Balinese

Much of the outside scholarly framing of Balinese religion, Agama Hindu Dharma, comes from work more concerned with kingship and ritual as political theatre than with cataloguing deities as such. Clifford Geertz, an American anthropologist, published Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali in 1980, arguing that pre-colonial Balinese kingship was organised less around practical administration than around the staging of elaborate ceremony intended to model a cosmic order in miniature, with the ruler positioned as an exemplary centre rather than as a conventional political head. Sanghyang Widhi Wasa, formalised in the twentieth century as Balinese Hinduism's supreme divinity partly in response to Indonesia's constitutional requirement that a recognised religion affirm one god, sits within this wider ceremonial and cosmological order alongside village and ancestral deities and the paired figures of Barong and Rangda enacted in ritual drama.

Geertz's theatre state argument has been influential well beyond Bali studies as a model for reading ritual and kingship together, and it has also been criticised for describing nineteenth century Balinese negara from source material weighted toward the island's own court chronicles, which had their own interest in presenting kingship as cosmologically central. The formal designation of Sanghyang Widhi Wasa as a single supreme god is itself a twentieth century development layered onto older, more locally organised village and temple devotion, a sequence this atlas records as attested rather than assuming the formal designation reflects how the tradition was always practised.