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Subsistence festivals of foresight

Just as ancestor worship and village-area rituals facilitate flexible social ties across locales, irrigation-temple rites implement adjustments to fluctuating environmental conditions affecting wet-rice agriculture. Balinese irrigation employs an elaborate system of shrines at every juncture of water distribution, where each phase of the growth cycle is complemented by rituals. The most obvious ecological strain on maximum rice production is, of course, drought. But the perhaps less obvious strain on the perpetuation of careful control of water allocation is all occasional overabundance of water which could foster laxity in maintaining the apparatus of controls. The calendars of rituals within a watershed allow for staggering water supplies throughout the growing period. When and where water is plentiful enough, tile rituals call for contemporaneous pan-watershed harvests, yet they preserve precise calendrical observations that would permit reinstating staggered harvests tip and down the watershed slope, if water resources became overtaxed. This dynamic function of irrigation rituals demands closer inspection.
C. Geertz has summarized the cyclic rhythm of the Balinese rice cult (cf. Wirz 1927) it is conducted at every level of the subak from the individual terrace, through the various subsections of the subak, to the subak as a whole, These various ceremonies are symbolically linked to cultivation, to ensure intersubak coordination within a given drainage region - a region, say, ten to fifteen miles wide and thirtyfive or so long, fanning out as you descend from mountain to sea. The cult consists of nine major named stages. These stages follow in a fixed order at a pace generally determined, once the first stage is initiated, by the intrinsic ecological rhythms of rice growing.

Subaks at the top of the system begin the ceremonial cycle, and with it the cultivation sequence, in December; subaks at the bottom, near the coast, begin it in April; those in between topographically are in between temporally as well.
When a higher subak is flooding its terrace preparatory to ploughing, a lower is clearing its. When a lower is flooding a higher is planting. When a lower is celebrating the yellowing of the rice and thus the promise about a month hence of harvest, the higher is already carrying the sheaves to the barns.
Indeed, as water is the central limiting factor in the subak ecosystem, if subak cycles were not staggered, wet rice cultivation in Bali could never have attained, and could not maintain, a fraction of its actual extent (C. Geertz 1972).
In this closely controlled timing of water allocation, overlords, by sponsoring adjudicating courts of appeal to expand the scope of the irrigation system beyond the mere cooperation of adjoining subak councils, perhaps had their greatest practical impact.
The previous description pictures irrigation under conditions of greatest natural strain, with smaller upland terraces flooded during a relatively drier month to reserve the wetter month for broader coastal fields. We should note, however, that the rituals that surround and help complement rice production also envision an eco