From its beginnings as a centre for international tourism in the early twentieth century, Bali has served in one way or another as a stage for the creation and re-imagination of performed identities, generally those of Westerners seeking exoticism (or seeking to become exotic themselves), and more recently including those from other parts of Asia as well. The idea of personal transformation has proven central to Bali's image in the world of international travel and tourism: early tourists and researchers went to Bali to encounter the exotic, the spiritual, or the primitive, and to discover in themselves something more authentic, or to mark themselves as different because they had found a supposed authenticity, and to a surprising degree, this still holds true. As MacCannell's early work shows, tourists are pilgrims in search of authenticity (MacCannell and Lippard 1999), and this is still the case in Bali. Writers including Adrian Vickers (1989), Uni Wikan (1990), Kathy Foley (1992) and many others (see, for example, Latrell 1999, 2000, 2008) have written about the elastic Balinese version of exoticism: from the French theatre critic Antonin Artaud (1976: ‘On the Balinese Theatre’ [1931]), to American writer and self-help guru Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love (2006), Bali has served as a sort of Rorschach test of what it means to be exotic, illuminating as much about the observer as it does about Bali.