THE ANCIENT SURVIVAL: THE BALI AGA

We became acquainted with I-Tanggu, a youngish man with fingernails four inches long, who was the perbekel of Tenganan, the representative of his village with the Dutch Government. We were surprised to find him quite sociable. Once we played host to him in Den Pasar and from then on we were often invited to visit Tenganan.

Unlike the rest of the villages in Bali, there is hardly any vegetation around the Tenganan houses, which are all exactly alike and are arranged in rows on each side of stone-paved avenues. In the central place is the council house where the Elders meet, a long shed about ten feet wide by some seventy feet long, strongly built and apparently very old. Farther along are other buildings for public use, the purpose of some kept a secret.

The most curious are the unique mill for grinding kemiri nuts to obtain oil, and the wooden Ferris-wheel, usually dismantled, in which the women revolve for hours in a strange rite. The dwelling of I-Tanggu is just like all the others: a small gate reached by a flight of steps leads into a court in which are the sleeping-quarters, the kitchen, and a long house for relatives and for storage. There is also a small empty shrine where the spirits may rest when they visit their descendants.

The people of Tenganan are tall, slender, and aristocratic in a rather ghostly, decadent way, with light skins and refined manners. The majority of the men still wear their hair long. They are proud and look down even on the Hindu-Balinese nobility, who respect them and leave them alone. They live in a strange communistic or, rather, patriarchal-communalistic system in which individual ownership of property is not recognized and in which even the plans and measurements of the houses are set and alike for everybody.

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