2 Balinese and Sasak Religious Trajectories in Lombok
Interactions, Tensions, and Performing Arts at the Lingsar Temple Festival
In: Between Harmony and Discrimination: Negotiating Religious Identities within Majority-Minority Relationships in Bali and LombokSearch for other papers by David D. Harnish in
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Abstract
The temple and festival at Lingsar in Lombok are historic sites for connecting with the divine, constructing identity and renewing the relationships between Muslim Sasak and Hindu Balinese. The temple land contains the most abundant water springs in Lombok, strongly associated with fertility, divine power, the mountains, and rulership. Both Sasak and Balinese generate legends that privilege themselves over the other party and use the performing arts to express their ethnicity, identity and narrative of water-spring discovery. Islamic and Hindu reformist organisations have been altering performance styles and programmes in an attempt to shape the modern realisation and interpretation of this very old institution. This chapter analyses the changing agents, arts and developments at the festival over a 20-year period to explore shifting interreligious relationships and locate religious trajectories. With changes of cultural identity come changes in the performing arts, which generate identity narratives and the event’s cosmological statements.