Advantages
Music of Kebyar
Commoners
Temporal Perspectives
Village Fields
Knowledge
Magnificent
Betutu
Evidences
Tropical
Mahendradatta
Music of Kebyar
Administrative

Continued...

Balipedia: concerted documentation
frinck's work Geertz has summarized this 'sociological defining feature of the Balinese irrigation system.'
it is organized into a separate independent, completely autonomous social. This membership is completely independent of any other social characteristic residence (all or most subak have people from various villages, and any one individual with much land at aft will belong to several subak), caste, kinship position, and so on (1912).

This institution is insulated, at least de lure, from matters of kinship: one's subak interests can conflict with those of a brother or a soil. Or nowadays subsistence is oil a different secioligical axis from politics or anything else: one's owl] interests call conflict with those of a member of the same party, a colleague or boss, and so oil. How much this is so should become clear later. Perhaps even more important, rice irrigation is insulated from other components of the subsistence system as well:

It must also be stressed that the subak is in no sense a collective farm. Oil his own land (which he can sell, rent, tenant, or whatever, as he wishes), within the regulation set by the subak, the individual peasant is his own master working in his own way, consuming (or selling) his own produce. The subak never engages in the actual process of cultivation as such nor, as 1 say of marketing; it regulates irrigation and that's all it does (1972).

Over the centuries institutions surrounding Balinese irrigation have beer constantly refined to insure the maximum production - however irregular the distribution of one highly regarded commodity and to prevent ally conceivable advantage from accruing. to the failure to achieve maximum production, given the water conditions. Diminished production hurts only oneself, or rather one's immediate hearth - those persons, usually husband, wife and children, eating from the same rice pot.

This is, baldly stated, what Liefrinck discerned, although lie never analyzed it ill a very schematic fashion. He detailed the procedures of`council organization and the functioning of the irrigation temples that give Balinese agriculture an air more of ritual action than of subsistence behavior. The basic principle is simple:

Those members with the same allocation of water are all obligated to participate to the same extent in the work that is collectively performed (Liefrinck 1969).
Of course in reality there were and are many provisions for sharecropping, for purchasing exemptions, and for delegating tasks. Fligh-caste landowners can persistently eschew physical labor as beneath them. But the responsibility, and council vote, of each subak member has traditionally been equal, regardless of rank.

Avoidin. conflicts and markets

The complex rules, rights, and regulations are as meticulous in the water control of subak as in the religious affairs of village areas and in the funeral and cremation