Today the travel and tourism industry is amongst the world’s largest industries, and the Asia-Pacific region is the world’s fastest growing tourist destination. Tourism as an ‘economic engine’ has become an alternative source for growth, contributing substantially to developing economies in the global south. It is also a labour-intensive industry, which in Bali has been encouraged and justified for its potential to increase employment opportunities and thus develop the island economy. Bali’s rapid economic growth since the mid-1980s is mainly the result of mass-tourism.

In Bali, a small island with a population of about 3.9 million, tourism accounts for about half the economy and employs more than half of the workforce. Labor migrants account for about ten percent of the population, and about two and a half million tourists from all over the world visit the island every year. The tourism and service sector is a composite industry involving transport, accommodation, catering, entertainment, natural resources as well as other facilities and services like shopping malls, golf courses, parks, etc.

Tourism began in Bali with the Dutch colonization of the island in 1908, but it was during the New Order period of President Suharto (1966-1998) that it really developed. Bali was viewed by Dutch orientalists as a ‘Living Museum’ of the Hindu-Javanese civilization that had been swept away from Java by the coming of Islam, a view which informed the colonial policy of the preservation of this cultural heritage (Balisering).

The island of Bali has been conceived ever since as ‘the Island of the Gods’ and the ‘Paradise Island’. However, where culture is ‘heritage’ to be preserved, it is also a major capital to exploit for profit.2 While the Balinese people try to make a livelihood by turning cultural practices into commodities for tourists, these practices might in the end become indigenized as ‘tradition’ and ‘authentic culture’ and form the basis for asserting a new cultural identity and new cultural practices. When local communities develop as a result of tourism, one will see traditions, culture and the past continuously reinvented in order to uphold the image created through the visitor’s gaze; simultaneously, material culture, people and places undergo commodification for the purpose of the global market.