Bali Village Organization.

Village Organization

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. It’s said that the head of the local Subak will often be the farmer whose rice paddies are at the bottom of the hill for he will make quite certain that the water gets all the way down to his fields, passing through everybody else’s on the way!

Each village is subdivided into Banjars which each adult joint when he marries. It is the Banjar which organizes village festivals, marriage ceremonies and even cremation. Throughout the island you’ll see the open-sided meeting places known as bale banjars – they’re nearly as common a sight as temples. They serve a multitude of purposes from a local meeting place to a storage room for the banjar’s musical equipment and dance costumes. Gamelan orchestras are organized at the banjar level and a glance in bale banjar at any time might reveal a gamelan practice, a meeting going on, food for a feast being prepared, even a group of men simply getting their roosters together to raise their anger in preparation for the next round of cockfights.

The Desa has two functions, a religious and a social one. The religious function lies in the maintenance of the thee main temples and their religious celebrations and exorcism of demonic hordes in the village in order to maintain the cosmic order the balance of territory of the desa, thus to ensure the welfare of the village and the people. The villagers do this by worshipping the divine power by bringing offerings to the temple on their anniversary days and exorcising the demonic forces by giving them sacrificial offering.
Although there are differences between the inhabitants as regards to their functions and right-of-say yet everyone and every group are expected to cooperated in performing the community task by helping to maintain and restore the village temples and provided offerings and whatever is needed for the temple festivals and the ceremonies of purifications and exorcism.

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 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 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.....

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