Sacred Labor: State Extraction and the “Domestic Labor” of Balinese Culture

Tourism in Bali has become a destructive force that disturbs living harmony in the local context, in terms of Balinese people, culture, and nature, for capital accumulation. In contrast to this, Bali has the concept of "Tri Hita Karana," which views all beings as subjects for mutual respect. However, the state has been treating Bali’s cultural harmony as reproductive labor that exists behind them, naturalizing it as “domestic labor”. I want to highlight these tourism aspects and tendencies to create an ontological resistance that shapes Bali tourism's existence as an essential subject with complete agency. I argue that the concealment of domestic labor creates the atmosphere that produces and sustains the assumption of a global commodity, ‘paradise’. The recognition of living culture as economic value, in which culture exists as a primary source, is substantial in determining the value of socio-ecological religious existence in tourism.