EVERYDAY LIFE IN BALI

THE HOUSE

As an organic unit, the structure, significance, and function , the home is dictated by the same fundamental principles of be lief that rule the village: blood-relation through the worship of the ancestors; rank, indicated by higher and lower levels; ar orientation by the cardinal directions, the mountain and the sea, right and left. The Balinese say that a house, like a human being, has a head - the family shrine; arms - the sleeping-quarters and the social parlour; a navel - the courtyard; sexual organs - the gate; legs and feet - the kitchen and the granary; and anus - the pit in the backyard where the refuse is disposed of.

Magic rules control not only the structure but also the building and occupation of the house; only on an auspicious day specified in the religious calendar can they begin to build or occupy house. On our arrival we were able to secure a new pavilion in the household of Gusti only because the date for occupation s by the priest was still three months off.

We were strangers immune from the laws of magic harmony that affect only the Balinese and we could live in the house until the propitious day when the priest would come to perform the melaspasin, the ceremony of inauguration, saying his prayers over each part of the house, burying little offerings at strategic points to protect the inmates from evil influences.

A Balinese home (kuren) consists of a family or a number of related families living within one enclosure praying at a common family temple, with one gate and one kitchen. The square plot of land (pekarangan) in which the various units of the house stand is entirely surrounded by a wall of whitewashed mud, protected from rain erosion by a crude roofing of thatch. The Balinese feel uneasy when they sleep without a wall, as, for instance, the servants must in the unwalled Western-style houses.

The gate of a well-to-do family can be an imposing affair of brick and carved stone, but more often it consists of two simple pillars of mud supporting a thick roof of thatch. In front of the gate on either side are two small shrines (apit lawang) for offerings, of brick and stone, or merely two little niches excavated in the mud of the gate, while the simplest are made of split bamboo. Directly behind the doorway is a small wall (aling aling) that screens off the interior and stops evil spirits. In China I had seen similar screens erected for the same purpose and once I asked a Balinese friend how the aling aling kept the devils from entering; he replied, with tongue in his cheek, that, unlike humans, they turned corners with difficulty.

The pavilions of the house are distributed around a well-kept yard of hardened earth free of vegetation except for some flowers md a decorative frangipani or hibiscus tree. But the land between the houses and the wall is planted with coconut trees, breadfruit, bananas, papayas, and so forth, with a corner reserved as a pigsty. This is the garden, the orchard, and the corral of the house and is often so exuberant that the old platitude that in the tropics one has only to reach up to pluck food from the trees almost comes true in Bali.

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