This book is an ethnography that charts reconfigurations of kebalian (Balineseness) – a notion that encompasses the personal, social, and cultural complexities involved in being persons and collectives of Balinese ethnicity in post-colonial Dutch society. I explore how Balinese subaltern citizens engage in discourses and materialities of the colonial in the present by asserting claims of proximity between themselves and the Dutch on the basis of colonial history through an active production of what I call postcolonial intimacy. My understanding of Balinese subaltern citizens’ claims of proximity that emerged so prominently in my ethnographic material urges me not to see them through the binary oppositions of remoteness and proximity, of harmony and disorder. Rather, I argue that post-colonial intimacy generated by Balinese subaltern citizens is produced relationally and needs to be situated within the following contexts: the specificities of Dutch colonialism in Bali and Balinese understandings of historical agency; wider understandings of Balinese culture as paradisiacal and Balinese people as peace-loving; the Balinese and Dutch common sense of threat from and vulnerability to radical Islam; and the existence of the Indies cultural landscape in the Netherlands, which is characterized by its rich and complex colonial inheritance that has been developing since the 1950s. Thus, post-colonial intimacy here should be seen as a wide spectrum of dynamic relationships that are experienced as familiarity, proximity, and closeness and are generated through a continuum of dis-harmony and tensions.

In analyzing the production of kebalian, I draw on a large body of scholarship that discusses Balinese identity politics in Bali. Michael Picard (1996a, 1999, 2000) conceptualizes kebalian as a ‘transcultural discourse’ by stressing its historically constructed, interactive character. His discussion focuses on the Balinese intelligentsia's investment in the production of discourses which take religion (agama), custom (adat), and culture (budaya) to be the central features of Balinese identity politics. Drawing on the work of Picard (1996, 1996a) and other scholars who approach Balinese culture and identity politics as an ongoing process of becoming (e.g. Vickers 1989; Howe 1999, 2004; Connor and Vickers 2003; Jennaway 2002; Ramstedt 2004; Schulte Nordholt 2007; Fox 2011), I study the production of kebalian in the context of Balinese diasporic formations.