Balinese Society.

Balinese 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. In fact the first ceremony of life takes place at the third month of pregnancy when a series of offering is made at home and at the Village River or spring to ensure the wellbeing of the baby. When the child reaches puberty his teeth are field to produce an aesthetically pleasing straight line – crooked fangs are, after all, reminiscent of the ghastly grimaces of witches and demons.

Balinese women are not cloistered away and social life in Bali is relatively free and easy although the roles of the sexes are fairly well delineated with certain tasks to be handled by women, while others are reserved for men. For instance the running of the household is very much the women’s task, while artistic skills are almost totally a male preserve.

Balinese society is held together by a sense of collective responsibility. The notion of spiritual uncleanliness (sebel) is one of central pillars of Balinese religion; contact with death, menstruation, physical deformity, sexual intercourse, insanity and sexual intercourse, insanity and sexual perversion can all be sources of spiritual uncleanliness under certain circumstances. To enter a temple during menstruation, for instance, is a kind of irreverence, an insult to the gods, and their displeasure falls not just on the transgressor, but on the community as a whole. This collective responsibility produces considerable pressure on the individual to conform to traditional values and customs.

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 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 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.........
	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 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 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 which is a Sanskrit word literally meaning a space surrounded by a wall.