Alan, i am not necessarily in disagreement with your theories here, but there are still a number of factors that i am unable to calculate due to my ignorance on the subject that i was hoping would be cleared up through my questioning, but have yet to be addressed.
Firstly i would need to know more about what was most common among court keris in Bali. I wouldn't think that the extra cost would be a big consideration among Balinese lords. How often are the very high-end Bali Keris likely to go pamorless on the gonjo? Certainly my collection is mostly lower and perhaps middle-class keris. All of my older Bali keris have pamorless gonjos, but do you or anyone know what a ballpark percentage of Balinese court keris were pamorless on the gonjo? Brekele has shown us that at least some Balinese keris had pamor on the gonjo, so if it were a matter of money, at least some Balinese felt it was worth the extra expense to have.
Again most of my old Javanese keris are lower to middle-class, yet with few exceptions they
all seem to have pamor on the gonjo. I understand that most of my Javanese keris are influenced by Islamic/Javanese culture and my Balinese by Hindu influence, but if i understand you correctly the theory of economics you put forth here is somewhat cross-cultural. So why then do we find, much more often, pamor on the gonjo of an old poor Javanese farmer's keris, but not on the gonjo of his Balinese counterpart? It doesn't seem likely that the Javanese farmer was in a better economic situation to afford it.
This is why i question economics as the origin for what appears to be a stylistic preference by the Balinese for a pamorless gonjo.
