Negotiating Cultural Constraints Strategic decision-making by widows and divorcees (janda) in contemporary Bali.

Indonesia and the Malay World

ISSN: 1363-9811 (Print) 1469-8382 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cimw20

Negotiating cultural constraints: strategic
decision-making by widows and divorcees (janda)
in contemporary Bali
I Nyoman Darma Putra & Helen Creese
To cite this article: I Nyoman Darma Putra & Helen Creese (2016) Negotiating cultural
constraints: strategic decision-making by widows and divorcees (janda) in contemporary Bali,
Indonesia and the Malay World, 44:128, 104-122, DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2015.1100869
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2015.1100869

Published online: 07 Dec 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 13

View related articles


View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cimw20
Download by: [UQ Library]

Date: 27 January 2016, At: 15:36

INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD, 2016
VOL. 44, NO. 128, 104–122
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2015.1100869

Negotiating cultural constraints: strategic decision-making
by widows and divorcees (janda) in contemporary Bali

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

I Nyoman Darma Putra and Helen Creese

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

This article discusses the strategies deployed by widows and
divorcees (janda) in negotiating cultural constraints and social
stigmatisation in contemporary Bali. In Balinese patriarchal society,
women are disadvantaged in terms of their access to employment
and commonly earn less than men. When a marriage ends,
Balinese widows and divorcees not only lose their partners but
also an important source of family income. Janda may need to
take on additional burdens in supporting themselves and their
families and are therefore economically vulnerable. In addition,
janda are often considered to be sexually available, may be the
target of men’s sexual advances and thus become a frequent
source of gossip. The dual state-village administrative system
further complicates divorce and remarriage within Balinese
patriarchal society. In order to understand how Balinese janda
cope with these social and cultural constraints, this article
focuses on the contrasting life histories of three janda. Deploying

Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of economic, cultural, social and
symbolic capital, the analysis demonstrates that access to
multiple forms of capital plays an important role in enabling
Balinese janda to make their lives bearable and manageable. With
adequate access to economic resources, janda can not only
demonstrate their independence and ability to support their
children, but also are able to meet their social and religious
obligations. In this way they can maintain their respectability and
social acceptance within their local communities. These findings
contribute to a wider and more complex picture of the life of
Balinese janda.

Agency; Bali; cultural capital;
cultural constraints;
patriarchal society; widows
and divorcees

Introduction
As elsewhere in Indonesia, in Bali the end of a marriage may signal major changes in status
and personal relationships for women, leaving them economically vulnerable and potentially open to stigma. In spite of a long history of formal legal protection (Creese 2016, this

issue; Parker 2016, this issue) and official national rhetoric about women’s inherent equality and ‘value,’ within Bali’s patriarchal social system, janda – widows and divorcees – are
disadvantaged in culturally specific ways that may exacerbate the burden of their single
status.1 Significant local factors in decision-making following a divorce or the death of a
1

Janda (Balinese balu) is an Indonesian term that refers to both widows and divorcees, sometimes differentiated as janda
mati and janda cerai respectively. In order to situate this article in the context of this special issue on janda and stigmatisation in Indonesia more generally, we prefer the term janda over its Balinese equivalent, balu, because the Balinese

© 2015 Editors, Indonesia and the Malay World

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD

105

spouse, which will be explored more fully below, include Bali’s patrilineal descent system
and virilocal residence patterns that may force divorced and widowed women to leave the
marital home and extended family networks. Many experience alienation and exclusion
from religious and communal life and may risk losing access to their children who typically remain in the father’s family. Children who move away from their father’s compound

to live with their mother when the parents are divorced or their mother widowed must still
perform all their own life cycle ceremonies and religious obligations within the patrilinial
familial environment. When a marriage ends, whether through divorce or the death of a
spouse, a core concern for Balinese janda remains the importance of ensuring their children remain fully integrated into their former partner’s family lineage. This concern may
necessitate maintaining strained personal relationships with a former partner or his
extended family over many years. Stigmatisation and perceptions of sexual availability
and promiscuity may mean that Balinese janda also face similar burdens to those reported
in the case studies from across the archipelago documented elsewhere in this special issue
(Mahy et al. 2016; Parker et al. 2016). Women who are widowed or divorced may also have
to negotiate complex caste boundaries that may be transgressed when new relationships
are formed and experience difficulties in meeting their religious and social obligations.
Although the economic, social and cultural consequences of choosing to leave a marriage
often seem insurmountable and may restrict choice, many Balinese women make that
decision, develop strategies to forge new and meaningful lives and rebuild the social
and cultural capital that the end of a marriage may have diluted.
In spite of the vast scholarly literature on Balinese society and culture, almost no attention has been paid to the life-experiences of janda in the community. Issues surrounding
janda may feature in contemporary studies of adat law, which remains a potent force in
the regulation of Balinese social relationships, but the discussion is primarily in relation to
their rights, or rather their unequal rights, to inheritance (Panetja 1989; Sukranatha 2002;
Windia 2014; Creese 2016). Despite widespread regional variation, the position of janda is

always marginal before the (adat) law and exacerbates the economic and social burdens
that janda face. Apart from some incidental attention to the challenges faced by janda
in Jennaway’s study of the lives of rural village women in north Bali (2002), only one
recent study (Margi 2007), set in a strikingly similar environment to that of Jennaway’s
field site a decade earlier, focuses on the life experiences of janda in a rural village in
north Bali. Margi considers the experiences of 19 divorced women who have returned
to their natal homes as single women in terms of the measure of empathy and social philanthropy (kedermawanan sosial) extended to them by their natal families and their
communities.
In this article, we seek to contribute to the field by presenting the life-histories of three
Balinese janda who, through personal choice or circumstances, have successfully navigated Balinese cultural and social constraints to rebuild their lives after widowhood and
divorce. These women are not, of course, representative of the experiences of all Balinese
janda, but they, nevertheless, exemplify the challenges faced by women following the end
of a marital relationship. Their diverse stories reflect their individual experiences and strategies as they negotiate their economic, socio-cultural and religious identities within
term balu does not differentiate gender and is applied equally to men who are divorced or widowed. Moreover, the
Indonesian word janda is in common use in Bali.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

106


I N. D. PUTRA AND H. CREESE

Balinese society. Two of these life-histories are autobiographical and are based on recent
interviews carried out in 2013–2014 by Darma Putra. The first story focuses on Musti, now
65 years of age, who has been both widowed and divorced, and the second on Oki, a
younger divorcee, now 47, who has remained single. The third case study, the story of
Tutik, is biographical and draws on collective family memory through a series of interviews with members of her extended family. Tutik, a janda whose first husband disappeared during the anti-communist violence of 1965–1966, later remarried and divorced.
We have included Tutik’s story to illuminate the propensity for stigmatisation to
endure even after the death of the janda herself. All personal names used in this article
are pseudonyms.
Our analysis, follows the frames of reference utilised by Parker et al. (2016) and
draws on Bourdieu’s concept of different forms of capital (1977; 1986) to demonstrate
how Balinese janda are able to exercise agency by mobilising support from their
families and communities in ways that allow them to accumulate, expend and negotiate
the various forms of capital – economic, social, cultural and symbolic. We extend
the concept of ‘symbolic capital’ still further in the Balinese context to indicate not
simply ‘respectability of janda’ but to denote the reintegration of janda into the Balinese adat community, a core social and religious relationship that the end of a marriage may have fractured. By accessing multiple forms of capital, individual janda
are able to recoup their status as productive and active members of these communities.
Moreover, these strategies enable them to avert debilitating stigmatisation by creating
respectability as a form of honour. As in the examples discussed elsewhere in this

special issue, it is possible for Balinese janda to overcome stigma and suspicion
through the acquisition and expenditure of various forms of capital over time.
Before turning to our case studies, we provide a brief overview of some broader
aspects of Balinese social organisation that provide the arena in which these experiences
play out. This background information will highlight the specific cultural context in
which the janda to be described below act and make decisions when their marital
relationships end.

Administrative dualism − the desa adat and desa dinas
In common with other provinces in Indonesia, the lowest administrative level in Bali is the
village.2 Bali has a longstanding dual administrative system, dating back to the colonial
period, that separates civil administration in the desa dinas from social and cultural
affairs in the desa adat (desa pakraman; Warren 2003).3 This administrative dualism is
a legacy of the Dutch mission to restore and preserve ‘authentic Bali’. It was founded
on a view of village society as the locus of the ‘original’ Bali and as fundamentally religious
in character (Liefrinck 1927: 281, 285). An administrative system was implemented that
severed religion and culture from more worldly matters of politics and administration
(Schulte Nordholt 1996: 240–3). Today, the desa dinas and desa adat comprise a
number of local neighbourhood wards or banjar with complementary but distinct
2

3

Despite its rural connotations in English, the desa or village also refers to residential sectors in urban areas.
In 2014, the central government issued a new law, Village Regulation No. 6/2014, which will recognise only one village
administrative unit. The law is due to come into effect in 2015. Balinese have indicated a strong preference for retaining
the current dual system.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD

107

functions and separate heads at each level.4 The desa dinas has responsibility for all civil
regulation including the issuing of identity cards, birth and marriage certificates and so on.
All Balinese must be registered as members of a desa dinas, but Hindu Balinese, comprising 83.5% of Bali’s population according to the 2010 National Population Census, must
register in both the desa dinas and desa adat.
For practical purposes, Balinese may move between desa dinas affiliations in accordance with their place of residence and employment but will normally retain lifetime membership of their desa adat. For men, their desa adat is normally the village into which they
are born; for women at marriage, it becomes that of their husband’s family, with significant
consequences for women who move away after they are widowed or divorced. All

members are required to provide material support and voluntary service to the desa
adat for communal religious and social activity and Balinese who no longer reside in
their village return there for life-cycle rituals and for the frequent, significant temple festivals and religious observations. The desa adat has formal administrative status but its real
power lies in its oversight of all adat concerns, including matters relating to the validation
of marriages and divorces. Since the Reformation period in Indonesia, the symbolic power
and authority of the desa adat have increased significantly not only because of the general
decentralisation of governance across Indonesia but also because of the rise of a spirited
and resilient Balinese regional identity that is reflected in the local Ajeg Bali (Bali
Stands Strong) movement. This sometimes ultra-conservative valorisation of Balinese traditional values and of Bali’s religious and cultural distinctiveness has played out in popular
discourse and media and for over a decade now has been, and remains, a powerful force in
shaping community attitudes and values (Allen and Palermo 2005; Schulte Nordholt 2007;
Lewis and Lewis 2009; Putra and Creese 2012). The desa adat has the responsibility to safeguard the community against both internal and external negative influences and threats
and has become the front line for guarding against the destruction of Balinese religion
and culture. Both within and outside the desa adat there has been a focus on the application of adat law (hukum adat), with the colonial documentation discussed in the companion article on legal processes in this issue (Creese 2016), particularly Korn’s Adatrecht
volume (1932) again providing authoritative definitions of Balinese adat for the 21st
century (see, for example, Panetja 1989; Windia 2014).

Adat marriage and divorce practices in Bali
Under Indonesia’s Marriage Law 1974, a marriage is legal if it is performed in accordance
with the laws of the couple’s religion. For Balinese Hindus, marriage therefore requires the

completion of specific adat rituals that reflect Balinese patrilineal kinship and virilocal
residence patterns. As part of adat law, the bride must perform a mapamit or leavetaking ritual at her family temples, as a symbolic gesture to inform the ancestors that
she will leave the house and be integrated into her partner’s family compound and
family (Pitana 1997: 95–6). In a simple wedding ceremony (masakapan) performed in
the husband’s compound temple, the woman is presented to his ancestors and accepted
by them as a member of their kin group. To validate the marriage under adat law, the
4

The lowest level of administration is the banjar. The banjar dinas is headed by the kepala lingkungan and the banjar adat
by the klian. Above them sit the village level heads, the lurah (in urban areas) or kepala desa (in rural areas) of the administrative desa dinas and the bandesa of the desa adat.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

108

I N. D. PUTRA AND H. CREESE

heads of the banjar dinas and banjar adat of both the bride and groom must witness the
rituals. The central purpose of these rituals is to hand over the bride symbolically to her
husband’s ancestors and family. In a series of parallel ceremonies, the heads of the two
natal banjar (dinas and adat) release the bride to their counterparts in the husband’s
banjar who accept her into her new banjar. The head of the groom’s banjar adat then
announces the marriage in the following monthly banjar meeting. Although they do
not always attend the rituals, the desa-level heads of both parties, the two lurah and
bandesa, must witness the necessary certificates thus bringing the total number of official
administrative officials involved to eight. The adat ceremonies usually precede formal
administrative registration with the desa dinas, which is responsible for organising the
paperwork necessary for the issuing of the marriage certificate by the district-level government office.
Divorce is a far more muted affair than marriage. The couple report their intention to
the two klian. After a separation period of three months, a certificate of divorce (surat
keterangan cerai), signed by the heads of both the desa adat and the desa dinas, can
then be issued without further recourse to civil procedures (Margi 2007: 131–2).
Nevertheless, at the end of a marriage, adat rituals that parallel in reverse those performed
at marriage are required. The woman must first take leave of her husband’s family and
ancestors in a mapamit ceremony and is reunited with her natal ancestral spirits by ritually
notifying them of her return (matur uning).
For Bali’s majority Hindu Balinese, this administrative bifurcation maps directly onto
concepts of sekala (the practical, material world) and niskala (the invisible world, the
domain of deities, ancestors and spiritual matters). It is difficult to encapsulate the
power and importance of the niskala, but it was, and remains, crucial to personal wellbeing and community life. Niskala concerns determine individual actions and decisionmaking and adat concerns therefore impinge directly on the lives of Balinese janda.
Failure to attend to the niskala dimension or to perform these rituals at marriage and
divorce leave the woman in spiritual limbo with no place to worship her ancestors so
central to Hindu-Balinese religion and no home from which the final rites of cremation
and return to the ancestors can be carried out.

Return to the natal family − mulih deha
Under Balinese adat law, widows are expected to remain living within the husband’s home
or family compound and thus they and any children of the marriage remain part of his
ancestral group until the end of their lives and cremation ceremonies. In a practical
sense, such living arrangements were, and are, sometimes impossible and pragmatic cultural solutions needed to be found. This solution is provided by the longstanding adat
institution of returning to the natal family, or mulih deha, literally to return to the
status of a daughter. This practice, which is attested in the traditional law codes (Creese
2008; 2016), continues to provide a core social mechanism for janda in contemporary
Bali and is, in fact, central to the capacity of individual janda to rebuild their lives.
In his study of divorced women in a small north Bali village noted above, Margi (2007)
provides strong evidence for the effectiveness of the institution of mulih deha. The 19 participants in his study were all young divorcees who had successfully renegotiated a position
of respect and status within their natal families. There were many reasons for divorce,

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD

109

ranging from their husbands’ drunkenness, gambling and jealousy or failure to provide for
them, to the women’s own health problems, including often their refusal to accept a cowife (mamadu) or failure to have children (Margi 2007: 131). Their decision was not
without considerable personal sacrifice since those who had children, the majority of
the participants, had no legal guardianship over them and were no longer directly involved
in raising them. They, nevertheless, took comfort in their success and well-being. They
reported initial feelings of sadness, emptiness and hopelessness for the future (Margi
2007: 133). After divorce, the women supported themselves, and often their relatives
and children, through their labour, working in the fields, raising livestock, running
small warung (roadside stalls) and sewing. Their acceptance into their natal families
also led to their reintegration as members of those family groups into the communal
life of the banjar. For the families too, there were strong motivations for acceptance
including averting the shame of having their daughters become homeless or destitute,
but also unwavering affection for their children. As one of Margi’s informants commented
(2007: 135): ‘there is no such thing as an ex-family member’ (sing ada laad nyame), or as
one father remarked somewhat poignantly: ‘I did not give away my daughter [at marriage],
I only gave away the love she had for her husband’ (tiang nenten mekidiang pianak, sakewanten titiang mekidiang tresnan ipun). Once that love was rejected, it was only natural
for his daughter to return.
The women in Margi’s study identified various all too familiar forms of stigma levelled
at them including charges of sexual promiscuity or availability, enticing men, barrenness,
disrespect to their husbands and failure to keep their families together. They sought to
overcome or avert stigma through hard work and exemplary behaviour so that no
charges of improper conduct could be levelled at them (Margi 2007: 137–9). These
women, although remaining emotionally vulnerable, had achieved some measure of satisfaction in their post-divorce lives and had negotiated an acceptable place and status in
community life. All these women were uneducated and had not moved away from the
village in which they were born, but their circumstances and challenges have more
general applicability. We turn now to our case studies to explore the different paths by
which three women have balanced the sekala and niskala, the material and the spiritual
dimensions of becoming and being janda in Bali.

Case studies
Musti’s story
Musti, now aged 64, is a commoner Balinese who was born and still lives in her home
village, west of Denpasar. In 1967, when she was 17 years old, she married Made, a
man from the same village. In the 1960s it was not uncommon in her village to marry
at a relatively young age. The couple had two children, a son who was born in 1968
and a daughter who was born in 1970. Made died in 1979, when Musti was 29 years of age.
Musti described the early years of their marriage as a time of hardship, with insufficient
income to meet the family’s daily needs. Although their village was located only about four
kilometres west of the city centre of Denpasar, up until the 1970s it was still a rural area
with only one access road to the city centre. Agriculture and associated industries were the
main sources of income in this village. Most people worked as farmers, some worked in
town. Musti’s husband worked at an abattoir in Denpasar for a few hours each

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

110

I N. D. PUTRA AND H. CREESE

morning and Musti worked as a casual labourer for a rice hulling factory delivering sacks
of rice from the factory to shops or households by bicycle.
Three years after they were married, Musti opened a small warung to sell food, rice and
beef soup (nasi soto). Made was able to obtain the meat from the abattoir where he worked
at a special discount price. Musti’s warung business became successful in a relatively short
time, but her husband left his job at the butchery to become a balian (a traditional healer).
He quickly developed a reputation as a skilled healer and was able to cure a number of sick
people who came to him to seek help. Soon after becoming a balian, Made collapsed suddenly one day. Delays in getting transport to take him to the hospital for emergency treatment meant he could not be saved. Balian work between the sekala and niskala domains,
and local rumour attributed his death to the supernatural intervention of enemies of his
former patients.
Following Made’s death, Musti accepted her lot as a widow within traditional Balinese
society. She remained living with her children in her late husband’s family compound and
continued to run her warung to support herself and her two young children. At 29 years of
age, she was still young and attractive and a number of men started to approach her for
sexual favours, including two of her brothers-in-law. The first of these men was Wayan,
the elder brother of her late husband. He was the most senior and most well-to-do
member of her husband’s extended family and therefore exercised considerable influence
within the family. He accepted the responsibility of caring for Musti and her children,
including sending them to school, thus fulfilling his adat obligations to his late brother’s
family. According to Musti, Wayan tried to persuade her to have an affair with him, but
she refused. At about the same time, Musti said, she was approached by another of her
brothers-in-law, Nyoman, the husband of her elder sister, Sangri. Musti was more
attracted to Nyoman than Wayan. She closed down her warung and started to work in
Nyoman and Sangri’s rice hulling factory. Musti’s task was to collect and deliver rice
for the factory. In the course of her work, Nyoman often accompanied her and
this enforced proximity made their relationship grow stronger. As a consequence,
Musti’s relationship with her son and her brother-in-law, Wayan, became increasingly
strained.
To distance herself from Wayan’s attentions, Musti returned to her natal home located
just half a kilometre away in the same village. Her brother-in-law and father-in law disapproved of her return to her natal home in violation of her obligation as a widow to
remain in her late husband’s home. Her children remained in their father’s compound,
but she maintained contact with them and contributed to their support. After two years
as a widow, and as her relationship with Nyoman developed, Musti agreed to enter into
a polygamous marriage with Nyoman for which the permission of his first wife, Sangri,
was needed. In spite of her initial resistance, Sangri finally consented to having Musti
as a co-wife, motivated by a mixture of sisterly concern and face-saving: firstly, she
wanted to help her sister who, since leaving her husband’s family, had no clear status in
village religious and community life and, secondly, she wanted to stop unpleasant community gossip and condemnation of the couple living together outside marriage. Musti’s marriage to Nyoman lasted less than six months, largely because of Sangri’s unhappiness and
dissatisfaction with their co-wife arrangement. Constant arguments made living together
as a threesome impossible and Musti once again returned to live in her parents’ house
(mulih deha).

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD

111

Musti turned her energy and attention to her trading activities. After working for some
time for other local business women, she set up her own business travelling around Bali
and Java buying rice, which she then sold to local traders. The business generated sufficient
profit for her to buy her own truck and hire a driver, Ketut, who had previously worked in
her sister’s family business. Ketut was married and lived in west Bali. On their journeys to
Java to buy rice, he took Musti to stay in his house. Musti began a relationship with Ketut.
Initially, Ketut’s wife, Ngarti, was upset, but as she was dependent on the support and
money her husband earned working for Musti, she was powerless to end the relationship.
Moreover, Musti provided them with money to renovate their house and provided Ngarti
with capital to open a small warung. She also paid their children’s school fees. Although
they lived as a couple, Musti refused to repeat the mistake of becoming a co-wife. Her de
facto relationship with Ketut continued and lasted for more than 20 years. She said that
sometimes people commented negatively on her lifestyle, but she ignored them and
stated that she was the one to determine her own needs and take responsibility for her life.
Throughout the years she lived with Ketut, Musti maintained her relationship with her
children and met her responsibilities to support them. As adults and married themselves,
they gradually came to accept their mother’s life choices and her son invited her to return
to the family compound. Musti agreed to leave Ketut and return provided her late husband’s family would accept her unconditionally. Adat rituals were performed in order
for Musti to be presented again to her late husband’s ancestors and taken back into the
kin group. The ritual served as a symbolic apology for any unacceptable past actions
and allowed her spiritual reintegration into the family. Musti now lives with her son,
daughter-in-law and grandchildren within her first husband’s family compound. She
has helped her son to develop a successful small business but no longer runs her own
business.
Commentary 1
In many ways, Musti’s life trajectory fits the janda stereotype for her generation characterised by early marriage, early widowhood, loss of status and return to the natal home,
quick remarriage and rapid divorce. Nevertheless, largely through her own efforts, she
was able to achieve economic independence and personal autonomy, in spite of her background as a commoner Balinese (jaba) from a semi-rural and poor village with little education. Thrown back on her own resources and through her commitment to hard work,
Musti succeeded in establishing and successfully running her business which grew from
a small roadside stall to a larger scale enterprise.
At the time of her first husband Made’s death, Musti faced an unhappy future. Under
adat law, she was required to remain in her husband’s family and remarriage required
their permission. Historically a close male relative of the deceased was viewed as the
ideal partner to avoid disputes over inheritance and preserve the patriline but Wayan,
her late husband’s brother, was not proposing marriage. His sexual predation, and
Musti’s unwillingness to enter a relationship with him, disrupted the normal adat
pattern of widowhood, forcing Musti to leave her children and return to her natal
home. For Musti, as for the rural divorcees described by Margi (2007), the natal family
and personal relationships within them provided the necessary support at this time of personal crisis. At that time, and again following her divorce from Nyoman, her natal family
and community provided a refuge. Her sister Sangri’s willingness to accept Musti as a

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

112

I N. D. PUTRA AND H. CREESE

co-wife is an example of the centrality of family support, even if their co-habitation rapidly
proved to be unsustainable.
There are hints of stigmatisation or at least community disapproval about her life-style
choices, but Musti herself dismissed these factors as unimportant. It was largely Sangri’s
reaction to neighbourhood gossip that had precipitated her marriage to Nyoman in the
first place. She was comfortable with her relationships with men outside marriage, including her long term de facto relationship with Ketut. After her divorce, Musti moved away to
a different part of the island, a common strategy to avoid stigma (see Mahy et al. 2016)
which may have mitigated any negative community comment.
Musti eventually forged a highly successful career away from her community, while
preserving her children’s ties to their ancestral patriline through their continued residence
with their father’s family, but her early experiences reveal significant structural disadvantage because of her uncertain status within the adat community. Although Nyoman and
Musti’s union had been formalised with a small traditional masakapan ritual to mark their
marriage religiously and symbolically and to make it socially acceptable in adat terms,
Musti felt some regret that the complete set of rituals that mark a new marriage had
not been performed. From an adat perspective there was some question about the validity
of her marriage to Nyoman because, as a widow, she ought to have remained in her late
husband’s family. In addition, administratively, she had no formal certification to legalise
her marriage and subsequent divorce.
In contemporary Bali, as we have noted above, marriages and divorces must be legalised
and ratified both administratively in accordance with the national Marriage Law and
under adat law. The two processes are complementary: failure to undertake the adat processes can lead to alienation and community rejection while neglect of administrative procedures can result in lack of access to essential administrative services. Divorce, however, is
a costly business, and in poor, rural village communities, such as those described by Jennaway (2002) and Margi (2007), where everyone is aware of everyone else’s personal circumstances, the final administrative step of civil registration of marriage and
particularly of divorce can simply be overlooked.
Administrative lapses surrounding formal registration and certificates of this kind, were
even more common 35 years ago and, for Musti, had later real world consequences.
Musti’s status as a single woman, who had been both widowed and divorced, became a
major issue when she tried to buy her own truck on an instalment plan and was asked
to produce the identity card (KTP, kartu tanda penduduk) required of all Indonesian citizens. She had not needed one previously, and Musti now found it difficult to obtain one
because of her ambiguous marital status. Her first marriage meant that she belonged to her
first husband’s banjar (ward community), but her membership was no longer recognised
because she did not reside there and had married someone from another banjar. The ward
community of her second husband, Nyoman, did not recognise her because their marriage
and divorce had not been legalised. The head of her parents’ ward community also refused
to issue her with the necessary paperwork to apply for an identity card because she had not
registered there at all. Ultimately, Musti was able to buy her truck through her brother’s
personal connections with the head of the ward whom he persuaded to issue a temporary
KTP to his sister. Nevertheless, these status issues highlight the vital nature of the appropriate attention to the adat and administrative processes surrounding marriage and
divorce.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD

113

Musti’s success hinged on her business acumen and her capacity to generate significant
economic capital to support herself. The combination of financial means and the willingness
to accept personal responsibility for her actions allowed her to gratify her own needs and
desires, including a 20-year de facto relationship with Ketut. Throughout this time she not
only met her responsibilities towards her original family but also supported her de facto family.
The final chapter in Musti’s life is an interesting one. While she arguably left her village
with low levels of social and cultural capital after her divorce from Nyoman, in her later
years she has been able to make use of her accumulated economic capital to return to her
natal village and restore her symbolic capital. Her savings have allowed her to retire from
active work and now provide her with the time for leisure and rest. Like the Muslim janda
from West Java who participate in pengajian religious gatherings discussed in Parker et al
(2016), Musti has employed the strategy of performing piety as a way of gaining respectability and distancing herself from her janda past. Not only has she been reintegrated into
her first husband’s kin group but she has also become a respected member of her community who has immersed herself in the study of moral and religious values. She participates
in a textual singing group (pesantian), and regularly joins interactive pesantian programmes on radio and television (Putra and Creese 2012). She has undertaken pilgrimages
to temples both in and outside Bali and assisted other members of her radio singing community who are less well off to participate in these excursions. She regularly performs
voluntary work (ngayah) in her village by singing with her group in temple festivals
and other social and religious events. Her life has come full circle and she has returned
to a valued place in her community of origin, back with her late husband’s family
under the protection of her son.
Tutik’s story
Tutik was born in 1946 into an educated middle-class family in a town in west Bali, one of
seven siblings. Her father, a primary school teacher, was Balinese, while her mother was a
Javanese Muslim and ran a small warung selling light meals, crackers, and fruit salad.
Apart from her father’s income as a primary school teacher, her parents also earned
money by renting out spare rooms in their compound, which was located on the main
road between Denpasar and Gilimanuk, the harbour connecting Bali and East Java.
After she graduated from junior high school, her parents wanted to send Tutik to Singaraja, north Bali, to continue her studies at a senior high school there. Being a teacher, her
father not only understood the importance of education but had sufficient income to
support his children’s education. In 1962, at the age of 16, just as Tutik was preparing
to go to Singaraja to continue her studies, she eloped with an upper caste man, Agung
Bawa, and married him, moving into his family compound in the palace (puri) where
the family upheld adat traditions. The couple had two daughters. Agung Bawa’s family
had belonged to the Balinese ruling elite in the pre-colonial period and had maintained
their social and political status and power throughout the colonial and early independence
periods. Tutik’s hypergamous union to an upper caste man raised her caste status and she
was given the new honorific high caste title of Biang, by which her natal family now had to
address her. Her father and immediate family members were very upset about her marriage but were unable to prevent it because of the symbolic power such high caste families
exercised within the community.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

114

I N. D. PUTRA AND H. CREESE

Tutik’s husband, Agung Bawa, and prominent members of his extended family were
heavily involved in post-independence period politics and aligned with left-wing factions.
During the period of chaos after the alleged communist coup in 1965, a number of family
members, including Agung Bawa, were captured and killed, the family puri was destroyed
and the extended family virtually annihilated. Tutik thus became a janda PKI – that is, the
wife of a suspected Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) activist or sympathiser (see
Pohlman 2016, this issue). Rather than risk potential threats of personal and sexual violence commonly experienced by women suspected of communist sympathies or connections during this period, Tutik returned to her natal home where her parents, who
belonged to the nationalist wing, might afford her some protection. She took her eldest
daughter with her, while the other daughter was raised by her husband’s sister who had
married a Christian and had then converted to Christianity.
Although her family had some means, Tutik needed to work to support herself and
provide for her two daughters. Initially, she helped her mother to run her small warung
and her father to manage the renting out of the extra rooms in their compound. As a beautiful, young widow, her warung attracted many people especially men wishing to seduce
her. When her father transformed the front section of their family house into a hotel,
he appointed Tutik as manager of the hotel; the small warung became a restaurant.
There were few hotels in the town until the early 1980s, therefore business people and
government officers who came to the region frequently stayed there, reportedly lured by
Tutik’s sexual availability. The success of the business allowed her to accumulate considerable capital. She became active in professional organisations such as the local branch of the
Indonesian Business Women’s Union (Ikatan Wanita Pengusaha Indonesia) and developed wide social and professional networks. In spite of her successful business which provided her with a good income, it was rumoured that Tutik supplemented her income
regularly by sleeping with the guests at her hotel. In the mid 1970s, the main road that
links Denpasar and Gilimanuk Harbour underwent a major reconstruction project. The
field-manager of the project, a man from the Philippines, became a long term resident
of Tutik’s hotel. They began a love affair and Tutik often spent time with him travelling
by car to project sites in the town and surrounding villages. On two or three occasions,
men offered marriage but these polygamous marriages failed to take place because of
objections from the men’s current wives and children. As a face-saving gesture for what
she must have seen as a personal ‘failure’ to remarry, Tutik simply informed her relatives
that her deceased husband’s spirit refused to permit it.
In 1982, Anak Agung Adi Perdana, a high caste man from Bangli who held a senior
position in the provincial governor’s office began a relationship with her. When Tutik
became pregnant by him, Adi Perdana refused to marry her because he was already
married to a Javanese woman, and also because he was not prepared to accept that he
was the only man who might have been the father of the child. Tutik’s father then mobilised his political networks and connections to report Adi Perdana to his superior, who
forced him to consent to the marriage. The marriage took place when Tutik was five
months pregnant. Adi Perdana did not attend the wedding ceremony and Tutik was
married symbolically to his kris, a pre-colonial prerogative of the high caste ruling elite
(Pitana 1997: 73; 103). Because Tutik’s family had coerced him into marrying her to
ensure the baby would be born legitimately, the marriage was a sham and lasted only a
few weeks. Tutik quickly filed for divorce. As soon as it was granted, Tutik took leave

INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD

115

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

of her husband’s kin group with a mapamit ritual and returned to her natal home as a
single woman again (mulih deha). Four months later, Tutik gave birth to a baby boy,
who was given the upper caste titles of Anak Agung. Although Tutik looked after the
baby and he remained with her, he was accepted as the son of Adi Perdana by his extended
family. All the necessary life cycle rituals, such as the tooth filing ceremony and wedding
rituals, were performed in his father’s puri. Tutik returned to her former life. She remained
single, but as she grew older, her hotel and restaurant business became less successful
because of increased competition but, so it was reported, also perhaps because her
sexual attractiveness had diminished. She died of cancer in 2002.
Commentary 2
A number of common threads run through the stories of Tutik and Musti. The two
women were generational peers, born just five years apart; both married young, were
widowed in the early years of their marriage, married again but were soon divorced and
both then chose not to remarry. Having taken the decision to forge their own futures,
they both pursued their individual needs and surmounted a number of socio-cultural
obstacles in different ways. Nevertheless, both were able to muster substantial economic
resources that allowed them not only to pursue personal gratification but also to
support their children and families. Although they had much in common, the individual
experiences of Musti and Tutik provide some significant points of contrast. Following her
divorce, Musti entered a long term relationship that continued for 20 years; Tutik, by
choice or necessity, had multiple sexual partners. Musti’s origins were in a semi-rural
village environment but Tutik was an urban Balinese from an educated family with
greater cultural capital. Musti remained within her own caste group and avoided stigma
by moving away from the confines of a closed village environment. Tutik’s journey,
however, involved elements of politics, caste differences and changes in status and the
stigma of sexual availability and promiscuity.
When Tutik’s marriage to her first husband was brought to an abrupt end by the anticommunist violence that swept through Indonesia in 1965–1966, she left the puri and
returned to her natal family. She took her eldest daughter with her, while her younger
daughter was raised by her husband’s sister in a Christian environment. The breakup of
the family is likely to have been spearheaded as much by pragmatic as adat considerations,
since there were so few surviving male members of her husband’s family to concern themselves with the fate of his widow and her daughters. Although both daughters lived outside
their father’s family, they retained their high caste status and titles and, for adat purposes
including lifecycle rituals, they remained part of their high caste kin group. Several years
later, the second daughter suffered a serious illness that the family attributed to alienation
from her family and Balinese Hindu heritage. Tutik then persuaded her to come and live
with her once again.
Her husband’s death and the strong leftist political presence of the family locally left
Tutik vulnerable to the violence perpetrated against women, including Balinese women,
during the 1965-1966 crackdown (Dwyer 2004; Pohlman 2016). Tutik escaped this fate
by taking the adat route of mulih deha and returning to the protection of her nationalist-leaning natal family. Tutik, a woman of commoner origins, married up twice to
upper caste men, the first time for love, the second time from necessity. When Tutik
married Agung Bawa in 1962, her family was powerless to stop it. By the time of her

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 15:36 27 January 2016

116

I N. D. PUTRA AND H. CREESE

second marriage to Adi Perdana 20 years later in 1982, the ascribed status of upper caste
descent had crumbled before the authority of the acquired status that had been made possible for commoner Balinese like Tutik’s father through education and success within the
civil bureaucracy. Through her first marriage to a high caste man, when she joined her
husband’s kin group, Tutik acquired new status and, despite her family’s objections, followed her heart. The second time, her father was able to mobilise his political connections
to enforce her shotgun wedding to the high caste Adi Perdana in order to legitimise the
child born to Tutik. Her marriages thus illustrate significant shifts in symbolic capital
within Balinese adat society across the New Order period.
Tutik had enough disposable income from her hotel business to meet not just her own
needs but also to provide for members of her extended family. She was well respected by
members of her family and relatives who recalled her generosity, for example, in taking
several of them on all-expenses paid tours of Bali and to Jakarta. Her economic capital
was therefore able to stave off any loss of social and cultural capital that disapproval of
her life-choices might have generated. At the same time, Tutik’s story also throws into
relief the enduring nature of the stigmatisation of single women who seek or dare to
pursue sexual relationships outside marriage, a stigma that is able to live on even after
the person dies. Shades of disapproval of Tutik and her lifestyle appeared in a series of
interviews with her family members. According to family gossip a propensity for promiscuity was intergenerational and hardly surprising: her father had been a womaniser and
had a daughter out of wedlock, while one of her daughters was also regarded as promiscuous and had run off with a half Javanese-Balinese man by whom she had a son. One family
member, a doctor, reported that Tutik’s death from cervical cancer in 2002 at the age of 56
was directly related to her immoral behaviour and sexual activity. It is important to
remember in this context, however, that Tutik does not speak for herself but instead
her life-story has been related by extended family members. Nor is it possible to know
if she felt the pain of stigma but made her own choices regardless. Unlike Musti, Tutik
did not have the opportunity to renegotiate her status in the end stages of life or to reinvest her economic capital in other forms of redemptive symbolic capital.
Oki’s story
Oki was born in 1969 into a high caste brahmana family from Denpasar where she grew up.
In 1997, when she was 28 years old, Oki married Tino, a Christian born in Jakarta whom she
had met when he moved to Bali in 1994 to take up a position in the same international airline
company in which she was working. Soon after their engagement, Oki resigned from the
company and began working instead for another international airline based in Denpasar.
Their employment provided the family with a substantial combined income. They were
able to buy a piece of land in Gianyar and a house in Jakarta. The couple had two sons.
In order for Oki to continue to be actively engaged in her Balinese culture and religion,
Tino became a Hindu and was embedded in Balinese culture and society through a somewhat atypical nyentana marriage arrang