This conference aims to explore traditional uses of writing on the Indonesian island of Bali with a special emphasis on the power and efficacy attributed to Balinese script. Our approach will be at once interdisciplinary and comparative, bringing together regionalexperts working both in Bali and other parts of South and Southeast Asia. Scholars have long recognized a certain gap between modern western practices of philological interpretation and those of the Javano-Balinese textual tradition. We wish to ask what, if any, impact recognition of this gap should have on our conception of the text.

Of what relevance, for example, are the uses to which Balinese script has been put in the context of ceremonial rites? Does it matter that many of the manuscripts on which we work were, and often are, thought to be ‘alive’ by those who have produced and made use of them? What ideas of materiality, power and agency are at work in the production and preservation of palm-leaf manuscripts, inscribed amulets and other script-bearing ritual instruments? In asking these questions we are not simply interested in attending to material – such as palm leaves, copper plates and the like – as an inert substrate for the text and its script. Rather we aim to examine indigenous ideas of materiality with an eye to their implications for critical scholarship. It is in this latter connection that we are especially interested in comparison with uses of script and writing in India and Java, but also in mainland Southeast Asia.