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Music of Kebyar
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Music of Kebyar
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The social matrix in place
to the deity, is more elaborate than ngebekin and is often accompanied by the Placing of festive Poles of bamboo (penjor) each kesit. The puras penyungsungan subak follow a pattern similar to that Of the Puras ulun charik. There, too, ngebekin and ngusaba alternate every other year or every two hundred ten days,
depending on whether the Hindu-Balinese or the Javanese-Balinese calendar is followed, with the festival being held on the anniversary (Odalan) of the temple.
Ngebekin is the 'little' festival; the ngusaba or the pura Penyungsungan subak is also called odalan (Grader 1960).
The tigebekitiltigiisaba contrast thus involves ritual acknowledgment first of potential demonic interference with rice production and then of divine benevolence in bestowing abundant harvests. These ritual formats alternate mechanically regardless of the actual current harvest, but they can be more accentuated ill certain environ Mental extremes. Consider, for example, the ngebekin harvest in 1972 of an extremely rich, heavily double-cropped watershed area in southwest Bali. Because water is in general abundant here - even more so after several recent very wet years the subaks in this area had tended toward simultaneous harvests; throughout the season mile after mile of gradual slope revealed paddy of the same hue, first seedling green, later strapling chartreuse, finally golden ripe. in terms of actual yields the rites oriented against scarcity in this area recall the ideals of those celebrating plenty elsewhere; the small harvest ritual here would qualify as enormous in many other watersheds of Bali. This is especially true, since in these relatively unstaggered
subaks, a festival celebrates an actual just completed harvest, whereas elsewhere staggered harvests mean that the new moon or full moon festival cannot actually apply to all the fields and cultivators but recognizes in part harvests past or ones to ore come. Yet in 1972 the peasants in southwest Bali who were knowledging in a demonic register a bountiful wet-year harvest were also currently experiencing a
severe drought which bade ill for the next crop. In this respect, then, the ngebekin ritual keyed with actuality insofar as the harvest festival served as tile occasion for intense trance activity and demonic possessions by many interested parties, including about a dozen pemangku priests from all over the watershed area who warned of conflicts to come and prescribed measures of water allocation for warding them off. Here was a case of a demon-oriented festival, dictated by the permutational calendar, at the moment of a plentiful harvest projecting, however, animpending setback in productivity. At such times trancers can be expected to enunciate policies which could reinstate here and there staggered planting to help minimize the impact of the current drought.
This extreme case from 1972 helps us better appreciate the complex temporal dimensions of the rice cult whose rituals are active agents ill precision water control.
A given harvest festival invokes the immediate past by the actual bounty displayed, The festivals register tile timeless qualities of the whole ecosystem, by requiring alternate forms to pacify demons or to entertain gods, regardless of the current harvest. Yet the festivals cope with the immediate future by exchanging information, often in trance performances, concerning the coming season's inter-subak relations;