11 Respecting the Lakes: Arguments about a Tourism Project between Environmentalism and Agama
In: Between Harmony and Discrimination: Negotiating Religious Identities within Majority-Minority Relationships in Bali and LombokSearch for other papers by Sophie Strauss in
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Abstract
The dispute over “sustainable” tourism projects on the banks of the neighbouring Buyan and Tamblingan lakes in the mountains of Buleleng (Northern Bali) has disunited the inhabitants in the villages concerned. In the ‘pro’ and ‘con’ arguments, each party draws on a similar syncretistic mixture of local Balinese ideas about human-environment relations, Hindu scriptures and elements from modernist ecological science with global “green” jargon. However, the configuration of these elements and the interpretation of them serve, as this chapter shows, different goals for different parties. This chapter traces how the actors combine global ideas of sustainability and ecology with Hindu Balinese space concepts and concepts of agama and local adat for their own purposes. In doing so, they renegotiate the power relations of local levels with provincial, national and transnational levels and rearrange the various constellations of minority and majority relationships.