Bali Economy

Bali Economy
Bali’s economy is basically agrarian. The vast majority of Balinese are peasants working in the fields. Coffee, copra and cattle are major agricultural exports, while most of the rice grown goes to feed the island’s own teeming population. Unlike most island people, the Balinese are not great seafarers and actually shun the sea believing it to be the abode of demons and evil spirits. This is reflected in the very small size of the Balinese fishing industry, although there are many fishing villages and fish provides a useful part of the Balinese diet. The people also keep domestic animals; cows are kept to plough the field; pigs to clean up refuse and to be spit-roasted at feasts; chickens and ducks for food; cocks as fighting birds; monkey to ward off evil spirits and apart from the mongrels you usually see in Bali, some dogs are kept and looked after as pets.

Rice grown on wet paddies is the staple food of the Balinese and the intricate organization necessary for growing rice is a major factor in the strength of Balinese village life. The Balinese grow three crops per year, and they do it so well they are possibly the best rice growers in the world. Since the rice terraces are often situated high above the rivers and streams, the water has to be tapped at a considerable distance upstream from the fields and then led over the irregular terrain to the fields. This done using a system of dams, sluices, canals, tunnels and aqueducts built by the people who own the land on which the water is to be used.
The process of rice growing starts with the bare, dry and harvested fields. The remaining rice stalks are burnt off and the field is then liberally soaked then repeatedly ploughed. Nowadays this may be done with a Japanese cultivator, but more often it will still be done with two bullocks or cows pulling a wooden plough. Once the field is reduced to the required muddy consistency, a small corner is walled off and the seedling rice is planted.
The rice is grow up to a reasonable size here then dug up and replanted, shoot by shoot, in the larger field. Once this is done, the walls of the fields have to be kept in the working order and the fields have to be weeded, but otherwise there is little work until the harvest. Planting the rice is strictly a male occupation, but everybody takes part in harvesting it.

Other Bali Information
	Bali Behaviour There are a couple of rules for visiting temples. Except on rare occasions anyone can enter, anytime; there’s nothing like the attitude found in some temples in India where non-Hindus are firmly barred from entry. Now do you have to go barefoot like in many Buddhist shrines, but you are expected to be politely dressed. You should always wear a temple scarf – a sash tied loosely around your waist
	Bali Architecture Balinese temples usually consist of a series of courtyards entered from the sea side. In a large temple the outer gateway will generally be a candi bentar, modeled on the old Hindu temple of Java. These gateways resemble a tower cut in the halves and moved apart, courtyard is used for less important ceremonies,
	Bali Religion The Balinese are nominally Hindus but Balinese Hinduism is half a world away from that India. When the Majapahits evacuated to Bali they took with them their religion and its rituals as well as their art, literature, music and culture.
	Bali Village Organisation Village organization one of the important element of the village government is the Subak. Each individual rice field is known as a Sawah and each farmer who owns even one Sawah must be a member of his local Subak. The rice paddies must have a steady supply of water and it is the job of Subak to ensure that the water supply gets to everybody.
	Bali Festival Festivals for much of the year Balinese temples are deserted, empty spaces. But on holy days, the deities and ancestral spirits descend from heaven to visit their devotees and the temples come alive with days of frenetic activity and nights of drama and dance. Temple festivals come at least once a Balinese year of 210 days.
	Bali Geography Bali is a tiny, extremely fertile and dramatically mountainous island. It has an area of 5620 square km, is only 140 km by 80 km and is just 8^ south of the equator. Bali’s central mountain chain, which runs east-west the whole length of the island, includes several peaks over 2000 meters and many active volcanoes......
	Bali Compound The smallest unit in the Balinese community is not the individual but the family. In the strictest sense of the word a family is a married couple with children and the broader sense a family is all the people who live in one compound, family compound. In one such compound there can live brothers, cousins and second cousins with all their children and all relatives who worship in one common house temple.
	Bali Households Despite the strong communal nature of Balinese society, their traditional houses are designed to divide the family from the outside world. Traditional houses (many of which can be seen in Ubud) are like houses in ancient Rome, they look inward and are surrounded by a high wall.....
	Bali Temple The number of temple in Bali is simply astonishing they’re everywhere, in fact since every village has several and every home at least a simple house-temple; there are actually more temples than homes. The word for temple in Bali is pura
	Bali Dance In fact it’s remarkably like the Balinese gamelan music which accompanies most dances, with its abrupt shifts of tempo, its dramatic changes between silence and crashing noise. There’s also virtually no contact in Balinese dancing, with each dancer moving completely independently.
	Bali Society Balinese society is an intensely communal one; the organization of villages, the cultivation of farmlands and even the creative arts are communal efforts – a person belongs to their family, clan, caste and the village as a whole. Religion permeates all aspects of life so each stage of existence from soon after conception until after the final cremation is marked by ceremonies and ritual.....