The highlands of Bali are divided into banua or ritual domains. These domains are spatially bounded alliances of several or even dozens of villages around a ceremonial centre in the oldest or source village, which signifies their common point of origin. Banua are said to have been established as emigrants from the source village or immigrants from elsewhere founded new settlements within its existing territories. Participating in the ceremonial life of village and domain temples, in the cult of the guardian spirits of the land, was and to some extent still is a way to assert the right to use that land. It is also much more. Domains, and the villages and houses within them, are not just stretches of usable land to people, they are sacred places of meaning. Temples are the markers of such sacred places and help to map complex identities arising from a complex history of migration.

The more distant events in this history, especially, are no longer concerned with the assertion of land rights but with the distribution of non-material resources within regional symbolic economies. The banua, from a historical perspective, is situated well beyond the boundary condition where material resource scarcity began to outweigh the benefits of practical cooperation. Banua temples are the spatial markers of the most distant events in origin history, the abode of the most completely disembodied or post-humanised beings, and the social stage on which struggles for the most refined, symbolic resources become the paramount theme.

I should add here that participants’ personal concern with spiritual obligation is a powerful motivation independent of their concerns about relative status. People have a very immediate and highly personal bond to the ancestral land that keeps them physically alive, and to the history inscribed on it, the ritual path of origin that one day will lead them also to a post-human state of immortality. They also very much enjoy their participation in the larger ritual community of a domain. For the time being, these sentiments and associated local regulations have helped to preserve people’s spiritual relationship to their land despite significant changes to the official, legal conceptualisation of land ownership that has occurred in Indonesia under Dutch rule and in the course of a number of land reforms since independence.