Books by James A. Boon

Exploring links between ritual and reading, focusing on commentaries about the seclusion of menstruating women in Native American culture, trance dances in Bali, and circumcision (or lack of it) in contrasting religions, this work considers the ironies of "first-person ethnography" by telling stories from the author's own fieldwork.

Professor Boon places our current understanding of Bali within the context of historical views of Balinese life and religion, beginning with the initial Dutch contacts after 1597. Based on field work in Indonesia as well as historical research, this book is the first thorough study of Balinese social and cultural dynamics.

In this book, James A. Boon investigates the history, dialectics and practice of the symbolic analysis of cultural diversity. His aim is to formulate a general comparative approach to the study of symbolic processes, integrating the major different theories about symbolic forms that have been developed by other writers.