Ambiguous bleeding: Purity and sacrifice in Bali

Menstrual beliefs and practices in Bali defy simple classification. Menstruation may be relegated to the dump, as when a woman had to undergo a rite on a street midden when her monthly period coincided with the ritual time for a purification ceremony. But menstruation is also viewed as conferring raja status, and women do exhibit agency in this supposedly passive process. Experiences of menstruation, furthermore, may vary according to caste status. (Bali, classifications of pollution, restriction, agency, ambiguity) ********** As many tourists to Bali can confirm from personal experience, menstrual taboos remain in effect there. At the entrance to temples, female tourists find that the taboos pertain to them, too, a fact they almost invariably experience as an affront to their sex. Visitors stop short with some incredulity at the signs in English that forthrightly prohibit entry to menstruating women. Although they have had surprisingly little to say on the issue of menstruation, the reaction of scholarly observers of Balinese culture has been similar. If mentioned at all, the complex of taboos and regulations surrounding it has tended to be viewed as somewhat of a jolting exception to otherwise relatively egalitarian gender relations (Covarrubias 1986). More recently, scholars have treated the issue of gender relations in Bali in more depth (Wikan 1990), but remain almost silent on the circumstances of the menstruating woman. Balinese women, meanwhile, generally adhere to certain menstrual taboos as a regular and accepted part of their lives. In 1998, in a noble house in eastern Bali, I observed a ceremony performed for a woman whose period coincided with a family temple purification marking the onset of preparatory sacred work for a major ancestral ritual. Reminding her that she must heed her elders, the woman's paternal aunt summoned her to the garbage heap outside the palace walls. Placed at the top of the heap, she was sprinkled with holy water in a brief rite performed by her aunt. At first glance, such a practice of sending the menstruating woman to the garbage heap--expressly, as the women envisioned it, because her condition belongs with the filth there--seems to resonate with conclusions such as Covarrubias's, that although in Bali "the woman is by no means the proverbial slave of Oriental countries ... once a month, during menstrual time, a wife's life is not a happy one" (Covarrubias 1986:156). There is no more graphic expression of menstruation as pollution than the image of the woman on the garbage. Other evidence, however, complicates any easy assumption that such practice necessarily reflects female oppression. This same woman stepped down from the garbage to talk at length about how the menstruating woman in Bali is said to become "like a raja." These positive and negative images of menstruation appear to coexist without contradiction to the Balinese actors involved. After introducing the complex of menstrual taboos found in Bali, this article clarifies the classification of menstrual pollution that emerges from contemporary commentary of variously positioned men and women in the eastern part of the island. It revolves around cycles paralleling those of life and death and a view of women as both vulnerable and powerful. For example, taboos surrounding a woman's menstruation also open for her certain avenues of agency. But such power is hedged by the differences in experience between high- and low-caste women in Bali. While high-caste women are more likely to appeal to the raja image, being a woman in a princely household entails not only higher status but also a higher degree of constraint. Similarly, being treated like a raja might restrict as well as empower the menstruating woman. Even studies that otherwise take into account many complexities surrounding menstrual taboos and related practices, such as those compiled by Buckley and Gottlieb (1988), still tend to characterize societies as having either positive, negative, or neutral views of menstruation, or as having taboos that either limit or enhance the powers of women. …