More Than Words

Grounded in ethnographic and archival research on the island of Bali, More Than Words challenges conventional understandings of textuality and writing as they pertain to the religious traditions of Southeast Asia. Through a nuanced study of Balinese script as employed in rites of healing, sorcery, and self-defense, Richard Fox explores the aims and desires embodied in the production and use of palm-leaf manuscripts, amulets, and other inscribed objects.

Balinese often… (more)

Grounded in ethnographic and archival research on the island of Bali, More Than Words challenges conventional understandings of textuality and writing as they pertain to the religious traditions of Southeast Asia. Through a nuanced study of Balinese script as employed in rites of healing, sorcery, and self-defense, Richard Fox explores the aims and desires embodied in the production and use of palm-leaf manuscripts, amulets, and other inscribed objects.

Balinese often attribute both life and independent volition to manuscripts and copperplate inscriptions, presenting them with elaborate offerings. Commonly addressed with personal honorifics, these script-bearing objects may become partners with humans and other sentient beings in relations of exchange and mutual obligation. The question is how such practices of "the living letter" may be related to other ideas about the island’s traditional script. Fox examines the relationship between the state-bureaucratic articulation of reform Hinduism, for which Balinese letters figure primarily as a symbol of cultural heritage, and the broadly western philological assumption that script serves as a neutral medium for the expression and transmission of textual meaning. However, as More than Words reveals, Balinese practices of apotropaic writing—on palm-leaves, amulets, and bodies—challenge these notions, and yet coexist alongside them. From this strange coexistence, Fox theorizes that the these seemingly contradictory sensibilities hold wider significance than has long been thought for the history and practice of religion in Southeast Asia and beyond.