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The central highlands and some coastal areas of Bali are home to a little-known indigenous minority group, the Bali Aga or ‘Mountain Balinese’. This paper focuses on ritual domains formed by clusters of Bali Aga ‘villages’ (desa adat or desa ulu apad). These regional, spatially bounded and historically conceived networks are known as banua. The banua and its constituent desa form a sacred landscape inscribed by the memory of a continuous history of human settlement and migration, and re-inscribed through origin narratives and ritual performances at sacred sites of origin, which are marked by shrines or temples. This multi-layered process of inscription defines how different groups of participants relate to the land in terms of spiritual ownership or obligation but also in terms of their practical ownership of land as a primary material resource.
I will argue that many agriculturalist peoples in the Austronesian world, such as the Bali Aga, define their social identities as well as rights of access to particular pieces of arable land by creating a hermeneutic circle of reciprocal mapping between social and physical landscapes. I further suggest that there is a historical movement of emphasis from material to symbolic resources as spatially defined entities grow in size or complexity. Because actual land rights tend to be negotiated locally, in the village or the ‘house’, the nature of people’s claims to a relationship with an area of land tend to become more distant and detached from practical concerns with material resources in the much larger structure of a regional, ritual-political organisation such as the banua. At this level of social organisation, status and other forms of symbolic resources tend to become the primary concern instead. [1]