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Story of Bali, Indonesia

the houseyard origins. Here are buried the afterbirths (ari-ari) of each child, symbolic younger siblings and protector of their womb companion's first months of life. The yard is the scene of the cosmological signposts of an individual Lifetime.
from one's own ari-ari burial; to the commemoration of numerological cycles at the third month, sixth month, and every six months thereafter; to the keepsaking of tile dust left from teeth-filing. Only after death are the individual's corporeal remains relinquished to tile public sector, consigned to the graveyard and partially entrusted to the ceremonial responsibilities of his non-kin hamlet associates.

The lack of explicitly horizontal bonds within file yard is apparent from Balinese domestic life-crisis ceremonies. There is little sense of community or of the more precise communitas, a concept articulated by V. Turner and associated with rites of transition:

insofar as it refers to a directly personal egalitarian relationship, 'gemeinschaft' connotes 'communitas,' as, for example, where Tonnies considers friendship to express a kind of gemeinschaft or 'community of feeling' that is tied to neither blood nor locality.

liminality, the optimal setting of communitas relations, and communitas, a spontaneously generated relationship between leveled and equal total and individated human beings, stripped of structural attributes, together constitute what one might call anti-structure (1973).

In distinct contrast to any such liminal communitas, Balinese initiation rites merely usher actors across the auspicious multiples of their cycles of days and months, in ceremonies that are very similar for the two sexes. There is no specifically male initiation. Specifically female rites - simple seclusion - reflect Hindu concepts of the dangers of menstrual blood to the order of society. But periodic seclusion does not reconstitute the woman as individual; it merely isolates her when impure. Balinese transition rites in life and after death never obliterate, even momentarily and for a cohort of comrades in passage, the actors' social structural attributes. Rather it is precisely such attributes that the ceremonies celebrate. In short, the affective bonds even among agnates within the same houseyard are expressed less as a community of total and individuated human beings than as structured vertical relations of differentiated actors to thee houseyard temple.

For these rice growers organized into subak s, the yard is not the production unit. It is rather the foremost domestic unit, and almost everything domestic in Bali is ceremonialized. Essentially, kinsmen comprising a yard consume rice from the same strorage bin and pursue daily routines together; practically all their other interests might diverge. Even the holy water required for certain rites that obliges everyone to maintain a subordinate relationship with a Brahmana pedanda might be fetched from different priests by members of the same space. Culturally, the agnates, spouses and adopted children of a houseyard are solidary because they are of the same space.

Certainly a Balinese individual has more interests in common with tile agnates of his own houseyard than with unrelated persons. But the cross-cutting modes of affiliation we reviewed above, which constitute a sort of definition by default of the