School of Geography - Theses
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ItemPigs, gigolos and mail order brides from Bali to Melbourne: Balinese-Australian marriage as an acculturative response to tourism in Bali and multiculturalism in Melbourne( 1998)Bali has become a major international tourist destination over the past twenty years. The constant contact between tourists and locals in some cases results in marriages. Using the empirical examples of marriages between Balinese Hindus and Australian tourists who decide to settle in Melbourne, this thesis presents cross-cultural marriage as an acculturative response to contact. The contextualisation of these partnerships in nation state Indonesia, tourist areas in Bali and eventually in multicultural Melbourne shows them to be marginal for a number of historic reasons. Using Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, acculturative change is recognised as a constant process. The concept of acculturation, reframed in a contemporary situation, separates it from its colonial antecedents and therefore proves useful in describing social change. Indonesia's post-colonial response to nation building places Balinese people within the confines of a nationalistic discourse and an encompassing Indonesian identity. The tourist domain in Bali repositions the Balinese outside a totalising Indonesian system and somewhat surprisingly, highlights idiomatically Balinese responses to marriage. Tourists are ritually incorporated into Balinese families when they marry Balinese partners. Explaining ritual incorporation involves a redefinition of the structural circulating connubium, or circulation of women, often understood in anthropology to form the basis Balinese marriage practice. Thus, contact with tourism, the very domain thought to subsume Balinese identity, in some cases reinforces pragmatic Balinese marriage practices that have become unpopular within Indonesian nationalist rhetoric. Multicultural Melbourne is the locus of the ongoing relationships between some Balinese and tourists. Melbourne as the choice of settlement focuses the discussion on miscegenation, engagement with bureaucracy and migration in general. Multiculturalism plays the dual function of assuring the legitimacy of these partnerships in a traditionally racist environment, but also in limiting them to mono-cultural constructions. Acculturation as both a processual and substantive state informs Balinese-Melbourne marriages beyond the limitations of the multicultural model. Rather than representing 'culture loss' or 'culture gain', these cross-cultural marriages show that acculturation is the inevitable result of contact and cross-cultural identities formed through this contact represent the acculturative response.