Jero Tapakan and Other Teachers: Stories, Friendship and Ethnographic Practice

Abstract

Compelling speech and spirited conversation in Bali almost always includes good stories. Healers draw on a fund of stories to heal, divert and entertain their patients. Stories take on new life over many tellings and patients and healers mutually construct narratives that open up new healing possibilities. These processes also characterise the ways in which relationships between ethnographers and their circle of teachers, relatives, friends, colleagues and the local people who become teachers and mentors can be forged through the shared experiences that make stories. In long-term research relationships, the close friendships that develop become stories in themselves as lives become intertwined in a cultural and emotional space that is outside the ‘ironic’ mode of ethnographic inquiry. These themes are explored through discussion of the author's friendship with the Balinese healer Jero Tapakan, as well as through other field research relationships.

Keywords:

• Bali
• Indonesia
• Friendship
• Stories
• Mentors
• Ethnography
• Field research
• Healing

Acknowledgements

Research in Bali since 1976 that is relevant to this paper was funded at various times by an Australian Commonwealth Postgraduate Research Award; Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney Carlyle Greenwell Bequest Fund; Australian Research Council; University of Newcastle Research Management Committee; and Wenner–Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I am grateful for comments on earlier drafts of the paper from Patsy Asch, Leslie Devereaux, Megan Jennaway and two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. By the 1970s, turis had supplanted the earlier term for Europeans, belanda (Dutchman/woman), which signalled the colonial presence of foreigners up until the early 1950s. Belanda was still used by the older generation and is still occasionally heard. Tamu (‘guest’) is now the politically correct term; bule (‘whitey’) is considered coarse, but ‘cool’ among urban youth in particular.

2. Séances were more of a challenge and depended on a bilingual guide being present. Unfortunately, I never witnessed one of these ‘tourist’ séances.