Continued...

are thought by Balinese to be complementary, intercorroborative. Tile greatest ancestors, such as I Gde Arta, were the Big Men of their time or are retrospectively construed as such. And the most politically savvy contemporary entrepreneur is endowed with divine attributes; moreover, he is urged to marry a cousin to enhance his own descent-line. On the one hand we find value placed on descent (for example.
the ascendancy of Market side East's elder line in the north quarter); on the other hand a plasticity in granting leadership roles to the more artful collateral members of a given house trying to maintain its corporate qualities under trying circumstances.Thus, Balinese descent values recall what have been termed 'status-lineages':
The status lineage in Polynesia differs from the broader class of 'conventional' lineages in the lack of exogamy and in its lack of full commitment to either male or female descent lines (Goldman 1970).
Yet in a sense Balinese ancestor-group options reverse traditional Polynesian lin-eality, such as the Maori hapu which is bilateral or endogamous in its lower ranks, preferentially patrilineal and patrilocal in its upper ranks' (Goldman 1970: 50). The fact that all deceased Balinese, elder and younger sons alike, are spiritualized and enshrined in the ancestral temple allows the exact lines of descent to be deemphasized, at least for purposes of legend and its revision. All properly cremated fore- bears are ancestors of the house; legends single out for glorification only tile Big Men (cf. Sahlins 1963) whose acts reflect those capacities ideally handed down through eldest sons by group-endogamous wives, but more often actually not.