Playing With Images: The Visualization of the Other in Hindu-Balinese Religion

In the context of a modern theory of images, the question has been raised how the discursive paradigm and the visual paradigm, or the linguistic turn and the visual turn, relate to each other in the social and cultural sciences. In other words, has the “culture as text” metaphor been replaced or only supplemented by the “culture as image” metaphor? Do the two metaphors exclude or complement each other (see also Bachmann-Medick 2006: 351)? This paper seek to answer these questions by drawing on ethnographic experiences from my research in Indonesia.