| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Henk Schulte Nordholt. The Spell of Power: A History of Balinese Politics 1650–1940. (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, number 170.) Leiden, The Netherlands: KITLV. 1996. Pp. ix, 389. NLG 60.00.

For the past two decades, international scholarly writing on Balinese history has been largely in the hands of anthropologists, and we have been treated to the ideas of Bali's "theater state," its visible and invisible realms, its romanticization and "imagining" or construction. As useful as these contributions are, like most anthropological writing that has only begun to make the historical turn, they are at their weakest in depicting change over time: their view consists at best of a short series of snapshots rather than a longer real-time video or film, and causation tends to be oversimplified. Henk Schulte Nordholt breaks from this trend and provides us with a rich narrative that is organized chronologically, details change, and argues complex causation. It is history informed by anthropology rather than the other way around. The result should be welcome indeed, not only to Baliologists but to anyone interested in thinking about the problems inherent in understanding the past, and the conceptualization of the past, of societies remarkably different from their own. . . .

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