From Sacred Practice to Tourist Experience: Daoist Standpoint on Ritual Authenticity and Balinese Purification Tourism

Abstract

Balinese purification tourism should ideally preserve the sacred meaning, ritual authority, ecological harmony, and community control of melukat, while a Daoist standpoint offers a comparative framework for understanding water, purification, balance, and ritual authenticity as expressions of cosmological harmony. However, Melukat at Taman Mumbul has been transformed into a tourism experience in which sacred symbols, ritual knowledge, and holy water are negotiated with visitor access. This study examines how Balinese people negotiate this transformation and decipher its implications through a Daoist lens. Employing a qualitative case-study design with a cultural studies approach, data were collected through field observation, interviews and document analysis. The principal finding demonstrates that the transformation of melukat into a tourism experience does not necessarily eliminate its ritual authenticity, because local communities retain control over sacred meanings, ritual procedures, visitor access, and environmental boundaries, thereby negotiating commercial benefits while preserving cosmological harmony and community authority. The study concludes that Balinese purification tourism can remain ritually authentic and ecologically harmonious when customary communities retain authority over sacred meanings, ritual procedures, spatial boundaries, and visitor conduct, showing that tourism transformation need not destroy spiritual integrity when it is governed by balance, restraint, and community legitimacy. This study contributes to Daoist and sacred-tourism scholarship by demonstrating, through the Balinese case of melukat, that ritual commodification is not inevitably equivalent to desacralisation, because community-based authority, customary regulation, ecological restraint, and the cosmological meaning of water can mediate tourism transformation while preserving ritual authenticity and spiritual legitimacy.