Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Chapter One Religion, Media, History -- Chapter Two The Past in the Present? A Tale of Bouquets and Bombsites -- Chapter Three Reframing the Problem: Mediating the Recent History of ‘The Balinese’ -- Chapter Four The Subject of Tolerance: Televising ‘The Teachings of Our Religion’ -- Chapter Five Assume the Position: Performative Style and the Voice of Authority -- Chapter Six Substantial Transmissions: Religion and the Idea of ‘The Old Javanese Text’ -- Chapter Seven Plus Ça Change . . . From Textual Fetish to Performative Accomplishment -- Chapter Eight A Dramatic Performance: Mpu Kuturan and the Three Sanctuaries -- Chapter Nine The Complexity of the Realm: Chasing a Traditional Tale -- Chapter Ten Concluding Remarks -- Works Cited -- Index -- Illustrations.

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Scholars of religion have always worked closely with media of one kind or another, from sacred books and archaic languages to cassette-sermons and the Internet. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the ways we actually use these and other media in the pursuit of historical inquiry. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted on the Indonesian island of Bali, this book offers a critique of the media-related assumptions underpinning fields as diverse in their subject matter and approach as the history of religions, British cultural studies and Old Javanese philology. Its central contention is that more nuanced attention to problems of media will have serious implications for how we think about the study of religions, past and present.