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

Continued...

This phrasing of the issue overlooks the fact that high castes tend to eschew desa al fairs altogether; they have little practical interest in the council, since they boast independent ancestral temples, and their residential property is counted among lands alienated from localities by rajas. Also, traditionally such lines were relatively independent of irrigation societies, because royal and noble houses kept them supplied with a rice staple. Nevertheless, this independence was most likely never total, and the egalitarian provisions must certainly have limited local influence of twice-borns.

The Encyclopedia's significant shift in emphasis to the local, commoner level of political and social organization reflected the important qualifications to earlier views of Balinese royalty that emerged from late nineteent -century research. Subsequent colonial and post-war research confirmed this fact. H. Geertz has recently summarized the particularities of the typical traditional bonds between ordinary Balinese and their superiors:
Commoners were owned I,c, specific services by them were owned by the various lesser lords as well as directly by the paramount prince in each region, and they could be 'bestowed' on others as gifts or seized from them as a result of military conquest . . . Some commoners paid only taxes to a lord, some were obliged to contribute goods and services for massive ceremonial festivals, while others worked for the lord as retainers or sharecroppers. Each individual commoner typically had several different lords 'owning' various services of various of their inhabitants. However, the governing of the village community itself was not the prerogative of the gentry, nor did the lords have much of importance to do with the irrigation societies. They served only as courts of last appeal for commoner disputes that could not be settled through their own councils. The main functions of the lords and princes, from the point of view of the village communities, were symbolic and ritualistic in that the ceremonies that the lords held periodically directly involved all the local population.