sanur beach in 1942. The Dutch came back in 1946, but they immediately became embroiled in the National Revolution of 1945–49. It has been largely written out of Bali’s image, but thousands died on the island during the struggles to define Indonesian independence—though the bloodshed was nothing compared to the massacres that were in store for Bali in the 1960s.

  Indonesia’s first president, the fantastical, sinister Sukarno, quickly discovered what the Dutch had: that Bali could serve as a symbolic cornerstone of conservative “Javanese” tradition within the chaotic tapestry of a vast, shambling nation made up of hundreds of ethnicities, religions, and separatist aspirations. As such, it had to be balmy and peaceable; outside the fray, as it were. The Island of Culture created in the ’30s was resurrected in the 1950s as Sukarno feted state guests at his Bali palace. But Sukarno played both sides of the coin—he patronized Ubud while encouraging the grimly radical Governor Suteja to keep the revolution burning. At the same time, he sent Bali’s dance troupes around the world, including the famed dancer I Nyoman Kakul, who was immortalized by Cartier-Bresson.

  Only the abortive coup in 1965 and the following anticommunist bloodbath interrupted the progress of Bali’s revived career as a showcase of ancient tradition and folklorish stability. At the end of 1965, armed gangs roamed the island, mutilating and beheading their victims; the hallowed villages vaunted by anthropologists for their peacefulness and charm elected execution squads to carry out collective murders.

  It is amazing to see how powerfully the tourist brochures of the Dutch period have stamped upon Bali an image that even the Balinese have adopted. Back in 1946, a Dutch military adviser had expressed the image quite neatly:

  The Balinese is a remarkable Oriental. He is very artistic, and expresses this in music, dance, wood carving and silver work. Although he is a poor fighter, because he is cowardly, the Balinese is self-confident and therefore very free in his association with others, including Europeans, though he does this in a pleasant way. He is good-humored and likes to join in a good joke. These character traits are certainly part of the reason for the great success of tourism here. (Captain J. B. T. Konig, quoted in Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise).

  But the American poet Frederick Seidel, writing of the 1965 massacres in his poem “Bali,” gives voice to the other side of the coin:

  Gentle Balinese murdered gentle Balinese,

  And, in the usual pogrom, killed

  The smart hardworking Chinese,

  Merchants to the poor, Jews in paradise.

  The Santika Garden hotel was only a few hundred yards up the hill of Jalan Raya from Walter Spies’s legendary villa, now converted into the Tjampuhan Hotel. I could walk there every morning before the rain came down. There were two ways to get there. The main road took one directly to the gates, but there was also a secretive shortcut across a rocky river sunk deep below the main road. Spies had built his house at the confluence of two small rivers that the Balinese consider to be magically charged, and above a small temple. The path is a series of steep steps cut into the hillside, with pavilions perched on the edge of countless terraces and a pool set inside a wedge of jungle. Spies’s own house is still here. Though very few of his paintings are housed within it, his carved monkeys still emerge out of the long walls. It is a few minutes before you realize that the whole thing is a fantasy of the 1930s, like the set of the Bob Hope movie The Road to Bali. You expect Dorothy Lamour to come padding out to the pool in a priestess hat. The bohemians are gone, and there is no memory of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, Jane Belo, or her musicologist husband Colin McPhee, the glittering crowd that hatched our idea of Bali when Kuta was still an empty beach. In her Letters, Mead describes coming to this house in April 1936 only a few hours after arriving in Bali on the Dutch ship Tapaneoli from Singapore. She was enchanted from the moment she landed, driving across island landscapes that seemed to her remarkably dense, compacted, and rich:

  It is the most extraordinary combination of a relatively untouched native life going along smoothly and quietly in its old way with a kind of extraneous, external civilization superimposed like an extra nervous system put on the outside of a body. Motor roads of black loose stones run through villages which are each protected by a magic wall against demons and over the heads of the motorists a screen of pointed bamboo is aimed at the demons.

  Spies was to be Mead’s mentor, her guiding spirit in Bali. “Walter is a perfectly delightful person,” she wrote, “an artist and a musician who has lived in Bali for some eight years.” A wealthy aristocrat born in Russia in 1895 to a Dresden family, Spies had arrived in Bali in 1927 after having worked as a court musician for the sultan of Yogyakarta in Java. He was a close friend of Friedrich Murnau, director of the 1922 Nosferatu, and Murnau’s chiaroscuro techniques can be seen in Spies’s paintings of Bali’s demonic rites. He became both a fervent photographer of Balinese life and a collector of folktales, music, and artifacts; his idealization of the Balinese peasant, meanwhile, harked back consciously to the Ethici.

  Magic and the village: Spies’s influence on Mead is obvious. But he was also a driving force behind the globalizing—if we can call it that—of Bali’s image. Vickers describes how at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, Spies shaped the Balinese exhibition. (It was where Antonin Artaud saw his first Balinese dance, a fierce influence on his “theater of cruelty.”) A book of Spies’s Bali photographs was also a sensation, and soon the smart set was paying house calls in Ubud. He also contributed to André Roosevelt’s film about Bali, Goona Goona, which made that phrase (“love magic” in Javanese) a part of ’20s New York slang. Later, he made a great impression upon the wandering Mexican caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, author of perhaps the most read book about Bali, the 1937 Island of Bali. The tone is already utopian. “Like a continual under-sea ballet,” Covarrubias writes, “the pulse of life in Bali moves with a measured rhythm … no other race gives the impression of living in such close touch with nature, creates such a complete feeling of harmony between the people and their surroundings.”