Table of Contents
Land has always been a critical resource in the successive political economies of south Bali, and not surprisingly, it has also been deeply embedded in a rich matrix of cultural meanings. [1] This ,was evident to the earliest foreign observers—‘There is a … correlation of the … people with … the land’ (Covarrubias 1994: 11, see also pp. 59, 84)—and has remained so until relatively recently. In the past generation, however, land has been relocated substantially from this matrix of meaning into something increasingly resembling the universal capitalist commodity hidden in the misleading term ‘real estate’, with all the attendant emptying-out of traditional meaning. This has happened primarily through its massive revaluation and inflation as a primary resource in an economy dominated by tourism as well as systematic attempts by the National Government, aided and abetted by foreign agencies, to ‘free’ it from the bonds of traditional forms of tenure and make it available to the widest possible market.
This process has been further aided at a more subtle psycho-cultural level by the phenomenological effects of various technologies that have progressively diluted and obscured the once-powerful and awe-inspiring daily (and particularly nightly) experience of landscape. Roads have connected places, such as the mountains or distant kingdoms, once awesome for their sheer remoteness. Motor vehicles have reduced distances of days to a matter of hours and their omnipresent noise, smell and sheer mechanical power have annulled much of the direct sensory experience of landscape, which was integral to the knowledge of previous generations. Kerosene lamps, battery-powered torches and more recently electric lighting penetrate the veil of darkness that once obscured the sekala (natural world), allowing people to glimpse the niskala (supernatural world) beyond. Radio, television and electronic amplification have pushed aside the sounds of bamboo rustling in the wind, the fading notes of a distant gamelan or even the stately creak of an ancient Dutch bicycle. People born since about 1970 have little or no experience of the landscape unmediated by these technologies, and when I ask them for directions they reply in terms of gas stations and hotels rather than waringin trees or temples.
I have discussed elsewhere some political-economic aspects of land in south Bali (MacRae 2003). The purpose of this chapter is to consider the matrix of meaning and customary practices in which land was and to some extent still is embedded. As with the political-economic dimension, from which they can never be entirely separated, these occur in the context of concrete historical processes. The land has always been there, a primary element of human experience, and successive cultural and political orders have made their own sense and inscribed their own meanings on it. Some recent transformations of these have been touched on above, but the primary axis around which this discussion revolves is the extent to which ‘traditional’ ideas and practices to do with land might usefully be seen in terms of ancient, pre-Indic forms, common to a degree throughout the Austronesian world and evident especially in the Bali Aga forms described by Reuter (this volume).
The south-central quarter of Bali is a wedge of land, sloping down and out from the central mountains, steeply at first, then flattening onto a coastal plain several kilometres wide. The soil is predominantly volcanic ash (paras), fertile and soft, allowing the rivers flowing down from the mountains to cut deep gorges, dividing the land into long tapering radial strips. In these gorges are remnants of the original rainforest that once covered most of the island while the strips between, some little more than ridges, others relatively flat and a kilometre or more wide, are terraced, irrigated and planted with rice and secondary crops such as sweet potato, interspersed with rows of coconut palms.
This landscape is divided, in traditional Balinese thinking, into two primary categories: wild forest (alas or [BI] hutan) and land that has been brought into human cultivation and ritual order (Boon 1977: 99). [2] Alas is inhabited by all manner of unseen (niskala) beings that are potentially disruptive and even dangerous to human life. When it is occupied by humans, the forest is cut, social and spatial institutions are established and ritual processes initiated to maintain harmony between human and niskala inhabitants. [3]
A well-known origin story in this part of Bali concerns Rsi Markandeya, a holy man from East Java, who came, with followers, to establish a community in the wilderness of Bali. They began cutting (marabas) forest by the River Wos at Campuan near Ubud, but were attacked by wild animals and diseases and the expedition was abandoned. Back in Java, Markandeya, received supernatural advice that he had neglected to establish the proper ritual relationships with the niskala inhabitants of the place. He tried again, this time taking appropriate ritual precautions, the most important of which was the burial of five elemental metals (panca datu) in the soil of the new land. This time he was to be rewarded with success. They cleared the forest, divided the land into dry and irrigated fields and established the primary institutions of social, ritual and economic organisation—banjar, desa and subak. [4] Banjar is the local community organisation oriented to essential social tasks, especially the disposal of the dead. Subak is the organisation responsible for the collective management of irrigation water, essential to material subsistence. Desa is the organisation responsible for the maintenance of ritual harmony between human and niskala communities in a particular spatial/ecological zone. [5]
While it can be argued that banjar is the primary secular social unit (Guermonprez 1991), desa is the primary spatial and ritual unit (commonly, but somewhat misleadingly, translated as ‘village’)—binding local community to local landscape through collective responsibility to local deities. [6] Land is understood to belong to these deities. Humans occupy and use it on what may be described as a leasehold basis, perpetual but subject to the regular performance of collective ritual obligations. It is the desa, rather than individuals, which is party to this arrangement with the gods, and individual households maintain their right to occupy desa land (tanah ayahan desa) by contributing to collective ritual obligations (Boon 1977: 100-2; Covarrubias 1994: 59,84; Reuter 2002b; Stuart-Fox 2002: 42-4; Warren 1993: 38-42). These obligations take the primary form of maintaining two (or more) main temples and performing in them regular ceremonies, which the various deities associated with the desa are invited to visit and are then plied with offerings of music, dance, food, flowers, incense and sacrificial animals.
The two main temples are the pura puseh (‘navel’, ‘centre’ or ‘origin’ temple) and the pura dalem (temple of the ‘great deity’ of death). The pura puseh is associated with the origins of the desa, in the form of founding ancestors and life-giving water from the mountains, and is located ideally and usually towards the uphill (kaja) end of the desa territory. It usually contains, in its middle courtyard (jaba tengah), a pavilion known as bale agung (great pavilion), in which all the gods of the desa assemble periodically. The pura dalem is associated with the spirits of the dead, but not yet fully purified and deified members of the desa. It is located ideally and usually near the graveyard and cremation ground (setra) at the downhill (kelod) end of the desa territory. [7]
The walled compounds (pekarangan) occupied by households of the desa are strung along either side of the uphill-downhill road (and sometimes parallel secondary streets) between these two temples. Each house yard is occupied by a household (or set of related households) in perpetuity but subject to prescribed contributions to collective ritual (ayahan, literally ‘work’). Such land (pekarangan desa or karang ayahan desa) might not be bought or sold. [8] Spatially, each house yard replicates the fundamental uphill-downhill orientation of the desa itself. [9] Desa are bounded laterally (east-west in this part of Bali) by the untamed space of the parallel river gorges and in the uphill-downhill direction by a neutral zone of cultivated land, which is owned by individuals and managed by subak.
