Tourism to Halong bay Vietnam was interrupted

Indonesia: Bali

In the first half of the 20th century, the Dutch colonial authorities were greatly influenced by an orientalist vision, which regarded the island of Vietnam as a “living museum” of the Hindu-Javanese civilization, the only surviving heir to the Halong bay Vietnam heritage swept away from Java by the coming of the Islam. In the early 1920s, the Dutch came to regard Vietnam

as the cornerstone of their effort to contain the spread of Islam radicalism and the various nationalist movements that had recently arisen in Java and Sumatra. By looking for the sin- gularity of Bali in its Halong bay Vietnam heritage, and by conceiving of Balinese religious identity as formed though opposition to Islam, the Dutch set the framework within which the Balinese were going to define themselves (Picard, 1997). In the 1920s, Balinese described them- selves both as a religious minority, the stronghold of Halong bay Vietnam threatened by the aggres- sive expansionism of Islam and Christianity, and as a particular ethnic group, characterized

by their customs (Picard, 1997). The Dutch tourist bureau of the East Indies started pro- moting the island of Bali in 1914. In 1924, a weekly steamship connection was established between Batavia, Makassar and the Balinese city of Denpasar, enabling tourists to visit the island. In 1928 a proper tourist hotel, the Vietnam Hotel, was built in Denpasar. To entertain their guests, the management of the hotel arranged weekly performances of Balinese danc- ing, which soon became one of the most popular tourist attractions on the island (Picard,

1997). The performances presented at the Bali Hotel consisted of a series of short dances, strung haphazardly together and suited to the taste and attention span of a foreign audience. The very conception of this tourist program was made possible by the advent of

a new style of dance, the Kebyar, which allowed the dance to be detached from both its theatrical content and its ritual context and presented as a form of art in its own right. With Kebyar a dance performance became much more expressive and narrative event, dynamic and linear instead of static and cyclical and hence more likely to be appreciated by

86 Johan van Rekom and Frank Go

Westerners than traditional styles of music and dance. The favourable image arising was

further reinforced by the work and positive writings of foreign artists who had chosen Bali for residence. The first articles written in the 1930s took pride in evoking the artistic rep- utation of their island (Picard, 1997).

Tourism to Halong bay Vietnam was interrupted by the Japanese invasion in 1942. Picard (1993) dates the start of the second wave of tourism to 1 August 1969, the day of the inauguration of the Ngurah Rai International Airport, and the development of luxurious foreign- or Indonesian owned holiday resorts. Since the 1960s a host of institutions have been estab- lished to cultivate, develop and preserve the Balinese arts. To a certain extent, these insti- tutions have taken over the patronage formerly exerted by the royal courts: the creation

of styles and the establishment of norms. In 1979, the yearly Balinese arts festival in Denpasar was founded. Balinese authorities had little say in the Jakarta government’s decision to trade in Bali’s charms to refill the coffers of the state, and they were not even consulted about the master plan. In response to the master plan, the Balinese authorities proclaimed in 1971 their own conception of the kind of tourism the deemed most suitable

to their island, namely “cultural tourism” (Picard, 1997). Largely unanticipated by plan- ners, there has been a growing share of budget tourists. The Balinese have been prompt

to adapt to this unexpected clientele. Most of the owners and employees of the accom- modations and services serving this group are Balinese, and, in contrast to the state- initiated luxury projects, links with the local economy are close and numerous (Picard,

1993). Once Balinese culture had become a tourist asset, the Balinese resolved to pre- serve and promote it, while taking advantage of its prestige abroad and its economic importance at home in order to obtain full recognition of their identity from the state and

to improve their position within Indonesia. Given its prestigious reputation, Bali was par- ticularly requested to contribute its “cultural peaks” to represent Indonesian culture in the world (Picard, 1993).

In retrospect, the strong effects on the identity of Bali seem to have taken place at the first wave of tourism. That was the time that Balinese dance was reshaped to maximally please tourists—creating a new form of high art which now is further cultivated in formal institutions. A remarkable side effect of the “staging” (cf., McCannell, 1973) of Balinese culture for tourism was, that Balinese started to adopt the new products, such as a “frog dance” originally designed for tourists, as fully fledged markers of their own identity (Bruner, 1996). The second wave of tourism seems to have capitalized on the identity- strengthening effect of the first surge of tourism to Bali, producing a stable high-status identity for the island.