Such are the more obvious dimensions or ‘layers’ of interconnection between places in this landscape. They are mutually connected by virtue of a degree of overlap, spatial and conceptual, hinging around the axis of Bukit Taro/Gunung Lebah. This overlap, however, is less than perfect and exceptions and anomalies abound.

It is perhaps timely at this point to remember two things. The first is that, as James Fox (1993: 23) reminds us, the ‘symbolic orders’ of Austronesian space tend to be ‘multiple’ and are ‘constantly created and recreated’ though ritual practice. The second is that these ‘networks’ and ‘layers’ are, unlike the mountain banua recorded by Reuter, not local categories of speech and thought, much less institutions of systematic practice, but abstractions created from my observations of a corpus of local practices and stories, which establish relationships between places and institutions. The analytical question would thus appear to be whether these systems and their correspondences are coincidence, figments of an overheated anthropological imagination, manifestations of normal Austronesian symbolic pluralism, residues of Austronesian banua or 19th-century negara, or whether they reflect an order of some other kind.

Knowledgeable local people with whom I discussed my work recognised the direction of my inquiries but were unable (or perhaps unwilling) to formulate it in any clearer terms. I sought therefore to ‘explain’ my findings by reference to some underlying order at a further level of abstraction. Neither Lansing’s ‘systems’ of ‘water temples’ nor any other structural logics provided this. Every case has its own explanation, unique and sometimes seemingly quixotic. These local explanations are instructive: when I inquired about relationships between villages, temples or barong, I was frequently answered with vague reference to Rsi Markandeya or Gunung Lebah or simply the self-evident ‘ada hubungan’ (there is a relationship). If I pressed the matter harder, there was usually someone who could provide an explanation specific to the case in question. Such explanation inevitably took the form not of logical structural relationship but of a story relating specific mytho-historical causes: barong made from wood from the same tree, a king who had received divine inspiration at this spot and had founded a temple that the local village looked after on his behalf. Things are said (and seen) to be the way they are ‘because’ of the story of their origin. Likewise, the exceptions to the dominant pattern of reverse-oriented bale agung discussed above are all explained not by logical default to the status quo but by reference to their specific historical origins. This led me to look more seriously at the historical processes at work (and seen to be at work) in the area. ^[28]