Bali Revisited: Death, Rejuvenation, and the Tourist Cycle

Abstract

Since package tourism began on a small scale at the start of the 20th century, tourism and travel to Bali have gone through a series of overlapping and interlocking phases. By the 1930s the destruction of ‘authenticity’ and the process of transformation were already apparent to some. Tourism expanded and diversified. In the 1970s world travellers, and later ‘surfies’, contributed to the distinctiveness of Kuta, a way station on the Asian overland trail. Kuta grew, drew vibrant commerce, package tours, and a new youth scene, displacing world travellers to the periphery—the ‘interior’ or ‘up country’—in search of elusive authenticity. Tourism became introspective, as the gaze of mass tourists and chic tourists focused on hotels, resorts, and each other; international, as world consumer goods displaced local products; and youthful, with the emergence of specialised package holidays, centred on action and consumption. Resort cycles were grafted onto each other in an unwieldy social and geographical synthesis, as Bali, increasingly diverse yet inconspicuous, became ‘whatever you want it to be’.