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The analysis of culture in complex societiesFredrik Barth aa Ethnographic Museum, University of Oslo, Norway

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To cite this article: Fredrik Barth (1989): The analysis of culture in complex societies, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 54:3-4,120-142

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The Analysis of Culturein Complex Societiesby Fredrik BarthEthnographic Museum, University of Oslo, Norway

Field materials from North Bali are presented to question conventional anthropologicalconceptions of culture and common practices in its analysis. The author argues that thereis a need for anthropology to reshape Us assumptions, particularly in response to recentreßexive and deconstructionist critiques. A revised set of assumptions is presented withregard to cultural meanings, sharing, positioning and function; and its fruitfulness inthe analysis of cultural reproduction in Bali is explored.

The expression "complex" societies in the title may strike you as quaint, aword that begs important questions and harks back to untenable positions..But quaintness, and question-begging, arc also embedded in most of theother words we use in anthropology, not least in the various senses of theterms "culture" and "society". Like most anthropological concepts, theyare fundamentally stamped with questionable assertions of holism andintegration: They celebrate the connectedness of disparate institutions; thefitness of custom for a place and a lifestyle; the sharing of premises, valuesand experiences within a community. In our day this assertion of connect-edness is mostly conveyed in the language of structuralism, with its empha-sis on abstractable logical patterns embedded in superficially diverse forms——abstractions which are supposed to capture the true import of theseforms. Our usage of "culture" is furthermore flawed by the deep impreci-sion of referring simultaneously to (a sumtotal of) observable patterns, andto the ideational bases of such patterning—which invites the recurringfallacy of misconstruing description as explanation. Finally, we are facedwith an ambivalence in our appreciation of culture: on the one hand assomething immensely intricate in its overwhelming detail, an intricacywhich the competent ethnographer should demonstrate that she commands;

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The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies 121

on the other hand an ideal of boldness as the way to abstract and reveal theunderlying essence.

I shall not try to improve matters by adding to anthropology's trouble-some history of verbal definitions and redefinitions of "culture" and "soci-ety". Rather, I suggest that we can most usefully work substantively, byexploring the extent and kinds of connections which obtain in the domain ofculture under various conditions of society. And the role I choose in thistask is not that of erudite and elegant scholarship, but rather that of H. C.Andersen's little boy observing the Emperor's Clothes. Theory and con-cepts in anthropology should be tested in the analysis of life as it unfolds insome particular place in the world. So any such place can serve as aprovocation to challenge and criticize anthropological theory. The island ofBali—a truly complex society—will serve as my provocation on this occa-sion.1

Bali and Anthropological Praxis

We should try to look at our object of study without having our view tooclosely determined by received anthropological conventions. Get off the busin North Bali, and what you will see is an incoherent bustle of activity in thedensely inhabited zone between high mountain and encompassing sea.Modern traffic thunders by. Passengers and bystanders, variously wearingsarongs and blue-jeans, mingle with exquisite politeness and grace, even intheir welcoming of uncouth tourists. Children, immaculately dressed inschool uniforms, swarm by on bicycles. Labour teams arc busy harvestingrice in the surrounding fields—teams based on traditional rules of coopera-tion and contract, but working modern high-yielding strains of rice gov-erned by an intensive regime of irrigation and artificial fertilizer, dependenton water provided from recently upgraded reservoirs supplying old irriga-tion channels. And if it is afternoon, chances are you will see a line ofwomen balancing elaborate, colourful offerings on their heads as they movein solemn procession towards one of the innumerable irrigation temples thatare scattered through the countryside, where complex worship followsancient customs and calendars.

This (at least apparently) disconnected diversity of people's activities;and the mixture of new and old in a creolized cultural scene, are obtrusivefeatures which will confront the anthropologist nearly anywhere; but we aretrained to suppress the signs of incoherence and multi-culturalism in the

• scene as inessential aspects of modernization. Yet we know that all cultureshave always been the conglomerate results of diverse accretions, as Lintonshowed us in his delightful vignette of what it involved to be 100%

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American in the 1930s (Linton 1936: 326-7). In a deeply conditionedprotest against a long discredited shreds-and-patchcs account of diffusionand cultural growth, we still dutifully insist on seeing such evidence as athreat to our subject matter and premises. So instead of trying to make ourtheories embrace what is there, we are led to picking out some small,distinctive pattern in this confusing scene, and applying our ingenuity tosalvaging a (functionalist) holism by constructing (structuralist) isomor-phies and inversions of this randomly chosen pattern, as if it encoded adeeper connectedness. I can readily imagine a colleague responding to theNorth Balinese scene I have sketched for you by producing an article onmountain : sea :: up : down :: man : woman :: sacred : profane :: head :body; and then point out how this allows women, who arc lower, to carryburdens on their head and therefore to carry the sacred offerings, whereasmen who must protect their head's sacrality carry burdens on their shoul-ders and can thus only carry secular burdens—except for the ashes ofcremation, carried into the sea on the head of a man, perhaps as womenbring babies, regarded as reincarnate deities, into this world through thenether parts of their bodies.

Our journals are full of such bagatelles which, though at their best theymay be engaging, essentially argue nothing and change nothing. Note howthey function: they serve their authors as a means to escape having toconfront what is problematic in the world around us. They silently reaffirmthe assumption of pervasive logical coherence in culture without exploringits extent and character; and they leave the axioms of received wisdom on"culture" undisturbed by any number of such reports from the field.

Reshaping our Concept of Culture

There is a growing modern reaction to this scholasticism. In the words ofClifford & Marcus, we need to throw culture in its totality into the"contested" pot, because it cannot be represented as a "unified corpus ofsymbols and meanings that can be definitely interpreted" (Clifford &Marcus 1986:19). But having established this view, we do not need moreprogrammatic literature on the elusiveness of absolute truth and the dialo-gic character of the ethnographer's conversations in the field. We need tofind the templates best suited to the phenomena that confront us, and worktowards building theory about the realm to which words like "culture" and"society" were intended to refer. To do so, I would argue that we must startmaking positive, falsifiable assertions about the phenomena we observe.This means being bold, at the risk of being proved simpleminded.

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There are ingredients for such bolder assertions in the convergence, inseveral contemporary traditions of scholarship, towards a view that people'srealities are culturally constructed (see, for example Wuthnow el al. 1984,reviewing the perspectives of Berger, Douglas, Foucault and Habermas).Much of what the members of any particular group regard as given in theworld can reasonably be shown to be merely a reflection of their ownpresuppositions. Yet they, as all of us, act and react of necessity to the worldas it appears to them, and thus imbue it with consequences arising fromtheir own construction. Thus every people's reality will be composed ofcultural constructions, held in place by mutual consent as effectively as byinevitable material cause; and this consent would seem to be embedded incollective representations: in language, categories, symbols, rituals, institu-tions. What anthropologists have referred to as "culture" then becomesvery central indeed to an understanding of humanity and the worldshumans inhabit.

So far so good—but we must now step gingerly. What might be. thenecessary entailments of this plausible insight, and what should we contin-ue to contest in the old conception of "culture"? Wuthnow et al., reflecting Ithink fairly the thrust of the literature which they are summarizing, urgethat cultural analysis be pursued as "the study of the symbolic/expressivedimension of social life" (1984 : 259). But thereby, en unstated assumptionis introduced that all the patterns we observe in cultural constructs arcsomehow related to, and essential for, culture's symbolic and expressivefunctions. "Culture" can be represented as the independent variable andprime mover; and received assumptions of holism and essentialism withinclosed universes of distinctive cultures can be perpetuated.

Yet the assertion that reality is culturally constructed in no way settlesthe question of how or whence these cultural patterns arise. Unhingingthem from a previously assumed correspondence with an objective, non-cultural reality does not necessarily render all cultural patterns autonomousand a property of culture as such; nor docs it underwrite an axiom of theexistence of multiple, discrete and internally integrated local cultures. I see,on the contrary, in the thesis of the cultural construction of reality anenhanced need to explore empirically the extent of patterning in the realm ofculture and the variety of sources for such patterns as can be found.Specifically, I see scope for an argument that major patterns of culture maybe the results of particular social processes, and neither functionally norstructurally essential to culture's symbolic and expressive operations. Thus,for example, let us reflect on that compelling sense of fitness and pervasiveorder that arises during a fieldworker's immersion in a primitive communi-ty, and which has lent intuitive plausibility to Malinowski's theoretically

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flawed dogmas of functionalism.2 Does it expose the roots of that meaningand force which the culture possesses? In the conventional anthropologicalargument we are asked to see it as evidence of an all-embracing andcompelling logical consistency permeating all aspects of meaning and ac-tion, to be teased out like the transformation rules of a linguistic code or thearticulation of the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Might we not more usefully beable to develop a method both to question and to map the extent ofconnectedness in the local culture, and show it to be an artifact of life in asmall-scale, socially dense context?3

Be that as it may: the Bali I have seen certainly can give no suchimpression of pervasive logic and connectedness. Living in a North Baliambience one is overwhelmed by the extraordinary richness and elabora-tion that characterizes the symbolic/expressive domain, but not by its unity.One senses that it has an aura or style which becomes familiar thoughremaining elusive; it also has a multiplicity, inconsistency and contentious-ness that defeats any critical attempt at characterization. Clearly, these arevery imprecisely formulated intuitions, only crudely retrieved by the label"complex". Yet they should be sufficient to force us to discard a vocabularycelebrating harmony, fitness and unity and an analysis assuming integra-tion and logical consistency. What we need is to develop other templates,which would enable ut to grasp its features better and more directly, notfiltered through a negation of the inappropriate. Systems models, andholism in the sense of an ambition to embrace a wealth of phenomena andprovide a comprehensive account, should continue to provide challenges,but cannot provide blueprints of what we should find. How can we besttranscend the debris of discredited schemata and become able to sec andarticulate characteristic features of what is there?

I see no way, and no reason, to escape anthropology's time-honourednaturalist task of working through a careful, meticulous description of abroad range of data. So that must provide our discovery procedure, eventhough it cannot be performed in the format of the present article (but seeBarth, forthcoming; Wikan 1987, 1988, and forthcoming). Let some frag-ments and outlines of such a description indicate the substance of myargument.

Bali-Hinduism

The outstanding symbolic-expressive tradition in North Bali is that of theBali-Hindu religion. This is a spectacularly prolific and diverse religionwhich cultivates an ancient heritage of Indie philosophy and myth, exter-

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nalized in moral and metaphyscial learning; ritual and worship; legend; art;architecture; theatre; dance; music; shadow puppetry; etc. Various ac-counts of it have been given in an ever-growing literature that includesCovarrubias, Belo, Bateson & Mead, Geertz, Boon, Lansing and manyothers—yet its interpretation remains highly problematical. One majordifficulty arises from the great local institutional variation which character-izes Bali. Anthropology is notoriously weak in its method when faced withthe task of abstracting valid models of complex phenomena which showsuch local variability. Thus each of the above cited accounts falls into thetrap of identifying as fundamental and necessary particular institutionalforms which prove to be locally variable and sometimes absent.

Bali-Hindu religion constructs and conjures forth a marvellous worldfilled with gods, spirits, and mystical forces, where dead ancestors partakeactively in social relations and intervene powerfully in events, where god-head and humankind fuse and souls transmigrate and are reborn again andagain in patterns conditioned by a moral cosmos. Above all, this world, iscreated through worship. In North Bali, nearly every village has its temple(Pura desa) where the god and founders of the village are honoured; nearlyall have a death temple where the souls of the uncremated dead hover; andnearly all have a share in an, often distant, sea-side temple where thenurturing and regenerating forces are celebrated. There are chains of watertemples—from the point of origin of the stream that irrigates the land anddown to simple shrines by every riccfield—where the irrigation societies andeach individual cultivator perpetuate the lovely goddess of rice and fertility.There are shrines by the wayside; there are family shrines in every houseand collective temples for descent groups where ancestors are worshipped;and a wide variety of temples and shrines to manifestations of Siwa, thecentral godhead of creation and the universe and the changeability anddestruction of all, who is also manifest in the great volcanic peak thatdominates the island. All these gods, or aspects of godhead, are propitiatedin the arts, in song and procession and dance, and above all in prayer and"the art of sacrifice" (cf. Ramseyer 1977)—an elaborate symbolic code offlowers, cut and plaited coconut leaf figures, fruits, pastry and other foods.

Brilliant and anthropologically influential attempts have been made toshow the coherence between this symbolic-expressive realm and the social'structure (e.g. Bateson 1949; Geertz 1973); yet strictly pursued, suchanalyses can provide only a rather monochrome projection of this enchant-ed reality, and a very partial representation of the structures in society.D

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Material Concerns

To address the latter point first: salient as worship and religion are inBalinese life, most of the social activity in North Bali is none the less notconcerned with ritual but directed towards providing food, material goods,and income. Contrary to the explicit philosophy of Bali-Hinduism whichdenies the desirability of becoming rich and belittles the importance of thematerial world, these activities reflect a pervasive desire among people formaterial benefits: to feed and clothe themselves and their families everbetter; to obtain an increasing variety of consumer goods; to educate theirchildren; to celebrate their gods and ancestors in sumptuous fashion; toenhance social standing and each person's sense of self-worth. In pursuit ofthis they engage in activities conspicuously shaped by pragmatic consider-ations of available technology, labour, and the exchange values of alterna-tive products, not priorities and valuations derived from or consistent withthe symbolic and expressive constructs of Bali-Hinduism; and these activi-ties have deep and ramifying consequences for the structures of theirsociety. New crops and techniques are introduced to enhance productivityand profits from the lands, and a bustle of petty enterprises mushroom inresponse to new opportunities in transport, trade, construction, and tour-ism. How deeply these penetrate and interconnect comes out in nearly everylife story and every community. Here is the old priest in a mountain villagewho turns out to have spent 30 years as a carpenter building luxury hotelsin South Bali (and who only returned to his village when offered templelands there, by a faction who wished to displace the ex-communist encum-bent priest). There is the roadless coastal hamlet that houses a majorenterprise based on catching fish fry by the millions for immediate trucktransport in plastic bags (they die within 48 hours unless released) to stockthe fish ponds in the Javanese tidal zone. A "deep structure" of societygenerated by these activities is the "central place" role of the main town ofSingaraja, serving a hinterland of dependent, producing villages. One of thetertiary results is that Singaraja sustains a population of sufficient size so asubsidiary university campus has been located there. A variety of highlysignificant patterns in the lives of the North Balinese can thus only beunderstood if one pursues a nexus of such independent causes and connec-tions affecting the objective conditions of society. Being there, these presentpeople with facts on which they attempt to place a cultural construction,butwhich are not in themselves the products of those constructions; and we canonly understand them by embedding our cultural analysis in a wider matrixof processes.

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Many Authorities

Nor does it seem plausible that Bali-Hinduism itself, seen purely as asymbolic/expressive system, can have and maintain the kind of consistencyand coherence which structuralist and interpretive analyses so valiantlyattempt to impose. Bali-Hindu religious traditions appear to me far toointernally contentious and alive for so to be the case. Observe the diversityof authorities within the tradition that make conflicting claims to be heardin Bali-Hinduism's variously instituted liturgies and priesthoods:

(1) A large and still only partly mapped heritage of originally Sanskrit-derived manuscripts has been retained and supplemented through a thou-sand years of literacy. But these manuscripts are sanctified in ways thathave precluded their functioning as a coherent, critical literature. Eachmanuscript is the revered property of a person, a family line, or a templecongregation and embodies sakli, holy potency. It cannot simply be read, itmust be approached as godhead is approached, with offerings, incense andprayers and only at the ritually appropriate moments—then it may. be reador chanted. Not few keepers of such manuscripts are so terrified of theirpowers that they have never once in their lives tried to read them. Yet thesevarious fragments of texts each provides an ultimate authority for theteachings and ritual functioning of their keepers as priests.

(2) The highest ranking priests, commanding the largest troves of suchmanuscripts, are of Brahmana caste. Born of, and living in, endogamousmarriages they are immensely respected and highly sacred persons, andduring their liturgy they become incarnated by the great Siwa himself, andthus transmit the ultimate power and blessing to the holy water which theyprepare. Such Brahmana priests perform the life crisis rites for families ofall other castes, who are attached to them personally as disciples and utilizethem, to variable extent, as spiritual advisers. Yet perhaps half of thepopulation of North Bali have no link with such a priest; and wholecommunities, some of them with rich collections of ancient documents oftheir own, brag that no Brahmin has ever performed a single rite in theirvillage, as they use their own commoner priests to attend Siwa temples andprepare holy water. There is also the inconvenient structural impedimentthat Brahmins cannot be priests in village temples, since they are them-selves so divine that they cannot serve divinities of lower caste, such asvillage founders.

(3) The main body of temple priests are thus of commoner caste —without any centralized, institutionalized system of training; selected byrights of inheritance, or by vote of the congregation, or by the godsthemselves through possessed temple mediums.

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(4) Most numerous are the ranks of family and descent group priests,selected, with considerable attention to seniority, within the descent groupitself. Though such priests are also highly respected, authoritative andinfluential in the interpretation they impose on life for their flock, they areinevitably somewhat cramped in their style by the accessability of

(5) the deceased ancestors themselves who spontaneously possess theirdescendants or can be brought down for conferences by professional trancemediums, and who speak with great moral and spiritual authority to theirchildren on all cultural, personal and practical matters.

(6) Finally, the gods themselves speak to the Balinese; not through thecasting of knucklebones, the cracks formed in scapulae or in cryptic oracu-lar statements, but in full presence when they descend during the greatceremonies and possess the temple mediums. I have been present in a deathtemple when Durga, the cosmic principle of destruction, through the bodyof a common peasant ranted and scolded her high priest, and the wholecongregation, until the priest collapsed in hysterical sobbing and the wholetemple staff was sent scurrying about to make the demanded ritual atone-ments.

To approach such a raucous cacophony of authoritative voices with theexpectation that their messages and their teaching will be coherent, in anysense of the term, one would have to be a very dogmatic anthropologistindeed. My argument is certainly not that what is said and done will bedevoid of pattern; it is that we must expect a multiplicity of partial andinterfering patterns, asserting themselves to varying degrees in variousfields and localities; and any claim to coherence should be contested whereit has not been demonstrated.

The force of this as a first premise for any analysis of Balinese culture iseven more compelling when one recognizes that Bali-Hinduism is not onlyitself a conglomerate of questionable coherence, it is also in North Bali onlyone strand among many in the culture of the region. Thus, on the night ofthat dramatic visitation by Durga, while the cymbals and the incense werepreparing the way for the gods (possession is expected; which gods maycome, and what they will say, no one can foretell)—I suddenly heardthrough the night air another congregation being called. For the time was 3a.m., and the Muslim mu'ezzin was calling the true believers to prayer.

Islam

About 10 % of North Balinese are indeed Muslims, living scattered throughthe rest of the population, or occasionally in separate wards or villages.Theirs is a religon about as opposite to Bali-Hinduism as could be, yet one

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that penetrates as deeply into the everyday life of its membership: in itsperson-definition, naming system, inheritance law, calendar, and idea ofhistory as well as its worship, morality and cosmology. Yet also theseBalinese are participants in the common larger society, mingling in workand in leisure, forming cross-category friendships, and even defying theorthodoxies of both sides and intermarrying. Despite the flood of imageryand symbolism that saturates the expressive dimension of the life of Bali-Hindus, and the fundamentalism whereby Islam claims complete hegemo-ny over the cultural construction of the Balinese Muslims' reality, the' twocamps do indeed meet in a common society and are capable of interactingand communicating complexly within it.

Bali Aga

We may add further diversity. A scatter of villages, many but not all in themountains, are known under various designations as Bali Aga or Bali Mula- "aboriginals". These communities deny caste, rejected the traditionalkingship of the central areas, live by a diversity of social organizationsbased on seniority among married couples (also an important element inmany other village constitutions), and are governed either by strict seniorityor by possessed priestesses. Yet also their members blend freely in the largersociety with Hindus and Muslims whenever they so choose.

Western-Inspired Modernism

During our longest period of fieldwork, we lived with a schoolmaster andhis family in Singaraja and there saw a fourth, and widely influential,construction of reality. Our host spoke Balinese, Indonesian, Arabic andEnglish, and to enlarge his world further he was working on Chinese. Hewas politically active in the regional committee of Soharto's GOLKARpolitical organization; he was patron and broker as well as teacher to theeducated lower middle class youth moving up through the burgeoningIndonesian educational system; he was busy and influential in the elitenetwork of modern administrators and bureaucrats. His world was thusmainly structured by the modern school system, modern politics andadministration, and the massive flow of information and knowledge trans-mitted by modern media. His children were systematically being trained,groomed and married to move in that same world, where they will jointhousands of others who have their reality constructed by the same forces.

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Wizards and Sorcery

But rumor said that this schoolmaster was also a powerful magician. If so,he was—as so many other Balinese—participating fully also in an entirelydifferent world, constructed over very different premises regarding persons,social relations, causality, and material and spiritual forces. A social meta-physics of concealed passions, mental balance and hygiene; love magic,death magic, rain magic; wizards inducing and combatting disease, thisconstruction represents an immensely powerful undercurrent behind politesocial facades of etiquette codifying ideals of collective civic obligations,friendliness, virtue and consideration (Wikan 1987).

I could go on picking out further, perhaps less salient, strands; but Ichoose to end with a vignette of my last visit to one of our friends—an activemember of his family's and village's religious life, and as Balinese as I amNorwegian—in which we conversed about his recent phonemic analysis ofsome Sumbawan languages. My simple point should be abundantly clear:an honest respect for what goes on between people in North Bali suggests .that no deep-structural slight of hand, or other facile interpretation, canreduce these phenomena to a homogenized unitary "Culture" by destillingand generalizing whatever regularities one can discern in institutionalizedexpressions. People participate in multiple, more or less discrepant, uni-verses of discourse; they construct different, partial and simultaneousworlds in which they move; their cultural construction of reality springs notfrom one source and is not of one piece.

Questioning the Nature of Coherence

Our most general task as anthropologists studying complex societies mustbe to explore the interdependence of elements in such conglomerates. Weneed to develop discovery procedures that do not impose a false ontology of"holism", yet do not abdicate to a multiplicity of more-or-less plausible adhoc "interpretations". How can we be at once sceptical to the coherence ofcultural things, yet alert to causal and necessary interconnections wherethey seem to occur, mapping out their extent and carefully identifying theirlimits, nature and force? Analysing the cultural pluralism of parts of theMiddle East, I have found it illuminating to think in terms of "streams" ofcultural traditions (Barth 1983, 1984), each exhibiting an empirical cluster-ing of certain elements in syndromes that tend to persist over time, althoughseveral of them can variously be seen to mingle in the life of local andregional populations. This template of "stream" entails no pre-set assump-tions of just what it may be that holds the elements of each co-tradition

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together—this is precisely what we should seek to discover—nor any expecta-tion that all streams should show homologous features and a similaressential dynamics—they may be differently constituted and differentlyreproduced. The main criterion is that each tradition shows a degree ofcoherence over time, and remains recognizable in various contexts ofcoexistence with other streams in different communitites and regions.

The five rubrics I have introduced in the preceding description—viz.:Bali-Hinduism; Islam; Bali Aga villages; the modern sector of educationand politics; and a sorcery-focused construction of social relations—eachseems to show these characteristics. Thus, they each have a historicaldimension. Perhaps there was a wave of megalithic migrations, from whichthe Bali Aga social organizations are descended. At any rate, thousand-yearold historical sources attest to village organizations based similarly onseniority (Goris 1954, Lansing 1983). A sorcery-based view of social rela-tions can likewise be plausibly assumed to form a culture historical substra-tum, and is similar in many of its particulars to sorcery beliefs elsewhere inSoutheast Asia. Hinduism and Buddhism appeared as a historical streamout of India into Southeast Asia, reaching Java and Bali in the seventh-eighth century, with its renderings of caste, godhood, suffering and Nirva-na. When Islam came to Indonesia in the 11-12 hundreds, a new compo-nent was added to Southeast Asian civilization, from a new external source.It brought a new awareness and a wind of change, preaching universal law;the equality of mankind; individualization among men through their per-sonal and voluntary submission before a non-anthromorphic god; the finite,unchangeable truth of the Koran and the Last Prophet. Later a verydifferent curriculum and perspective appeared from the West, and wasinstituted in modern education, political parties, and statehood. All thesestreams now together into what is today the complex culture and society ofBali.

The Search for Deeper Structure

For an anthropological analysis, it would hardly be sufficient to write thisunfolding history and show that certain impulses have adhered to eachother: we are expected to be able to take the matrix of culture and societyapart and show why-it coheres. Could the careful study of the cultural formsthemselves, in search or~tn€4r__CQmrjrehensive logic, provide a suitablediscovery procedure? Attempts to do solof~Bali-HJnduism have proved it tobe a frustrating task. The luxuriant imagery of Bali-HTH3uisro-seerns to baseitself on a logic arising from other premises and epistemologiesfhanours,and is thus difficult to trace if it is abstracted from a context of social pras

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Thus, Bali-Hindu thinkers seem to assert that1. Whatever is, is continually changing: continuously coming about, beingsustained, being dissolved (the principles of which Brahma, Wisnu, andIswara are manifestations). In these processes of being, entities are contin-ually changing, and particularly liable to turn into their opposites (cf.Hobart 1986 a, b).2. What our senses report is illusion; it is difficult to distinguish appearancesfrom truth; reality is like a shadow-puppet play.3. Something is often a manifestation of something else. So there is a networkof identities connecting overtly very different entities as manifestations ofthe same.4. There is harmony and resonance between macrocosmos, buana agung, andmicrocosmos, buana alii, the latter usually identified with the person/theindividual consciousness. So cosmic disturbances are reflected in sicknesswithin me; and my bad act may engender cosmic upset.5. Partly for this reason, and partly because gods, ancestors, spirits andogres arc powerful and whimsical and continuously active around us, thematerial world is as much and as often shaped by magic, virtue and evil as it isshaped by labour and physical causation.

But if we follow Bali-Hindu sages into such abstractions, how do we reversethe process and recreate out of these principles a flcshed-out cosmology anda real world such as they inhabit? Taken together, and applied simulta-neously as if they were one unitary set of universal principles, they providefar too many options, and become indeterminate in the reality they mightgenerate. Or what do we make of a "theory" of reincarnation whichencompasses the following Bali-Hindu assertions: a Buddhist longing forNirvana; the celebration and deification of individual dead ancestors; theprinciple of karma pahala, i.e. the just return for acts; the assumption thatrebirth always occurs in the dead person's descent group; a belief that onechild may contain the "souls" of several ancestors, while one ancestor isoften reincarnated in several descendants with widely discrepant lifecourses?

Much scholarship can be (and is!) wasted on puzzling over such prob-lems, which are artifacts of an improper and unproductive framing of thequestions, one that prejudges and limits our vision to one of searching forunderlying logical premises and principles for the patterns we discover. Iadvise that we should try seeking our insights in the wider and opener fieldof social processes. Social activity is an ongoing activity of world-making(Winner 1986:15); the forms of culture are not best explained by abstracting

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their general principle but by asking what each particular pattern may beevidence of. We must ask just what kind of consistency we find in eachparticular pattern, and why this form develops just here? It is the trendtowards some partial order that needs to be explained, by particularefficient causes, whereas the absence of order needs no explanation.

A Sociology of Knowledge

So we must go into each of the streams we identify, as a universe ofdiscourse and (i) characterize its salient patterns; (ii) depict its productionand reproduction, and its boundary maintenance; (iii) in this depictiondiscover what makes it cohere, and leave it as an open, empirical questionhow and to what extent its idcational contents achieve logical closure as atradition of knowledge. We likewise must identify the social processeswhereby these streams intermesh, sometimes with interference, distortionand even fusion. Moreover, we may find each stream to be characterized bya different essential dynamics. For example, the fundamentalism of Islam—where all scholarship inevitably gravitates back to the one shared, finite textof the Koran—is impossible to produce in a world where Durga steps downinto a congregation and speaks. This is a sociological, not a purely logical,assertion; and it represents a plea for a broad sociology of knowledge thatshows how the traditions and their parts are constituted by showing theprocesses that generate them. Thus, in a world where reality is culturallyconstituted, we must seek to show how the shapes of culture are sociallygenerated.

This is a perspective I find echoed in Hannerz, in his exploration ofurban anthropology in terms of the generation of shared meanings (Han-nerz 1980:287). Where does it happen in the social structure of the city, heasks: in the salon, in the coffee house; by a street gang, a cult group, auniversity department? We must press these questions for the insights theycan produce: What difference does it make, how does it show in the culturalproduct whether it is the creation of a street gang or a university depart-ment? Applied systematically, such questions provide us with a method todiscover and map the significant forms of coherence in culture—not bymeditating on shapes and configurations but by identifying social processesand empirically observing their consequences, i.e. modelling their opera-tion. Thereby, we should become able to trace out the parties to thediscourses that take place, and the "segment of the infinite and meaninglessWorld process", in Weber's terms, "on which they confer meaning andsignificance" (Weber 1947).

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Reconceptualizing Culture

To conceptualize culture as such a product, we need to purge our concept ofa number of inappropriate connotations, misleading conveniences, andabsurd tacit assumptions. In contrast to the sum of received wisdom onCulture, an attempt to use the concept critically in complex societiesdemands a new set of assertions:

(1) Meaning is a relationship between a configuration or sign and a viewer,not something enshrined in a particular cultural expression. To createmeaning requires an act of conferring, as Weber implies. To discovermeaning in the world of others, contra much contemporary anthropologicalmethod from Lévi-Strauss to Geertz, we need always to link a bit of cultureand an actor with her/his particular constellation of experience, knowledgeand orientations.

(2) Culture is distributive in a population, shared by some but not by others.Thus it cannot, with Goodenough, be defined as what you need to know tobe a member of a society and cannot, with the cthnomethodologists, be.systematically elicited from an informant, by linguistic frames. The mostsignificant structures in culture—i.e. those with the most systematic conse-quences for people's acts and relations—may not be embedded in its formsbut in its distributions, its patterns of «on-sharing.

(3) Actors are (always and essentially) positioned. No account "in theirown voice" will have privileged validity, and any model of a relationship,group or institution must be the anthropologist's construct. Differences inpositioning provide the main impetus for the "long conversation" withincommunities (Malinowski 1922) through which people interpret and sharetheir experiences, and enhance their grasp of their own life and that ofothers. Recent reflexive anthropological writing, while stressing the contin-gent and positioned nature of accounts, has focused too egocentrically onthe natives' dialogue with ourselves and too little on their dialogue with oneanother.

(4) Events are the outcome of interplays between material causality andsocial interaction, and thus always at variance with the intentions of individualactors. The structural-functional position—still deeply entrenched in themental reflexes of anthropologists—which equates purpose, function andeffect cannot be sustained. We need to incorporate both a dynamic view ofexperience, as the outcome of individuals construing events, and a dynamicview of creativity, as the outcome of the struggle of actors to overcome thisresistance on the part of the world, into our model of how culture isgenerated.

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This simple set of assertions—in no sense original and, in their conventionalverbal contexts, not even particularly controversial—when combined andpursued with reasonable consistency provides a most fruitful and stimulat-ing instrument in the study of North Bali. In conclusion, I shall seek tosketch this in respect to some of the major themes I am pursuing in thatstudy, and have illustrated in the preceding pages.

"Meaning is a Relationship . . ."

This assertion does not presume a particular theory of meaning; but itinevitably guides our discovery procedures: It directs us to look at the linkbetween any vehicle of expression and the person employing or respondingto that vehicle, as a necessary step to ascertain the meaning of culturalthings. Particularly in a complex society, where the cultural expressions andsymbols that are produced are almost inexhaustibly many, elaborate andmulti-layered and their connection with the persons, groups and forces thatproduce them are far from transparent, the conscious search for such linksbecomes essential. Without that injunction, anthropologists with a salutaryreluctance to become enmeshed in the exploration of private, covert motiva-tions and repressed, deep symbolism may tend to short-circuit the wholematter by performing only an externalist extrapolation of the apparentlogical entailments of formal customs. This only too easily leads to interpre-tations very wide of the mark, which arc then combined in elaborateconstructions that do not reflect the understandings and meanings enter-tained and communicated among real people. Heeding the emphasis onmeaning as a relationship, one is led to give much greater attention tocontext and praxis.

In North Bali this was brought home to me at a very early point infieldwork, when I discovered that the Balincsc Muslim community in whichI was working employ teknonymy, i.e. the renaming of parents and grand-parents as father-of-x, grandmother-of-x, etc. on the birth of a first-bornchild. My research design at the time was mainly to study social organiza-tion and personhood among Balinese Muslims and compare them to SouthBaiinese Hindus as represented in Geertz's corpus of writings, especially his"Person, Time and Conduct . . . " (Geertz 1966/73). In it, Geertz interpretsteknonymy as one of a series of cultural patterns whereby the Balineseconstruct personhood and depict each others as stereotyped contemporar-ies, abstract and anonymous fellowmen who shrink from the close encoun-ter with each other's unique and temporal selves; and I tried gently to hintat this significance to the small circle with which I was conversing. Theirinitial disorientation swiftly changed to a confident putting-things-right as

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they explained how, on the contrary, they employ the custom to flatter theproud parents/-grandparents of a first-born by giving prominent attentionto this personal event which will be very much on their mind. Later, usingthat name will evoke this happy time, and a feeling of cameraderie in itsjoint recollection. I later found that Bali-hindus in North Bali construe thecustom in the same way. Its meaning to those I know who use it, and theorientations it reveals, are thus the very opposite of what Geertz depicts.Far from anonymizing and stereotyping, individual achievement is empha-sized in a manner designed to flatter the personal vanity of the other, whilealso the shared memory of this valued event-in-life is evoked betweenintimates. Likewise, the pervasive use of public titles to address and namepersons who have achieved such titles: the effect of the practice falls intoplace if you imagine all your former fellow students calling you "Prof." or"Dean" from the day of your appointment and through all the subsequentyears, always in an approving and positive way.

I am still prepared to accept as fairly plausible an argument that the widepractice of such name-changes will render the complete biographies ofdistant and genealogically senior public persons somewhat more opaque inbeing less simple to retrieve. But the "meaning" of the practice: what itexpresses in the social relationship in which it is employed, and the orienta-tion it reveals to us, as outsiders, to understand, are in most respects thestark opposite of Geertz's externalist construction. Casting back to theopening assertion of this discussion: one can only have reasonable assuranceto have grasped meaning correctly if one pays close attention to those cuesof context, praxis and communicative intent and reading which alone allowus to enter tentatively into the world they construct.4

In the words of Unni Wikan: "The starting point for any analysis ofperson beliefs . . . must be the actor's own use of this construction tointerpret events and aspects of the self and other persons . . . [T]he mosteloquently elaborated analysis of time, person, and conduct in Bali has littlevalue as an entry to the understanding of Balinese culture when viewed onlyin the realm of concepts within which their experience moves, so long as weare given no notion oFwkat that experience in fad is" (Wikan 1987:343). Usingthis perspective, Wikan (1987) develops a powerful and detailed critique ofthe interpretation of Balinese culture constructed from the imputed logic ofthe form of certain institutions. In a more comprehensive monograph(Wikan forthcoming) she uses this same methodological principle to devel-op a comprehensive account of personhood, emotion and social relations inNorth Bali.

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"Culture is Distributive . . ."

Thus, for example, to produce the "cultural text" (to highlight the inappro-priateness of that metaphor) of a particular Bali-Hindu cremation ceremo-ny in which we were involved as friends and participants, a number ofparties were mobilized, with very different interests and skills and deeplydivergent conceptions of what was being performed, i.e. the meaning, in therites. Two different ancestor-possession mediums (balian matuunan) wereindependently consulted to check with the deceased what the required scaleof the ceremony should be (an order in excess of what the majority faction ofthe family had hoped was confirmed, and they reluctantly had to sell abouthalf of their inherited estate to raise the sum required. Thereby, of course,they harvested the social rewards of conspicuous consumption from some—but from others, the opprobrium of exaggerated ostentation). An astrologer(balian usada) determined the auspicious time for the rite, according to asystem and cosmology inaccessible to those he was assisting. Officials of thetown quarter, with their records of communal labour obligations andperformances of the quarter's citizens, approved of the dates and mobilizedand organized the large apparatus of collective labour in scores of differenttasks for men and women. The high priest of the great death temple of thetown, and three family priests, led the rites, whereas no Brahmin priest wasused. But the high priest was steeped in the philosophy of Karma andNirvana, and furthering the abstract goals of dissolving pcrsonhood andfacilitating the reunion of the soul with its source. The family priests, on theother hand, seemed mainly intent on conjuring the dead souls back intoanthropomorphic representations, again and again, and securing purifiedand deified ancestral persons for the family shrines.

An enormous volume of highly differentiated offerings were provided byan offering-making house in another town quarter (whereas the anthropo-morphic soul representations were made by the family). The contractor forthe offerings (tukad banlen) was of Brahmin family; but most of the labour ofcutting, plaiting and assembling the materials was sub-contracted to com-moner women of that other quarter—a quarter, incidentally, for politicalreasons mostly not even on speaking terms with the cremating family andquarter. This matters little, however, as disasters caused by faulty sacrificeswill boomerang on those.who committed the mistakes, not the family whopurchases the offerings. The cremation tower was built in a distant village,specialists in the esoteric rules of its dimensions and construction. Itsheight, however, was determined by the family's wish to avoid having to cutelectric wires along the route of the procession—an expensive matter toarrange with the electricity board. The cooking of rice for the town quarterfeasts, performed in a closely guarded room, was in the hands of a woman

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particularly knowledgeable in the rites and the magic required to keep ituncontaminated by the sorcery-poisoning no doubt being attempted byvengeful enemy participants. Clowns for the procession, gamelan orchestrafor entertainment and ritual accompaniment, a puppetteer for a Ramayanaperformance, etc., were called in from various places.

To perform their sacred duty to the dead, the descendants are thusutterly dependent on all these others: all the neighbours in the town quarterwho are like them in the relevant respects and must be mobilized to providecommunal support, and all those specialists who are unlike them in one oranother component of cultural competence. Together they then create acharacteristic Bali-Hindu festival, in which a plethory of collective repre-sentations evoke Bali-Hindu ideas, myths and images. Rich cultural materi-als are thereby actualized and taught to children and adults, bereaved andgeneral populance alike. But not only are these materials a product ofdifferent people with diverse skills and ideas: what is seen and heard, andhow the message touches you, will also vary immensely. To the communityat large this cremation was, after all, only a festive and demanding episode(it was the fifth in that town quarter held during the last year). To thecelebrating family it was a major hurdle and milcpost—they had not heldone for about 60 years, and ten adults and thirty four children werecremated. To the orphaned 9-year old girl who was led up to throw moneyon her mother's pyre, or to the family priest who twice fainted during theproceedings from the confrontation with his father's spiritual presence, themeanings were others again. As a consequence, the precipitate from theevent—the experience that transformed the living and their personal storeof knowledge and insight, i.e. their own cultural competence—was one thatwill reproduce differences between people, not reduce them. So the collec-tive product is not only a result of distributive culture being temporarilypooled: it also reproduces the distributive character of culture in thetradition.

Contrast this dynamics with that found in the differently structuredtradition of Balinese Muslims. It is one that propells persons into othertrajectories, generating quite other events, patterns, and cultural construc-tions and distributions. Thus, in a community of Balinese Muslims where Iworked, the basic spiritual relationship is not to one's ancestors but to one'sguru, one's teacher of religion. This follows from the premises that Islamicknowledge is one, it should ideally be held by all and is accessible throughscholarship, and it provides the only valid basis for society, morality, andcivic authority. All children must therefore attend a guru; and when theyhave mastered their first guru's curriculum, young men of talent andambition set off into the world in search of greater knowledge. It can be

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obtained from the great teachers of Islam in Lombok and Java, and best ofall in Mecca; and this road leads to a career as scholar and teacher, tomembership in the governing board (Majlis ulama) of the village, andultimately, if your effort is crowned with success, to the position as Imam inits Mosque. From the village I studied, nearly all boys go out for someyears, and climb to their appropriate level in the pyramid of scholarship.The pinnacle ofthat pyramid was reached by the greatest son of the village,Hajji Makhfuz, who was himself a teacher of Shafi law in the Masjid-e-Haram in Mecca for three years, before returning and becoming the villageImam at home. Thus, the Muslim congregation is created from a distribu-tion, and consequent flow, of cultural items: between gurus and pupils,wandering between the schools of Muslim Indonesia; Imams preaching totheir flocks; jurists and village assemblies applying Shariah to conflicts. Allcontribute to transforming the message of the Koran into the practice ofIslam: submission to the will of the one God.

Developing the perspective of my second assertion, that culture is distri-butive, I am thus helped towards a view of the reproduction of these twodeeply contrasting traditions, as well as the other traditions I have mention-ed. A close attention to the distribution of culture shows how it animatessocial life and generates complex cultural constructions. It leads to asociology of knowledge that can illuminate cultural production and repro-duction in a complex and hetcrogenous world.

"Actors are Posi t ioned. . ."

It would extend this essay intolerably if I were to continue to illustrate insubstantive sketches the various findings that each of these assertionsfacilitate in the study of North Bali. But it may be helpful to indicate inmore general terms some of the perspectives for which this third assertionopens the way. In one sense it provides the very gateway to the analysis Iwish to develop: it supplies me with the challenge and the freedom toconstruct my own analysis of my object of study. There is no place wherethe true informant can be found who will tell us what it all really means;and there is no writ that makes us the captives of the culture we aredescribing, the particular concepts that are embraced and used in a com-munity. But this does not turn anthropology into mere writing: it is amisjudgment of the true implications of this circumstance that makes it ajustification for modern deconstructionist programmes in our literature. Myunderstanding, on the contrary, is that the fact of the positioning andpartiality of every view has no such implications for the epistemology ofanthropology as an empirical science. It in no way reduces the primacy we

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must give to the realitites which people construct, the events they cause tohappen, and the experiences they harvest. But it forces us to acknowledgethat people—each of us—live our lives with a consciousness and a horizonthat encompasses much less than the sum of the society, institutions andforces that impinges on us. Somehow, people's various limited horizons linkup and overlap, producing a world much greater, which the aggregate oftheir praxes create, but which no one can see. It remains the anthropolo-gist's task to show how this comes about, and to chart that larger world thatensues. To do so is important, since it is a world which its membersunwittingly inhabit, and which covertly shapes and limits their lives.

This realization also provides our brief to write about other cultures andother lives in English and as anthropology. To do so is not to deny thecultural construction of reality, and the primacy (and difficulty) of the taskof gaining entry into those particular worlds which are the constructs of realpeople; but it clarifies the need and legitimacy of locating them in a frame ofour construction, in which you and I also have a place.

For my analysis the concept of positioning also provides a necessary-escape from a conundrum of my own making, which my template of"streams" might otherwise produce. I could put it that each person is"positioned" by virtue of the particular pattern of coming-together in her ofparts of several cultural streams, as well as particular experiences. Toconstruct the internal dynamics of each of those streams, we have takenaspects of the person apart and linked them up with parts of other personsin encompassing organizations and traditions; but the way the parts arevariously embedded in complex persons remains a primary fact of life."Positioning" provides a way to put together again what we have wrentasunder, and to relate persons to the multiple traditions which they em-brace, and which move them.

Thus, it can facilitate a first step towards the modelling of a number ofimportant social processes. For example, the differences between peoplewhich are retrieved as positioning probably provide the main impetus toessential forms of interaction, conversation, and reflection. Your experienceand horizon being different from mine (within bounds), your interpretationof events becomes interesting and potentially insightful for me, but accessi-ble only through special communicative effort. Indeed, the experiencewhich we thereby shape and share may provide me with the main materialsI use to challenge interpretations foisted on me by an authority person I amlinked to through my participation in another stream. There may be toolshere for the modelling of pervasive processes of influence, interference, andrevision of conceptions and behaviours in heterogeneous and complexsocieties.

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The Disjunction of Intent Meanings and Consequences

I asserted also that often "intentions differ from outcomes" and also fromconstruals of events. This assertion seems to me to provide an escape fromthe stalemate of conceptions of "emic vs. etic" and "models of and modelsfor". It makes it more possible to give clarity and precision to our empiricaldescriptions. Further, it enhances our ability to handle macro-phenomenawithout doing violence to people's own interpretations and realities. Wecertainly need concepts and vocabulary to integrate our discussions ofsymbol and meaning with those of labour and market, political dynamics,demography, and ecology. Moreover, I hope also by clearing out this debrisof other assumptions about culture to be able to see more clearly thecreative work that Balinese are doing to refashion their consciousness in achanging world. A substantive analysis along these lines would be moreuseful for the critical reconstruction of general anthropological theory.

I would not claim that the assertions I have formulated above hold thekey whereby we can contribute equally and profoundly to all the themes Ihave raised. Nor am I arguing that every anthropological analysis should bedesigned to encompass or address them all. But I do wish to argue that it isimportant that we struggle to make a coherent anthropology capable ofaddressing these themes and issues. Too much theory is constructed withnarrow and limited objectives in mind, without pursuing its force or failuresin other parts of anthropology's vast enterprise. Nor do I think it is healthy,or defensible, to retain in one nook or cranny of anthropology such prem-ises, conceptions or heuristics as have been proved baseless or unfruitful inother parts of our field. Our efibrts to rebuild, reform, discard and constructtheory should be ceaseless, and strive towards comprehensiveness andconsistency. The present essay has tried to take a few steps in that direction.

NOTES

1. This account is based on fieldwork by Unni Wikan and myself over about 11 months eachsince December 1983, partly together and partly separately. I gratefully acknowledge herstimulus to this work, her major insights in the analysis I present, and her permisson to usefreely of her field data for my purposes. The research has been supported by the NorwegianResearch Council for Science and the Humanities (N.A.V.F.) and by Instituttet for sam-menlignende kulturforskning. In Indonesia, the research was sponsored by the IndonesianAcademy of Sciences (L.I.P.I.) and advised by professor Ngurah Bagus.

2. Even Malinowski, of course, admitted to having idealized his description of Trobriand lifealong these lines by portraying it without the European influences that had indeed "to aconsiderable extent transformed" it (Malinowski 1935:480).

3. Without especially developing these implications, I made a first step in such a direction onmy analysis of symbol and meaning in the ritual of the Baktaman of New Guinea (Barth

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1975). There I attempt to show their ritual idioms to be based on analogue coding, entailingsources of meaning which do not require the assumptions of digital structure, minimalcontrast, or bounded domains, and thus leave the effects of social process on the structure ofthe code capable of demonstration.

4. A more extended discussion of these issues will appear in Barth, forthcoming, and parts ofmy perspective have been developed with respect to data from elsewhere in Barth 1983 andespecially Barth 1987. For an analysis of Bali highly compatible with the present argument,see Wikan 1987, and forthcoming.

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