ABSTRACT
The central highland region of Bali is the principle homeland of a disadvantaged minority group on this rather prosperous Indonesian island, a people locally referred to as ‘the Mountain Balinese’ (wong bali aga). While southern Bali has long been a prominent research site for western social scientists and popular as an international tourist destination, few foreign visitors had paid much attention to the broader significance of Bali Aga culture when I first began my study of the island's highland region in 1992. A focal aim of my subsequent publications has been to remove some of the veils of biased representation that have situated the highland Balinese at the fringe of Balinese society (see Reuter 1998a—c, 1999a—b, 2000, 2002, in Press). In this chapter, I focus on how the position of the Bali Aga within Balinese society has changed repeatedly during times of crisis, including the Indonesian financial and political crisis since the fall of Suharto in 1998. The analysis is designed to support three hypothesis that have general implications for the study of social change.
