Story of Bali, Indonesia

But most observers assumed the process was slow and irreversible. Goris, for example,
describing archaic Selat near the state temple Besakih, implied that the principle of
mother-daughter villages anticipates formal 'village federations, in the course of time, however, a mother village can acquire the status of a principal village at the head of a village federation of former daughter villages which have become completely independent. It has still not been definitely established whether there are village federations which have not developed from the relationship mother village-daughter villages (Goris 1969).

Only Bateson's article (1937) suggested how quickly and opportunistically such interlocal ties could be fabricated, thanks to temple legends and trancers who express new strategic economic and political relationships 'as social ties between clubs, temples, or villages' (Bateson and Mead 1942). What we saw earlier with regard to ancestor-temple networks is equally true of the mother-desa pattern in the
absence of genealogical connections and irrespective of actual historical events, mystic proclamations and ritual activations of presumably forgotten relations caninvolve residents of one locality in the affairs of another. The process relies on the way temples tie households vertically to a sacred space and join different spaces horizontally to each other.