The social landscape of highland Bali is patterned by regional networks of ritual alliance among groups of villages. Such networks are locally referred to asbanua,or “ritual domains.” How these regional associations are conceptualized and maintained, and how they generate a sense of shared identity among the mountain people and set the stage for a regional status economy will be explored in the following chapters. The study of regional social interaction among the Bali Aga leads to a magical world where human beings, ancestors, spirits, and gods share a sacred landscape and timescape, brought to life in an intricate...

The majority of villages in the mountain district of Kintamani (Bangli) and some further communities in the northern coastal district of Tejakula (Buleleng) take responsibility for the ritual and physical maintenance of a regional temple of great antiquity. This sacred location is colloquially referred to as Pura Pucak Penulisan, “the temple on the summit of Mt. Penulisan” (see Figure 2).

The temple complex is located on a peak that forms the northern part in a wide circular wall of mountains. This enormous crater rim is all that remains of the larger, primordial Mt. Batur that collapsed in the distant geological...

Pura Pucak Penulisan is a popular place of worship among all Balinese Hindus. Pilgrims from the most distant corners of the island come here almost every day of the year, now that an age of motorized transport has made this temple easily accessible. But Pura Penulisan has a far deeper and more personal significance to the members of its principal congregation. Tens of thousands of people regard this sanctuary as the emblem of their sacred origin and the hub of their social and ritual world. This chapter will explore who these people are, what obligations they must meet, and why...

By far the most graphic and impressive display of Pura Pucak Penulisan’s role as the regional ritual center of a domain is the celebration of up to eleven days that marks its annual festival. This festival is the most complex synchronized activity involving the entiregebog domasand wider membership of the domain. It is a ritual performance in celebration of the domain’s sacred unity. It is also a stage for the enactment of internal distinctions of status in orientation to a common origin.

The symbolism and procedures of ritual in Bali Aga villages and ancestral origin houses warrant an...

Even though thebanuaof the ancient temple of Penulisan is exemplary, outstanding in terms of both its size and its regional significance, it is only through a wider comparison among several different domains that the general conceptual and organizational features ofbanuacan be established. With this chapter I begin a comparative exploration of several ritual domains beyond Penulisan, starting with its immediate neighbors. The study of other domains reveals that their participants are concerned not merely with relations within their ownbanua, but with a larger web of social and ritual relationships spanning the highlands of Bali and...

The institution of thebanuais of significance well beyond the geographical sphere of Pura Pucak Penulisan’s direct or indirect influence. Several other domains will be described in this chapter in brief comparative sketches. These case studies are designed to reveal similarities and variations in the conceptual and ritual organization of banua without exploring the intricacies of social processes in each individual domain. I aim to provide a ritual map of the highlands rather than a detailed account, even of such local complexities as have already been studied, and there is much room for further research in this area.

The...

Exploring the lifeworld of the Mountain Balinese from the perspective of their regional alliances within ritual domains (banua) has relegated to the background the more immediate community and family settings that form the stage for many of their mundane and ritual activities. This chapter is concerned first with the internal social organization of Bali Aga communities, so far referred to by the gloss “village” or by the popular local term of Sanskrit origin “desa” (village or place).Desa, in turn, include even smaller and denser spheres of social interaction, among kin and affines, defined by their common worship at private...

Processes of mutual representation within the regional status economy of Bali Aga society are based on voluntary association, and status differentiating relationships are perpetually negotiated in the terms of an inherently process-oriented idiom of fluid temporal distinctions in an order of precedence. Moving beyond the highlands, to the larger world in which the Bali Aga engage in a process of mutual representation with more powerful others, this chapter and the following ones explore their place within Balinese society and discourses, and in the Western anthropological literature about this island. This exploration leads back, inevitably, to problems of representation in anthropology...

Moving beyond the ethnography of highland Bali, I now explore how Bali Aga people and their culture are situated in the representational landscape of Bali as a whole. Insofar as the Bali Aga have been portrayed with a negative bias by other, more powerful Balinese people, I assume that there is a moral responsibility to amplify their counterdiscourses. At the same time, Balinese identities are the product of a historical and intersubjective process in which the Bali Aga have participated with an ambivalent attitude of competition as well as cooperation. In adopting this perspective, I aim to prevent a fetishization...

The situation of the Bali Aga within changing Balinese representations of their society is part of a contested and emergent knowledge system, drawing on a range of culturally specific metaphors of time and movement and, more recently, on a more “global” and Western-influenced vocabulary of modernity. But how do these local representational models compare and relate to Western portrayals of the Bali Aga, as reflected in an abundant and changing anthropological literature on Balinese society?

While the way Balinese conceptualize their own society has been influenced significantly by Western ideas over the last century, the reverse may also be the...

This final chapter asks what people generally and social scientists in particular can learn from the highland Balinese and from their approach to representation. We all have a practical interest in representational models insofar as they have a tangible effect on all of our lives, for better or worse, as models for living. Social scientists also have a theoretical interest in representational models, as they struggle to gain a general understanding of particular societies and of society in general. The Bali Aga, likewise, approach representation from these two inseparable perspectives as they negotiate practical conflicts among self-interested subjects and simultaneously...