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

The social matrix in place

subak-organizations and planning that is often tested and constantly rumored might manage to increase yields for a time in certain sample areas, but it is doubtful if the national bureaucracy could work out a rationalized scheme as effective in fine tuning the entire rice-production system to the ever changing exigencies of fluctuating differential needs for each other's water.

Balinese irrigation has yet to be studied systematically as an active means of adaptation that is intrinsically dynamic and expansive, rather than in equilibrium. The system is receptive to new agricultural and trade endeavors (for example, frog 'husbandry' in the paddies) as long as they are not detrimental to i ice production.' And other foodstuffs in Bali can become more significant than outside planners often allow. Corn, for example, is generally listed as a poor and unwanted substitute for rice (cf. Hanna 1972). But merely observing that no Balinese prefers corn over rice obscures the fact that once such a substandard crop is introduced, and especially when it becomes required in ceremonial offerings, different qualities of strains are developed, different local areas become reputed for producing superior varieties, and some of the cultic meaning formerly ascribed most to rice begins to accrue. To fully understand the dynamics of Balinese subsistence a long-term study, preferably by Balinese, would have to assess its twofold vantage on water shortage versus abundance and document the strategies and results when one leads to the other. Moreover, a thorough study would stress tile multitemporal perspectives and the readiness to support additional agricultural activities if new needs or markets or meanings arise.

Again the ngebekin ngusaba contrast would, 1 think, be central in such an investigation, and it could lead to comparisons toward the cast as well as the west. For, if Bali's omission of markets from the religious and ritual value placed on food provisioning appears somehow Indic, its showy celebrations of a frequent surplus can appear outright Oceanic. The relative insulation of wet-rice subsistence from Balinese caste compelled many observers to view the island's society as essentially communal, only stratified by an intrusion of foreign, Hindu decadence. But this same state of affairs might have easily suggested the Pacific. Balinese demonstrate an overriding concern with prestige and social ranks, but only on the foundation of a guaranteed surplus for which traditionally the apical social status is somehow held religiously, and litigiously, responsible. In this respect precolonial Bali resembled those intriguing Pacific societies which appear on the one hand tribelike, in that different social segments are equally assured basic subsistence, yet statelike in that elites gain the authority to manage the luxurious expenditure of a recurring surplus. Thus Bali is not, for example, unlike what can be guessed about ancient Polynesia:

The democratic land tenure of f Polynesian 1 Traditional Societies may be explained therefore, by the concept of honor that does not involve high chiefs in the practical affairs of agriculture. Their honor is met when they receive first-fruits as token tribute and when the lands prosper generally (Goldman 1970).
Substitute Archipelago Sanskrit sakti for Polynesian honor or mana and the passage