Materiality and Efficacy of Balinese Letters

Richard Fox, Ph.D. (2002) School of Oriental and African Studies (London), is a member of the Special Research Initiative on Material Text Cultures (SFB 933) at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. His research focuses on religion, media and performance in South and Southeast Asia.Annette Hornbacher, Ph.D. (1993) Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute für Ethnologie, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. Her ethnographic research has focused on Indonesia, and especially on Bali, where she investigated ritual and theatrical performance as kinaesthetic cosmological knowledge.

• List of illustrations1. Introduction—Balinese Practices of Script and Western Paradigms of Text: An Anthropological Approach to a Philological Topic - Annette Hornbacher2.The Meaning of Life, or How to Do Things with Letters - Richard Fox3.‘The World is Full of Letters’: Graphic Ideologies, Graphic Technologies, and Transformative Practice in Bali - Margaret J. Wiener4.The Body of Letters: Balinese Aksara as an Intersection Between Script, Power and Knowledge - Annette Hornbacher5.The Medium is the Message: Chirographic Figures in Two Traditions -Thomas M. Hunter6. Imposition of the Syllabary (mātṛkā/svaravyañjana-nyāsa) in the Javano-Balinese Tradition in the light of South Asian Tantric Sources - Andrea Acri7. Im-Materiality: Where Have All the Akṣara Gone? - Helen Creese8. Visible and Invisible Script Used at Consecrations of Buildings in Bali - H.I.R. Hinzler9. Postscript - Richard FoxBibliographyIndex