Friday, June 22, 2007

New tourism brand invokes Bali of peace

(The Jakarta Post)

Following six months of intensive research, which included direct interviews with hundreds of Balinese residents and foreign visitors, the local government has finally unveiled its new tourism brand for the resort island.

The new brand is expected to unite the tourism industry under a single flag and battle cry in an effort to elevate the vital economic sector, which had been paralyzed by two terrorist attacks, environmental degradation and the locals' increasing resentment toward tourism development.


"We hope this brand will give us new energy in our struggle to recover the industry, which for decades has been the backbone of the island's economy," Bali Tourism Agency head Nurdjaya said.

The new brand -- comprising a logo, a tagline and a series of strategic recommendations -- centers around the vision of making Bali known as "The World's Place of Harmonious Peace".

Teguh Mahasari, the engine behind the so-called Bali Reborn team responsible for preparing the new tourism brand, said the vision was the key, recurring message conveyed by a large majority of the research participants.

"It genuinely reflects the true aspiration of the Balinese people as well as the visitors'. Harmony, balance, peace and spirituality are several major themes that kept appearing in our interviews with people from a wide spectrum of society," she said.

In the course of their research, the Bali Reborn team interviewed 900 Balinese individuals, from Hindu high priests to academic scholars, and from farmers to housewives in every regency of the island.

The results showed that over 50 percent believed "paradise" or "heaven" was the image that most correctly described Bali. This was followed by "balance" at 26.5 percent of respondents then by "harmony" at 21.9 percent. Curiously, "vacation" was only selected as the most suitable image by 16.5 percent of respondents.

Moreover, they also listed temple, culture, traditional customs and arts as the island's most precious heritage. A staggering 73.5 percent majority viewed the temple as the perfect icon to represent Bali.

Meanwhile, 37.3 percent of 327 foreign visitors to Bali recalled "Island of the Gods" as the island's most popular tagline. Only a minuscule 5.8 percent considered it to be Bali is My Life", the most recent tagline, as popular.

"The team analyzed and interpreted the findings and then came up with this new brand," Teguh said.

The brand concept was based on the ancient Balinese Hindu principle of Tri Hita Karana, the harmonious and balanced relationship between three primary elements: mankind, nature and God.

"That's the philosophy behind our triangular-shaped logo. The triangle perfectly captures the stable relationship between the three elements," Teguh said.

The spiritual nature of the brand is further reflected in the colors of the logo -- red, black and white, the colors respectively associated with the Balinese Hindu trinity of Brahma, Wisnu (Vishnu) and Siwa (Shiva).

The final touch was the tagline "Shanti, Shanti, Shanti", obviously taken from the daily Balinese Hindu prayer of Tri Sandhya. Literally meaning peace, shanti and its repetitive chant is a sacred invocation for a reign of peace in the three worlds -- the under, middle and upper.

"Frankly, we want this brand to inspire the Balinese as much as the foreign visitors. With the increasing internal conflicts among Balinese, the people of this island needs peace as much as any other in this world," Teguh stressed.

-- I Wayan Juniartha

Monday, June 11, 2007

Balinese Y-chromosome perspective on the peopling of Indonesia

Balinese Y-chromosome perspective on the peopling of Indonesia: genetic contributions from pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers, Austronesian farmers, and Indian traders.

(Tatiana M. Karafet, J.S. Lansing, Alan J. Redd, Svetlana Reznikova , Joseph C. Watkins, S.P.K. Surata, W.A. Arthawiguna, Laura Mayer, Michael Bamshad, Lynn B. Jorde and Michael F. Hammer. )

The island of Bali lies near the center of the southern chain of islands in the Indonesian archipelago, which served as a stepping-stone for early migrations of hunter-gatherers to Melanesia and Australia and for more recent migrations of Austronesian farmers from mainland Southeast Asia to the Pacific. Bali is the only Indonesian island with a population that currently practices the Hindu religion and preserves various other Indian cultural, linguistic, and artistic traditions (Lansing 1983). Here, we examine genetic variation on the Y chromosomes of 551 Balinese men to investigate the relative contributions of Austronesian farmers and pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers to the contemporary Balinese paternal gene pool and to test the hypothesis of recent paternal gene flow from the Indian subcontinent. Seventy-one Y-chromosome binary polymorphisms (single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs) and 10 Y-chromosome-linked short tandem repeats (STRs) were genotyped on a sample of 1,989 Y chromosomes from 20 populations representing Indonesia (including Bali), southern China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Near East, and Oceania. SNP genotyping revealed 22 Balinese lineages, 3 of which (O-M95, O-M119, and O-M122) account for nearly 83.7% of Balinese Y chromosomes. Phylogeographic analyses suggest that all three major Y-chromosome haplogroups migrated to Bali with the arrival of Austronesian speakers; however, STR diversity patterns associated with these haplogroups are complex and may be explained by multiple waves of Austronesian expansion to Indonesia by different routes. Approximately 2.2% of contemporary Balinese Y chromosomes (i.e., K-M9*, K-M230, and M lineages) may represent the pre-Neolithic component of the Indonesian paternal gene pool. In contrast, eight other haplogroups (e.g., within H, J, L, and R), making up approximately 12% of the Balinese paternal gene pool, appear to have migrated to Bali from India. These results indicate that the Austronesian expansion had a profound effect on the composition of the Balinese paternal gene pool and that cultural transmission from India to Bali was accompanied by substantial levels of gene flow.