Conclusion: ‘Made in Bali, by Java’

Summary

After a series of fieldwork periods, informed mainly by multi-sited ethnography and theoretical examinations, this study has shed light on some overarching, important, and interesting features of contemporary Islamic expression in Indonesia, a country that has recently been labelled as taking santrification referring to an increase in Islamic piety and a stricter adherence to Islamic practices across large sections of the Indonesian society. It intersects with what Martin van Bruinessen calls a ‘conservative turn’ signalled by the proliferation of salafi groups and ‘religious commodification’ across sections of Indonesian Muslims. Having started with questions concerning Muslim saint worship: how these wali were invented, marketed, experienced and at the same time contested, the Wali Pitu cult made it abundantly clear how a sainthood tradition is invented, experienced and appropriated to meet modern lifestyles and market demands, and how this invented tradition is linked with broader socio-political formation and sociocultural contexts. By extension, this book exemplifies the travelling saint worshiping tradition in a translocal setting and dynamics of pilgrimage sites seen from the perspective multifaced cultural geographies, boundaries, and encounters between Islamic Java and Hindu Bali. The book further demonstrates cultural traffics between localities, exchange, competition and contestation which are framed in translocal settings but shaped by local specificities, i.e., local figurations, attachments, and belongings of ‘Muslim Balinese’.

This book offers three important insights for the study of Islam in Indonesia that so far have been virtually neglected in scholarly circles. The first is that the present studies on Indonesian Muslims who live in a minority setting – like Muslims in Bali – have their limitations. This is mostly because Indonesia is labelled the largest Muslim country in the world and consequently these studies failed to pay due attention to the presence of Muslims, as religious minorities in more local sociocultural contexts. Secondly, no matter how much Indonesians and Indonesia specialists are aware of and familiar with the tradition of saint veneration, only some scholarly works have been written on the subject and existing scholarly research findings offer insufficient appreciation that these traditions were invented or/and insights into how they were invented and subsequently grew. Finally, by analysing Muslim pilgrimage in Bali in a wider sense, this book reveals some of the contemporary transcultural dynamics between Java and Bali.