Fredrik Barth The University of Chicago Press Chicago & LondonPreamble This book has been slow in the making, because it simultaneously attempts two very demanding tasks. It seeks to give a synthetic account of society and culture in North Bali, embracing social organization, salient cultural ideas and knowledge, circumstances and concerns in terms of which people respond to events, and insights and experience they judge central to their lives. It also seeks to explicate concepts, perspectives, and discov- ery procedures that could put the anthropological analysis of complex civ- ilizations on a better footing. These two tasks are connected: where the mainstream of existing an- thropological literature on Bali fails to give an adequate account of society and culture, it is because we still do not know how to go about describing complex civilizations. We lack some of the necessary concepts and in- sights, and persist in using others that do not apply. Thereby we produce a consensus between area specialists that corresponds poorly to the realities of the area, Mark Hobart, drawing on lifelong studies of Balinese culture and society and extensive fieldwork in a community in South Bali, best articulates these concerns and criticisms: “Despite — or even because of — the amount of research on Bali, it is becoming clear how little we know. The plethora of unexamined, but relevant, indigenous treatises and the degree of local variation alone suggest that generalizations are rather du- bious. Much of the material has reported assertions in particular situations as facts, and facts as truth. What we have mostly is a smattering of (data] - + taken out of context and mapped onto nebulous paradigms of Western intellectual history” (Hobart 1986b:151). Initially I shall be using some features of this local variation as my lever to shift some established anthropological views on Bali. I will argue thatTHE CHALLENGE OF NORTH BALI local variation in a traditional civilization is not a surface disturbance, to be covered over by generalization or tidied away by a typology. It is a ubiq- uitous feature of great civilizations, and we should make it a major com- ponent of our description and characterization of these societies rather than a difficulty to be overcome. Variation should emerge as a necessity from our analysis. How might that be achieved? First, we must break loose from our root metaphor of society as a sys tem of articulated parts. The image is too simple, and it misleads: the con- nections we are trying to conceptualize are linkages without determinate edges, in a body without a surface for a boundary. Nor are they related to each other in a part-whole hierarchy. If not a bounded thing, then how can we conceptualize this society, or this culture, which we seek to describe? The features we use to visualize it must be predicated by the object, not our descriptive conveniences. So we should look for another model. I hold that when we can see society as characterized by a degree of conceptual and statistical order, this must reflect the results of processes — processes that arise from particular combinations of ideas, material circumstances, and interactional potentials and have patterning as their consequences. ‘The image of processes serves us better than that of a structure or a closed system. After all, we generally recognize by now that we are speaking of a reality that is at least in significant part socially and culturally constructed. Consider how the alternative metaphors position us if we ask where the work of reality construction might be taking place. Obvivusly, reality con- struction must be a process of creating connections in people’s “here” and “now,” centering on themselves —not out on the edge of things where “parts” articulate, or at some distant boundary where society stops. The problem of boundedness will also have to be faced, but with the difficulties we have in pointing to boundaries, it must not serve us as the very means whereby we constitute the object of our study. Our focus should be on the processes of social and cultural construction of reality, which are always here and now. ‘This brings me to my second main point of leverage: individual varia- tion, in relation to the processes whereby some degree of shared reality is established. In a civilization, there is a surfeit of cultural materials and ideational possibilities available from which to construct reality. The an- thropologist has no basis for assuming that all these materials are con- tained in one complete, logically compelling package or structure; that begs most of the very questions we should raise and entices us to proceed as if our task were to tease out a key that would make sense of it all. On the contrary, the sense that is being made, the reality that is being created, in any community or circle must be diverse. (1) There are variations in thePREAMBLE level of “expertise” in the population: which level could hold authority for all? (2) There is diversity of received traditions. (3) There is a varied par- ticularism of local history, contention, and context. (4) There are all the differences between people in positioning and experience, besides that of expertise: old and young, male and female, rich and poor, powerful and vulnerable. (5) Finally, there is the pragmatics of purpose and interest: dif- fering representations for different tasks. Which should the anthropolo- gist privilege? Or do we adhere to a belief that, if only it is thoroughly abstracted, it all coheres in its essence? Again, these variations are not difficulties to be overcome but inherent features of the object that we wish to describe. In their way, Balinese must face the same questions when imposing some semblance of graspable shape on their world and their life: what knowledge and insights are work- able for me, here and now? But living in a civilization means having some of the skills needed to construct a life from a multiplicity of available ele- ments. I am certainly not suggesting that a person's reality is the fruit of her or his own free creativity: it is made from the knowledge and imagery that are available. But like the anthropologist, only with greater knowledge and discrimination, a Balinese will be faced with a wide range of experts and authorities, a diversity of received traditions, etc., etc. Thus the per- spective I am arguing for does not deny the presence of agreements, shared premises, shared conventions, and commitments to publicly em- braced values. There are plenty of them — indeed, far too many to be put together in one cohering structure or one person's practice, and too many to be universally and equally shared. They represent ranges of options from which a Balinese can choose in the perpetual work of constructing her or his reality, i.e., interpretation of the here and now so as to be able to respond to it; and the complexity of events and options is such that she/he will probably often see several alternative constructions that can give rea- sonable and workable insight. In such a situation, the anthropologist even more than the individual Balinese should give up the pipe dream of coher- ence and concentrate on developing theory and concepts for analyzing dis- ordered systems, where events are underdetermined by rules and where — rising now to the macrolevel of communities, regions, and society — such relatively determined connections as there are will generate processes at angles and at odds with each other, producing innumerable large and small incoherences in culture and in the body politic. Most of our experience of social life should lead us to accept as plausible this view of disorder, multiplicity, and underdeterminedness. Why then does it seem so difficult for anthropology to embrace it and develop it as a basis for theory? One reason may be that it goes against the grain of re-THE CHALLENGE OF NORTH BALI ceived intellectual standards of excellence: we are always best believed and rewarded when we succeed in revealing a hidden simplicity underlying the apparently complex, as when we can perfect an encompassing logical form for the data we have selected that underwrites the myth of an ordered, coherent society/culture/reality. We must rebel against this scenario, which may he more apprapriate for other objects of study than ours, and which has been drilled into us through the type of solution favored in the preset puzzles of our exams. Culture, society, and human lives — the ob- jects we seek to understand — do not come in this puzzle format, and we should not succumb to the temptation to cast them as puzzles by selecting a limited set of data, designing a solution that makes them appear coher- ent—and then, outrageously, claiming this to be an example of the coher- ence that obtains in the whole. These arguments and misgivings, you may say, are shared by many an- thropologists and articulated in many, and more subtle, ways. Indeed. Some of them have been forcibly argued in the postmodern literature, de- veloping points I find challenging but from which I draw rather different conclusions. Many of them are currently being combined and identified as. “practice theory” (e.g., Ormer 1984, 1989), drawing on a literature to which I am clearly indebted. But to the extent that practice theory builds ‘on a concept of “contradiction” in its revolt against consensus models of culture and society, it tends to reconstruct the tyranny it was meant to bring down. Only if coherence were viewed as a “functional prerequisite” (with all the anthropological debris that phrase entails) would “contradic- tion” reveal the spring, the hidden mechanism that makes the wheels of change revolve. And we are again invited to model connections in terms of logical necessity (Barth 1990), when we know perfectly well that the phe- nomena we are depicting are neither logically coherent nor essentially contradictory: they could well have been different, probably are different in all those places we have not observed, and may be now be different in those places we did abserve. I see na way that the logical incompatibility, contradiction, of two monolithic coherences could reproduce the shifting sands of multiple interpretations and interests, much less model the empirical processes whereby people's traditions of knowledge are la- boriously built. And this provides my third point of leverage. Our focus, I argued, should be on the work of social and cultural construction of reality: those are the crucial processes that generate our object. Yet most of the anthro- pological interest, and most of the anthropological conceptions, focus only on how cultural knowledge within some domain or other is patterned, and how it is instantiated — not how it is generated. Though linked to a salu-PREAMBLE tary attention to practice, “contradiction” likewise focuses our attention on how two pre-established organizations of cultural knowledge clash, not ‘on how they ever came to be organized. Instead, we should focus on how cultural knowledge is produced, the processes of its “construction” read as, a verb, not as a substantive. Postmodern critiques have taught us to admit more readily to the in- trinsic dissonance in social life as it actually unfolds and to the surrealist qualities of the various representations that make up cultural repertoires. 1 accept the validity of such observations and wish to take full account of them in my analysis. This being my position, it may strike the reader as curious that I should focus as strongly as I do, in the subsequent chapters, on the gross features of social organization and knowledge, rather than critiquing and deconstructing fictions. But that is precisely the core of my chosen argument. We need not follow postmodernism in rejecting every attempt to construct coherent theory: we need only learn to construct it differently so it is not chained to an axiom of a coherent world. Our object of study is not formless, and it does not follow from the fact that it exhibits disorder and indeterminacy that it could be any old way, and that we can- not model the processes that bring about this particular form and this de- gree of coherence. T accept the postmodern critique that structural representations of dis- sonant conditions and disordered circumstances are perforce both fictional and distorting. It makes lite anthropological sense to depict an imaginary situation where order reigns, and then show how the activities of people reproduce this order with an arguable, but considerable, degree of imper- fection. But if we focus instead on process, on the work done by people in the social and cultural construction of their realities, we are modeling con- nections and interdependencies that generate a degree of order and shape, and such models can perfectly well be compelling, simple, and bold. The recognition that there is some kind of imperfect pattern out there becomes fruitful, it seem to me, not if we extract and perfect a simplified represen- tation of that order in itself, but only if we construct our models on a meta- level, in an attempt to represent the processes that generate that degree of order —even where such order may be quite imperfectly manifest as pat- tern in the observable outcomes, Such models become believable if we can show how the observed degree of coherence is brought about and repro- duced in the lives of people, through processes involving those people’s own ideas and activities. Indeed, if we have to construct an initial situation, we should not choose the fiction of a perfect structure but rather the fic- tion of an initial amorphous lack of order, which may then be given a de- Bree of shape through the operation of the processes we have modeled.THE CHALLENGE OF NORTH BALI That would make more phylogenetic sense. But we are not there in the morning of the world: “Knowledge is always a modification of earlier knowledge” (Popper and Eccles 1984:425), and this credo is notionally valid for all of culture. So we should rather look at how people through their collective and separate activities reproduce and modify the realities of their past and present lives, elaborating features or losing them, enhanc- ing their coherence or dismantling it. Modeling such processes promises to enhance our ability to describe the complex civilizations of human so- cieties and understand something of their dynamics. The following monograph retraces the steps of this argument through a slow and cumulative account that allows me to depict a broad range of features of the Bali I have seen. Thus the validity and value of the position [have here briefly formulated are on trial, and can best be judged at the end of this text.