Story of Bali, Indonesia


Subsistence festivals of foresight

Just as ancestor worship and village-area rituals facilitate flexible social ties across locales, irrigation-temple rites implement adjustments to fluctuating environmental conditions affecting wet-rice agriculture. Balinese irrigation employs an elaborate system of shrines at every juncture of water distribution, where each phase of the growth cycle is complemented by rituals. The most obvious ecological strain on maximum rice production is, of course, drought. But the perhaps less obvious strain on the perpetuation of careful control of water allocation is all occasional overabundance of water which could foster laxity in maintaining the apparatus of controls. The calendars of rituals within a watershed allow for staggering water supplies throughout the growing period. When and where water is plentiful enough, tile rituals call for contemporaneous pan-watershed harvests, yet they preserve precise calendrical observations that would permit reinstating staggered harvests tip and down the watershed slope, if water resources became overtaxed. This dynamic function of irrigation rituals demands closer inspection.
C. Geertz has summarized the cyclic rhythm of the Balinese rice cult (cf. Wirz 1927) it is conducted at every level of the subak from the individual terrace, through the various subsections of the subak, to the subak as a whole, These various ceremonies are symbolically linked to cultivation, to ensure intersubak coordination within a given drainage region - a region, say, ten to fifteen miles wide and thirtyfive or so long, fanning out as you descend from mountain to sea. The cult consists of nine major named stages. These stages follow in a fixed order at a pace generally determined, once the first stage is initiated, by the intrinsic ecological rhythms of rice growing.