ABSTRACT
Bali is justly famous for a number of things, most of them revolving around a heady nexus of international relationships (tourist and expatriate, artistic and academic) with a supposedly timeless traditional culture, always threatened but always surviving, indeed thriving on its encounter with global cosmopolitanism. What it appears to have largely escaped is the frontier violence of national and transnational regimes of resource extraction that have laid waste to indigenous cultures and environments over much of Asia and Latin America (Sawyer and Gomez 2012). Balinese culture itself, enduring, traditionalist and resilient in the face of change, seems likewise the antithesis of the unstable dynamics of frontier process. There is some truth in these impressions but also a degree of illusion.
