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this information must as well be sensitive to any current environmental or political pressures. Finally, the whole ritual process looks to the distant future by requiring full productivity to enhance harvest celebrations, even when particularly favorable conditions might otherwise allow relaxation of the terse cooperative organization and the rigorous temporal calculations. Regardless of fluctuations in water supply or difficulties in inter-subak relations, and often in spite of new colonial and now national policies, both the work force and the calendrical calibrations are kept in gear in the event of an always anticipated water shortage. The system is implemented by a social organization of subsistence which pits groups against groups rather than individuals against individuals, but groups who realize that it is ill the interest of all to maintain a flexible system of maximized water allocation.

We submit then, that the plenty scarcity distinction in the Balinese rice cult is, among other things, part of the ritual foresight which requires a surplus to be harvested and in part consumed this year, not just to store in reserves, but to insure that the social apparatus of labor cooperation and interdigited growth cycles never be curtailed, even for a season. This, of course, is not to reduce the rice cult merely to a functional lubrication in case the social and calendrical machinery of subsistence grows rusty. Indeed, the content of rituals is constrained by many other values as well; for example, the Balinese reluctance, we noted earlier, to release rice into an anonymous and impersonal market system recalls the stigmas in South-Asian Hindu. ism attached to middleman operations in handling foodstuffs, as opposed to agriculturally preparing food for harvest in the field and domestically preparing food for consumption at the hearth.' However, while both Bali and South Asia tend to deny status and esteem to the merchant of subsistence crops, this value is put to opposite social uses. In Bali it reinforces the tendency for each household or ancestor group to stock its own rice bins from its own paddy - a sort of endosubsistence. In South Asia the value helps implement the whole set of specialized ritual occupations in the hierarchical exchange system, here suggested in near biblical phrasing:

High Status in India is symbolized by being able to take the rarest kinds of food from the fewest people. It is much better to give and have one's food taken than it is to receive. A Brahman theoretically can take only uncooked food from anyone of lower status than himself, at a feast, a Brahman should cook his own food (Cohn 1973).

As we saw earlier, Bali's striking divergence from India ill this respect was recorded even ill the early nineteenth century. But since then the comparative study of subsistence values - such as differential uses of a stigma oil marketing staples - has made little headway ill the Indo-Pacific.

For our purposes the important point is the flexibility of Bali's subsistence system guaranteed partly by the ritual apparatus surrounding it, which can stagger water usage tip and down a slope, or shift the whole periodicity of planting, growth and harvest depending on various factors. The government take-over of Balinese