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Sisters and Lovers
Women and Desire in Bali
Authors:
Publisher:
2002
Summary
The Balinese devotion to their temples is both legendary and conspicuous, but the ways in which they enshrine their innermost desires have long been hidden. This ethnography draws back the veil by focusing on the romantic experiences of women in a rural village (Punyanwangi) in North Bali from adolescence to maturity. Delving into the intensity of passion that exists just below the harmonious veneer of traditional patterns of courtship and marriage, motherhood, and connubial fidelity, this book overturns Margaret Mead's assertions of passivity in Balinese social life. Punyanwangi's proximity to a thriving tourist center allows Megan Jennaway to explore as well the striking gender disparities in the ways sexuality and desire are culturally mediated. Aside from service work, women are excluded from entering the tourist domain, yet male sexual adventurism is expected and even encouraged. The bodies of foreign women are thus invested with potent fantasies of exotic desire, while those of local women are muted-denied legitimate avenues of expression. The author invokes Post-Freudian and feminist concepts of sexuality to explain culturally specific psychiatric disorders to which Balinese women are prone, interpreting them as expressions of frustrated desire. She thus convincingly reveals Balinese society as anything but unemotional or stagnant. Rather, it is swept along by currents of emotionally charged desire. By allowing key informants to tell their stories in their own voices and by skillfully interweaving fictionalized interludes, the author gives us not only a rigorously researched ethnography, but an intimate and fully realized portrait of Balinese women's innermost desires.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2002
ISBN-Print
978-0-7425-1864-3
ISBN-Online
978-1-4616-1732-7
Publisher
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
309
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Table of Contents No access
List of Illustrations and Tables No access
Foreword No access
Preface No access
Chapter 1: Introduction: Ethnography and Fiction in Punyanwangi No access Pages 1 - 16
Chapter 2: Muting Desire: Women, Sex, and Discourse No access Pages 17 - 32
Chapter 3: Producing Desire: Village Economy and Social Organization No access Pages 33 - 58
Chapter 4: Marrying Desire: Locating Women in the Social Order No access Pages 59 - 98
Chapter 5: Depriving Desire: Lovina Tourism and the Economy of Pleasure No access Pages 99 - 136
Chapter 6: Delinquent Desire: Female Sexuality in Punyanwangi No access Pages 137 - 180
Chapter 7: Expressing Desire: Women and Hysteria in Punyanwangi No access Pages 181 - 214
Conclusion: Denial and Delirium: Women's Desire as Transgressive Capital No access Pages 215 - 226
Epilogue: The Naming Ceremony No access Pages 227 - 240
Appendix A: On Ethnographic Truth(s) No access Pages 241 - 244
Appendix B: Discourse and Dichotomies No access Pages 245 - 246
Appendix C: Notes on the Village Household Census No access Pages 247 - 248
Appendix D: Cloves No access Pages 249 - 252
Appendix E: Gender and Labor in Punyanwangi No access Pages 253 - 262
Appendix F: List of Agnatic Descent Groups (Tunggalan),Desa Adat Punyanwangi No access Pages 263 - 264
