Bali Artilce

The people who live in the mountains of central Bali are rather different from other Balinese. It is often implied that they represent a kind of ancestral population-what the Balinese were like before the arrival of Hindu and Buddhist influences from India and Java.

This is really not the case and many of the Bali Aga`s cultural traditions are clearly related to those of their lowland cousins.

Nevertheless, they do constitute a distinct population in their own right and have exercised an independent existence since the earliest times- many of the edicts of the first Hindu Buddhist king of Bali, in the 10th century, were addressed to the village communities that are today classified as Bali Aga.

The principal point of divergence between lowland and mountain Balinese seems to have the resistance of the latter to Majapahit influences from the 14th century awards: the Bali Aga people do not organized into castes, and so forth. Naturally their remote location in the mountains has played a big part in helping the Bali Aga to retain their cultural and political autonomy.

This isolation has also meant that they retained more of their Autronesian cultural heritage than their lowland neighbours, who came under the influence of the Hindu courts established by Javanese prices and Majapahit settlers.

This helps to explain, if not justify, the tendency to represent the Bali Aga as a kind of aboriginal population.

Village Layout

The Bali Aga villages are spatially oriented along the same lines as those in the lowlands, being laid out in relation to a mountain–sea axis (kaja-kelod) and the path of the sun. In other respects, however, they are quite different. In the place, although the Bali Aga live in extended family compounds, individual structures within the compound are not functionally differentiated and each building constitutes a self-contained unit which is home to a married couple, their children and the odd elderly parent.

These quite separate households households are called kuren, which is the common term for both a hearth and the group of people who share the food cooked on it. Kuren represent the basic social and economic unit of Bali Aga society.

Compound Layout

As far as the layout of the compound is concerned, the individual houses are arranged in rows along an uphilldownhill axis, with the most senior member of the extended family occupying the house at the uphill (kaja) end of the compound. As the male children of a couple marry and form their own households, new houses are added at the downhill end of the row.

At the same time, however, as older generations die, the houses they occupied at the uphill end become vacant and are inherited by younger couples, rather like a game of musical chairs. In this respect, residence patterns within the compound reflect the relative status of different household within the extended family group.

Sometimes one finds two rows of houses laid out in parallel within a single compound, which indicates that the compound was established by more than one founder-by a pair of brother, for example.

Bali Aga villages, of which a number may be found throughout the mountains around Kintamani, are distinguished by their unusual layout and uniformity of the houses, as if they all adhere to a single design. However, the traditional Bali Aga architecture is disappearing in many places as houses are rebuilt using modern materials.