The fresh lunar year of 1934 began for the Balinese on Friday, March 23, 2012. Nyepi, as Bali's new year's holiday is known, is celebrated as a day of silence. All families across the island, which has a population of nearly four million, remain within the walls of their family compounds or homes and spend the day from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. the following day in rest, meditation, prayer and fasting.
Tourists and expats are expected to follow the strictures to at least some degree, remaining quietly indoors for the 24-hour period. As usual on this island where tourism comprises about 80 percent of the economy, foreigners are given a bit of a pass. Prohibitions for observant Balinese include lighting a fire or using electricity, for instance, which are not strictly enforced for all hotels and expat homes.
All roads and the international airport, which is expected to welcome a record-breaking three million foreign visitors in 2012, are closed for 24 hours in observance of Nyepi. On an island whose economic lifeblood is tourism, one wonders, how long can this tradition continue?
Other traditions under pressure from modern economic reality surround Bali's subak. Subak is the term for a voluntary association of paddy rice farmers who share a common water source for irrigation, as well as the system of irrigation itself, including canals and tunnels that carry water from the volcanic crater lakes to the coast.
Irrigation is only one aspect of this intricate system that has sustained wet paddy rice cultivation in picturesque terraces that have helped make Bali famously beautiful.
Water temples across the island provide forums in which farmers of each subak gather to agree upon planting schedules in order to use their common water source equitably and to coordinate flood periods that prevent pest outbreaks. Farmers in a subak are thus also congregants of a given water temple.
These are democratic participatory institutions, but they are also religious institutions. Farmers, and all Balinese, revere the Goddess of the Lake Dewi Danu as well as the Rice Goddess Dewi Sri.
Farmers belonging to a subak contribute both time for meetings and part of their harvest to their water temple. Their responsibilities also include rituals and rites performed on the Balinese lunar calendar.
This hitherto resilient system may have met its match with the current priority for tourism expansion. Though agriculture was the mainstay of Bali's economy for a thousand years until about three decades ago, the rising price of land has nearly destroyed traditional rice paddy farming.
A pending proposal for UNESCO World Heritage recognition for Bali's subak system could shift priorities. International recognition, and the tourism dollars that follow, could inspire creative thinking about how to balance tourism and agriculture, as well as how best to honor tradition.
Photo by Glenn Chickering
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