Adat and Dinas

SOUTH-EAST ASIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE MONOGRAPHS Adat and Dinas is a study of the dynamics of community organization in contemporary Bali and of the ambivalent relationship between village institutions (adat) and those of the Indonesian state (dinas). Profound links between earth, ancestral ties, and death ceremonial obligations form the cultural basis for co-operative relations in the village domain and for the defenceof local interests ADAT AND DINAS in engagements with the state. Most striking is the power and cohesion exhibited by the BALINESECOMMUNITIES IN banjar, the civic community in Bali and the primary focus of the study. The book traces THE INDONESIAN STATE the banjar's role in serving the collective needs of its members and the tensions implicit in its function as an intermediary in the implementation of Indones_ian develop ment policies. Adat and Dinas will be of general interest ,iii to social, cultural, and economic anthro pologists as well as to those with specialist interests in Indonesian culture and politics, the ethnography of Bali, rural development, and the role of local institutions in social ' change. ◄ Jacket illustration: Banjar ritual preparations (Photograph by Carol Warren) Oxford University Press ISBN 0 19 588609 7 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 248 x 154 mm 400 pp. 13 tables 4 figs. 2 maps 25 b/w illus. South-East Asian Social Science Monographs Adat and Dinas Adat and Dinas Balinese Communities in the Indonesian State Carol Warren KUALA LUMPUR OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD SINGAPORE NEW YORK 1993 Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford ox2 6DP Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, New York © Oxford University Press 1993 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, To Jim, Kris, and my parents without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Within the UK, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, or in the case of reprographic reproductionin accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Warren, Carol. Adat and· dinas: Balinese communities in the Indonesian state/Carol Warren. p. cm.-(South-East Asian social science monographs) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-588609-7 (boards): 1. Balinese (Indonesian people)-Social conditions. 2. Balinese (Indonesian people)-Politics and government. 3. Balinese (Indonesian people)-Government relations. 4. Adat law- Indonesia-Bali (Province) 5. Village communities-Indonesia-Bali (Province) 6. Social structure--Indonesia-Bali (Province) 7. Community development-Indonesia-Bali (Province) 8. Bali (Indonesia: Province)-Social life and customs. I. Title. II. Series. DS632. B25W37 1993 307.72' 09598'6-dc20 92-35881 GIP r93 Typeset by Indah Photosetting Centre Sdn. Bhd., Malaysia Printed by Kim Hup Lee Printing Co. Pte. Ltd., Singapore Published by Oxford University Press, 19-25, Jalan Kuchai Lama, 58200 KualaLumpur, Malaysia Preface THIS is a study of the dynamics of Balinese community organization in the context of the Indonesian state. My interest in community and cul ture began in 1969 when Jim Warren and I lived in a Sama/Bajau Laut settlement while teaching in Sabah, Malaysia. The Bajau were a boat dwelling people who had begun to settle and take on wage labour at that time. For a number of complex reasons they found it difficult to estab lish an effective basis for organizing themselves as a community in order to provide or to politically articulate their most basic needs. They wanted a primary school but were given funds for a mosque at a time when few were Muslim. Living as they did in a village built over the bay hundreds of metres from land, their most basic daily need was for fresh water; yet government-granted rain tanks were left to corrode in front of the home of the village head, while villagers paid dearly for water from a private facility. In 1975 I returned to Sabah for formal research. One of the conclusions of that study (Warren, 1983) was that, although mater ial advancement had indeed been achieved by a small minority of Bajau, the lack of corporate structure or values and the consequent inability of the people of the settlement to organize for common purposes had greatly disadvantaged the village as a whole. These institutional and cul tural factors exacerbated the effects of the cleavages which were taking place among the Bajau in the process of their incorporation into the capitalist economy and Malaysian political system. Since the looseness of Bajau society had made collective action difficult, it seemed important to look at social organization and change at the opposite end of the structural spectrum. By reputation, Balinese society was among the most highly structured of systems, so much so that Bloch ( 1977) could treatits proliferation of rules as something of an 'embarrassment' to anthropology. In his rather mechanist argument, social structure is correlated with institutional hierarchy. The complex ity, ritualization, and constant resort to customary rules and a timeless past in the present, in his view, function to disguise and legitimate inequality. At odds with Bloch's inference, what interested me in the Balinese case was the reputed insistence on principles of legal equality and consensual decision-making at thelevel of local institutions in a cul tural system that was otherwise said to be dominated by status competi tion and relations of patronage and dependency (C. Geertz, 1959, 1980; viii PREFACE PREFACE lX Boon, 1977). Bali was a logical place, then, to look at highly developed power and symmetric relationsin the local sphere, the chapters in Part II community organization and the relation between local social structures illustrate the importance of these institutions in providing collective and national development policies. goods, either directly through self-help initiatives or indirectly by using There was another aspect of this earlier research experience that led to their political and organizational capacities to claim resources from the the decision to do fieldwork in Bali. The Bajau example lent itself to an state. Here it is important to note that collective goods include not only explanation of social change heavily weighted in terms of economic fac the sort that development advisers would be concerned with-schools, tors. As an outcaste minority, the central aspects of their culture-their water, and other public amenities-but also ritual and aesthetic 'goods' animistic religious beliefs and boat-dwelling tradition-hadbeen so asso which are equally essential to Balinese conceptions of well-being. ciated with material poverty and powerlessness vis-a-vis land-based eth Finally, Part III deals with state intervention and the appropriation of nic groups that change for many Bajau meant consciously abandoning customary (adat) institutions to administrative (dinas) ends. The power what they now conceived their culture to represent. In the Balinese case, of local institutions in Bali has ensured that the relationship between on the contrary, social as well as economic development has been almost village and state to date involves a relatively balanced play of forces. The rhetorically identified with cultural continuity in both official discourse discussions of basic needs provision and of national rhetorical strategies and popular consciousness. Bali, therefore, also offered the prospect of a focus on the complementarities and oppositions between state and local broader consideration of the connections between cultural construct, interests. In this respect, the dangers of an overemphasis on hierarchy social practice, and political-economic change. and patronage in the analysis of Balinese culture and social relations Wolf (1986) expressed concern over the need to integrate what have become more apparent, for such interpretations can be made to rational become two disparate sets of literature-one, usually of a political eco ize paternalistic state policies directed at expanding central control. nomy cast, dealing with questions of social transformation, the other The broad framework of issues to be addressed posed a number of focusing on the symbolic domain. 'Recently anthropologists have in problems for research and writing. On the one hand, concentration on a creasingly been tempted to divorce social behavior from culturally single community was necessary to develop the depth of understanding encoded symbolic forms, rather than to inquire into the ongoing dialect that participant observation approaches at least begin to make possible. ical interpretation of the two realms.' (Wolf, 1986: 327.) The line of On the other, a single village might provide too idiosyncratic a case to argument dominating both of these approaches to the ethnography of make

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