Becoming-local in Bali: Racial viscosity and the commodification of language

In this paper I explore how the commodification of language for tourist consumption in Bali mediates the negotiation of racial difference between tourists and their local counterparts. The website of one Indonesian language... [ view full abstract ]

In this paper I explore how the commodification of language for tourist consumption in Bali mediates the negotiation of racial difference between tourists and their local counterparts. The website of one Indonesian language school in Bali asks prospective students, “Are you living in Indonesia? What do you hear people call you usually?” Noting that readers may have heard the Indonesian word bule, the site describes this as just one of a number of terms for foreigners in Balinese/Indonesian society, and offers a few additional terms along with definitions. Absent, however, is any mention that bule commonly means “white person” or “Caucasian” (Stevens & Schmidgall-Tellings, 2010, p. 162), or indeed any mention of race at all. Instead, every term listed is hierarchically ordered from least to most “local” based solely on degree of Indonesian language proficiency. Working from the perspective of posthumanist performativity (Barad, 2003), I conceptualize this reconfiguration of racial difference through the materialist lens of viscosity (Saldanha, 2007), which describes the materialization of particular racialized bodies as a probabilistic alignment of embodied practices “fully contingent on scenes, places, [and] economies” (p. 129). Using school advertisements, curricular materials, classroom discourse, and interviews with students and staff collected during a year-long ethnography of language policy (Hornberger & Johnson, 2011), I examine how the circulation of normative models of personhood based primarily on language proficiency in this school works to permit the negotiation of more cemented notions of racial identity that would otherwise commonly be used to distinguish most tourists from Balinese and Indonesian locals. I argue that in the context of the Balinese tourist economy this commodification of language restructures and revalues racial difference such that students are encouraged to see the only meaningful barrier to their ability to fully integrate into Balinese society—to become truly “local” and shirk a cumbersome “tourist” identity—as their ability to purchase a quality language education. In conclusion, I discuss various implications of such an attempt at reorganization of racial difference on tourist–local interactions in Balinese society.