Bali

Bali is the Indonesian island whose population remained Hindu when Java turned to Islam, and its tradition, Agama Hindu Dharma, is not a survival of Indian religion so much as a distinct system built from Indian materials.

Ritual there is organised around keeping the world in balance between the seen and the unseen, sekala and niskala, and the practical work of that is offering. Small palm-leaf trays of rice, flowers and incense are placed at house shrines, crossroads, workshops and vehicles daily, and larger ceremonies escalate through village, regional and island-wide scales. Every household compound has a shrine in its northeast corner, every village has three temples with defined functions, and membership of a village temple congregation is a civic fact as much as a religious one.

The calendar drives everything. Two systems run at once, a lunar-solar one and a two hundred and ten day cycle of intersecting weeks, and temple anniversaries fall on the latter, which is why a Balinese year contains an extraordinary density of ceremonies.

Rice is inseparable from the ritual order. Irrigation is managed by cooperative associations, the subak, whose water distribution decisions are taken at water temples and which combine engineering, farming and worship in one institution. Priests work from Sanskrit and Old Javanese texts, and the offerings that reach the public eye are made largely by women.

Two Balinese practices are known worldwide, and both are commonly misread.

Trance is a normal feature of temple ceremony rather than an exceptional one. Participants become vehicles for a deity or a spirit, may handle fire or press krises against their own chests without injury, and are brought out of the state by attendants with holy water. Jane Belo's fieldwork in the 1930s documented the range of forms and the ordinariness of the institution, and the material she gathered remains a principal source. What outsiders often see is a performance version arranged for visitors, which is a real cultural form in its own right and is not the temple event.

Cremation is likewise misunderstood as a funeral. The body is usually buried first and exhumed for cremation later, sometimes years later, when the family can afford the ceremony, and the event is loud, expensive, communal and often shared between families. Its purpose is to release the soul from the body so that it can proceed toward eventual reincarnation and eventual enshrinement as a family ancestor, and further ceremonies follow the cremation itself.

Bali has been a mass tourist destination since the 1970s and its religion is unavoidably part of what is sold. The island's own institutions have taken positions on which ceremonies may be watched, photographed or entered, and those rules are set by temple and village authorities rather than by the industry.