What are the prospects for a universal theory of status? There is one major obstacle to all generalization attempts in the social sciences: the classes of phenomena they propose to exist and whose existence they seek to explain often show a very limited degree of cross-cultural validity. General theories of ‘status’ are no exception. The etymology of the word suggests something at a standstill, an image that is difficult to reconcile with the immense variability of status systems across different societies and in the same societies during different historical periods. Obviously, it is the most universal theories of status that also experience the greatest difficulty in accounting for the apparent lack of a universal status distribution pattern or a universal logical principle of status reckoning. However, it does not further the cause of social science simply to avoid the dilemma of generalization. Treating each individual status system as an utterly unique phenomenon is tacitly implying that it cannot be profitably compared to those of other societies. An explicit argument conceived in this spirit, however, would encounter the opposite problem: the status systems of widely separated societies in fact often show remarkable similarity.

This paper adopts an intermediate position. It is proposed that generalizations about status systems (and other social phenomena) across different societies are possible and profitable so long as we are able to offer a reasonable, explicit and testable explanation for the similarities that unite and the differences that distinguish them. A possible explanation for differences and similarities alike is to say that status or ‘symbolic capital’ is socially constructed by competing individual agents, but not randomly or at their complete liberty. Status is necessarily also constructed in a regulated or co-operative fashion, in accordance with culturally shared principles of classification, communication and social interaction. People who regularly interact thus tend to disagree and agree about one another’s status at the same time. In order to explain similarities in cultural principles of status reckoning and distribution across different societies we need not assume the existence of a hypothetical universal structure in the individual mind either. Status systems and the cultures to which they belong are historical and ‘fuzzy’ systems of communicative and strategic action rather than permanent and easily separable metaphysical entities. Not many societies are clearly bounded or isolated from their neighbours today, and few ever were. In addition, different societies with a common historical origin and cultural heritage — though they no longer form a single or tightly cohesive social universe today — may still have many principles of status reckoning and distribution in common.

Indonesian societies, and indeed societies in the Austronesian-speaking world, appear to be related in this way (Fox 1993; Bellwood, Fox and Tryon 1995; Fox and Sather 1996). On the basis of rich historical, linguistic and ethnographic evidence it is thus reasonable to propose that a single theory may suffice to explain many common features and variations in their different status systems. This paper explores how status is constructed and distributed in one of these societies; namely, among the central highland people of Bali.

My results from more than a decade of ethnographic research indicate that it may be profitable to reconsider Balinese society, and its symbolic economy, from the wider perspective of a comparative ethnology of Indonesian and Austronesian societies.^[1] Previous accounts of Hindu Balinese society have tended to stress its uniqueness in a predominantly Islamic Indonesia. These studies focused on the courtly culture of coastal Balinese polities whose rulers trace their origin to the Hindu Javanese kingdom of Majapahit. The more obviously ‘Austronesian’ heritage of the indigenous ‘Mountain Balinese’ or Bali Aga people had not been examined in sufficient depth. For the study of a Balinese status system this has meant that the importance of Indic elements (such as the concept of varna) could be overestimated and Austronesian elements ignored or discounted as an anomaly. Hindu Balinese society thus still tends to be attributed with a ‘hierarchical’ status structure in the Dumontian sense of the word (for example, Guermonprez 1990).

The analysis of their symbolic economies has been a perennial and contentious issue in the comparative ethnology of Austronesian societies. Two major approaches to the study of status in this region may be distinguished. One has been inspired by Louis Dumont’s theory of ‘hierarchy’, a presumably universal model of status relations in pre-modern societies based on his case study of the Indian ‘caste system’ (Dumont 1980, 1986). Concerns about the predictive validity and portability of his theory to societies other than India have prompted ethnographers working in Austronesian societies to develop an alternative. A new theory has been promoted by a number of researchers associated with the Comparative Austronesian Project at the Australian National University (Fox 1988, 1989; Graham 1991; Lewis 1988; McWilliam 1989; Reuter 1993; Vischer 1992; and others). The aim was to do justice to the rather different principles of status construction and distribution found to be characteristic of Austronesian societies. Their alternative theory of status relations revolves around the two key concepts of ‘precedence’ and ‘origin’. A consensus on the formal definition of these key concepts is beginning to take shape among the proponents of this approach, especially with the publication of this volume. Allow me briefly to define my particular usage of the two terms in this paper and in relation to my research in Bali before moving to a contrasting discussion of ‘precedence’ and ‘hierarchy’.

In the present case, the terms ‘precedence’ and ‘origin’ have approximate equivalents in the Balinese terms maluan (from malu, ‘earlier’, ‘preceding’) and kamulan (‘origin’, ‘beginning’). However, these and other expressions that emphasize the flow of time as the distinguishing feature of the ‘quotidian world’ (sekala, from kala, ‘time’) are not the most central terms in discussions about social status among the Bali Aga. Like many of their neighbours, they more often evoke an all-important order of time by narrative reference to a historical migration of people through space, or by a metaphorical comparison between social history and processes of organic growth (for example, kawitan, from wit, ‘tree [trunk]’; also means ‘origin’). In this paper, therefore, the terms ‘precedence’ and ‘origin’ are not merely translations of local terms but are used also as descriptive and analytical constructs which seek to unpack the meaning of key metaphors in the local culture.

A social order of precedence is herein defined as a system where the status or symbolic capital of a person or group is conceptualized by reference to a temporal sequence of culturally pertinent and recursive events, such as births, marriages, migrations, or the foundation of houses and settlements. The status of specific (classes of) persons is constituted upon such a temporal sequence by their association to one of its elements. In a temporal vision of the world, the ‘earlier’ element is distinguished from the one which ‘follows’ in the stream of time and life (a, b, c, …). This principle of division becomes value-laden because greater prominence is attributed to the preceding element and persons associated with it than to either immediate or more distant successors (a>b>c…). The valency and transitivity of the asymmetric relationships between the elements in an order of precedence thus rests upon a greater concern for the beginning of time; that is, for the ‘source’ or ‘origin’ of society and life in a sacred ancestral past.^[2] Where there are two distinct points of origin, two lines of precedence may be traced in parallel, each relating to a different domain of social life or different social groups within a local society.

The notion of origin is conceptually central to the construction of an order of precedence, but it does not posit an absolute value or truth. In the highlands of Bali, a person who occupies a position of proximity to a sacred origin point may enjoy a higher status than others, but life and history are continuous processes and thus the position of an individual always remains changeable. First, as new elements are added to a sequence, all earlier elements move relatively closer to the point of origin with respect to the sequence as a whole. Second, while the value-concept of origin posits the past as a sacred beginning, the historical past does not determine in any simple way how the past is actually viewed in the present. Origin is usually interpreted divergently within different and competing narrative histories, each of which may locate points of origin and even define the rules of reckoning precedence in different ways. Thirdly, people may actually agree that two (or more) points of origin (for example, indigenous and immigrant) are both equally relevant to complementary social status claims within different contexts. Finally, even when a single point of origin is accepted by all concerned, the value or origin naturally posits a counter value, attached to the opposite and emergent pole of the temporal sequence rather than to its beginning. The growing extremity in an event sequence is open to new opportunities, subject to contingency, and frequently associated with ‘the tip (of a plant)’, ‘fertility’, ‘the new’, ‘the foreign’ or ‘the powerful stranger’. This idea of life as a self-regenerating continuity thus imposes a general limit upon the value of origin, which represents the sacred source and unity of all life. In short, concepts of origin and precedence do not dictate current social relationships by reference to a fixed, incontestable and singular past. In Bali and beyond, precedence simply assumes temporal sequence as the basic principle of people’s vision and division of their society in relation to status reckoning. Given that the vision is essentially religious, Balinese are primarily concerned with the work of maintaining the sacred unity of society or of a particular group through its rituals and temples. This effort toward maintaining unity is in perpetual tension with the work of status competition, which is based on a process of division.

Bali’s position is at a theoretical cross road. The people of this island are close neighbours to eastern Indonesian societies, where precedence systems were first observed, and yet their society is also a bastion of Hindu religion and Indic culture, the Southasian variant of which provided the ethnographic case material which inspired the Dumontian model of ‘hierarchy’. It may therefore be profitable to reflect briefly on the relationship between precedence and hierarchy (see also Fox 1990, 1994a; Platenkamp 1990) from a Balinese perspective.

The image evoked by the word hierarchy, following its Greek etymology, is of a divine rule or government; a sacred order (from hieros: ‘holy, divine, sacred’ and arkhia: ‘rule, government’) led by a priest-leader (hierarkhes) or other human representative of divine authority. Hierarkhia thus insinuates a relationship between ‘the sacred’ and ‘(the order of) society’. Emile Durkheim later expounded upon this ancient intuition in his now classic sociology of religion. He argued that the source of the very notion of the sacred, and of transcendental or universal values associated with the sacred, lies in the individual participant’s experience of society as an objective and trans-individual reality. By arguing that the experience of the social transcends the boundaries of individual consciousness, Durkheim was moving firmly towards a sociology of knowledge. Social participation indeed calls for a cognitive process which Piaget later described as ‘decentring’, and it thus provides the supposedly self-enveloped Ego cogito of a Cartesian philosophy of consciousness with both an opportunity to transcend the limits of its own existence through communion with the whole and an opportunity to define itself as a separate part in relation to other parts. Durkheim’s basic insight is that a notion of the sacred arises, necessarily, from the self-transcending experience of sociality, rather than being the product of a philosophical or theological imagination. In addition, the social experience of a ‘participation mystique’ must also be recognized as an enactment of the basic fact of the psychic unity of humanity, and ultimately the unity of all life, which — in my view — is a natural and physiological rather than a social phenomenon.

Symbolic economies nevertheless depend on ‘social values’, that is, values posited upon a human proclivity to socialize and be socialized. Values based on social co-operation, following Durkheim, are inextricably linked to a notion of ‘the sacred’ (in the wider sociological and not necessarily theistic sense). Even the values stipulated in modern moral philosophies, though they avoid references to the sacred (in the narrower religious sense), tend to appeal to a universal notion such as ‘the common good’. They thus draw upon the same universal experiential ground of human sociality as their foundation. In this broadest sense, one could argue that society is by its very nature the experiential foundation of the sacred and of universal values. In short, society is a hierarkhia which reproduces itself by inculcating a specific value-orientation into the minds of its participants, against the penultimate background of the objective unity of life.

Cross-culturally, however, a universal ‘sacred’ experience of sociality may be interpreted in many specific and fundamentally different ways. The particular interpretation of ‘the sacred’ in Indonesian societies is reflected in the concept of origin and in an associated logic of precedence. Contemporary society is regarded as the product of a history of diversification. The contingencies of this diversification history and the contested nature of contemporary social orders are not denied. Rather, the enchanted vision of society as an undisturbed experience of sacred unity and harmonious collectivity is a vision projected into the past — the moment of origin. Unlike in the Western world, where the truly harmonious and sacred society has often been a utopian projection into the future, Indonesians have tended to focus on a collectively shared (and thus sacred) time of origin, the one root from which the many branches of society have grown.

It may be objected that the vision of the sacred for contemporary Indonesians is also prominently defined by one or another of the world’s great religious traditions, in the Balinese case by Hinduism. However, while they may be required to profess publicly to one of the constitutionally-recognized world religions, many Indonesians simultaneously maintain an underlying concern for origins, in keeping with concepts and practices predating the arrival of Hindu-Buddhism, Islam and Christianity.

A common form of ‘religious’ (agama) or ‘customary’ (adat) practice in Indonesia is the ‘worship’ or rather ‘acknowledgment’ of deified ancestors associated with particular social groups and simultaneously with particular localities; with temples, cemeteries and other landmarks in a sacred topography. The names of these ancestors or places (or both) are often recorded in ‘myths’ or historical narratives that describe the creation of the world and the origin of society. The role of ancestry and topography in defining ‘sacred origins’ shall be discussed in detail later, using Balinese case material. For now, it is sufficient to note that this specific interpretation of the sacred generates a temporal and process-oriented system of social valorization. This stands in stark contrast to the substance-oriented notion of the sacred which has been reported in different studies of Indian society, and for which Dumont postulated ‘purity’ as the paramount value for the purpose of drawing status distinctions.

Although the notion of origin, as a specific interpretation of the sacred, is central to a specific form of hierarkhia in Indonesian societies, this does not necessarily imply that it constitutes a paramount value in the Dumontian sense. To begin with, Dumont’s notion of hierarchy — as a social order based upon a single all-encompassing (religious) value — is a totalizing interpretation of Durkheim’s notion of ‘the sacred’. Durkheim’s basic idea of the socio-genesis of the sacred and of social values may be correct. But although society generates and reproduces itself through an enchanting experience of sociality, it also generates the disenchanting experience of a multitude of separate individuals with often incommensurable positions and interests.^[3] Social experience is characterised by anarkhia as well as hierarkhia.

Losing sight of specific historical and dialectic social processes, through which the order of a society is only ever enacted and reproduced in a partial and imperfect manner, Dumont focuses instead on an evolutionary social history following the trajectory of a universal Hegelian dialectic. His is a history leading from a pre-modern, unified and hierarchical to a modern, fragmented and egalitarian form of society. Adopting this evolutionary perspective, Dumont allows for a plurality of values only in the context of a modern society. His distinction between modern (individualistic) and pre-modern (collectivity-oriented) thinking also resonates with aspects of Max Weber’s theory of modernity, who suggested that the singular value-orientation and sacred wholeness of hierarchical societies apparently became fragmented into a kaleidoscope of separate values and value spheres.^[4] This argument denies in modern subjects the ability to experience sociality as an ontological ground from which universal values may be derived, as well as denying so-called pre-modern subjects the ability to acknowledge a plurality of social contexts and a diversity of positioned interests. Dumont’s support for these unfortunate marriages, between modernity and value-fragmentation and between hierarchy and singular values, has earned him much criticism even on his home ground India.

The problem with a singular value theory of hierarkhia, of the relationship between the sacred totality of society and the values governing its status economy, is that the untold diversity of specific social categories in India (for example, varna, ‘colours’), for example, cannot be logically predicted on the basis of a bland and colourless value such as ‘purity’. Undifferentiated by its very nature, this concept is translated into a model of social differentiation by an interpretation of resemblances between a zero-state of ‘purity’ and the relative degree of pollution of different categories of persons or objects. A cultural system of hierarchization is thus always the result of a process of value exegesis, a struggle of representation driven by participants’ experience of society as anarkhia. The transcendental unity of a single and featureless value, such as ‘purity’ or ‘origin’, must be shattered or ‘fragmented’ before it can provide a practical model for evaluating the social and natural world in all its complexity. The sacred as such is not yet a principle of social classification. It acquires relevance, in the conceptual and practical sense, through a collective labour of interpretation, no matter whether the sacred is conceived as ‘origin’, ‘purity’ or ‘reason’. Only then can sacredness be attributed to persons and give rise to an order of precedence, a caste system, or a modern state bureaucracy. In my understanding of Indian ethnography, for example, the exegesis of the sacred as a state of purity relies upon a complex interpretive convention, a theory of substance and contagion, and on associated practices of segregation (cf. Marriott 1976). To describe Indian hierarkhia as the product of a single value is a tautology, in the sense that purity (a state of being without distinct properties) is as yet little more than a synonym for ‘the sacred’ (a society without individuals, individual interests or differences). Mistaking ‘purity’ as a full interpretation of the sacred is to ignore the enormous interpretive effort which separates the nameless ‘purity’ of the sacred, for example, from the purity of a substance such as clarified butter (ghee) or from the purity of a Brahmin.

The multiplicity and messiness of values ‘in action’ is less apparent when viewed across a temporal, cultural or presumed evolutionary distance than it is from the position of a local participant. It is all the more important that ethnographers approach the study of symbolic economies through intimate observation of local relationship practices and local discourses on human relatedness in all their complexity. It is easy to become enchanted by the simplicity of a transcendental value and its power to totally ‘explain’ a social order. However, it is not the task of social science to reproduce the totalizing attempts of local discourses at the level of analysis, let alone to create a totalizing vision of a state of affairs which the participants themselves recognize as a momentary state in a dynamic sequence of events. With these cautions in mind, let me proceed towards an ethnographic description of how status is constructed and distributed in the highlands of Bali.