These past ten years I’ve spent most of my vacation time exploring a culture that is old and still very much intact, and at the same time I have observed the slow unraveling of that culture.
My introduction to Bali began with a tour group that focused on the textiles and crafts of this Indonesian island. Although the media often tout Indonesia as the largest Islamic nation in the world, only a few of its more than 17,000 islands have a Muslim majority. Many islands remain overwhelmingly Christian from Portuguese and Dutch missionary days. Bali is 95 percent Hindu.
I found on Bali a Hindu culture uniquely blended with an ancient practice of animism, the belief that everything is infused with godlike spirit. Extended families form the principal social unit. Whole streets might be composed of cousins of various degrees and a household includes at least three generations. Every family has a rice field. They eat rice at every meal. They place a pinch of cooked rice on a palm leaf with red, yellow, and white flowers and one or two sticks of incense—I see these daily offerings to the gods and the evil spirits tucked into roadside shrines, lying on the ground in doorways, and perched on the dashboard next to the bus driver. Rice growing requires an abundance of water, water at precise times and in specific amounts. Control of water rests firmly with the subaks, collectives of local farmers, which not even the federal government in Jakarta can overrule. In Bali it is all about family and rice.
On that first visit I walked out alone early one morning and saw many young people in blue and white uniforms all walking or riding motorbikes in the same direction. I thought they were probably headed for the high school, so I followed them. After working twenty-five years as a high school librarian, I have the habit of popping into local schools while traveling. When I turned into the main driveway at Suweta Street Senior High School, this was nothing new for me. But it turned out to lead to an endless adventure.
The tall, lanky, very surprised principal soon exhausted his English and sent for the English teacher. This is how I met Nyoman, now my good friend, guide, and protector. Nyoman left his class in the middle of the lesson and hurried to the principal’s office to discover that an American had fallen from heaven into his school. His English was fearless but uniquely accented and mushy. So when he led me across the gardenlike campus to his classroom, I felt I had a mission to give his students the experience of hearing the real sounds of English. I spent an hour with thirty polite and shy seniors talking about California and American teenagers, as well as the Balinese lifestyle I was just discovering. I have returned to the island seven times since then and I always visit Nyoman’s classroom.
That very first day Nyoman insisted that I return with him to his village, about twelve miles away, to meet his family. He borrowed a helmet for me and I rode on the back of his motorbike, sitting side-saddle as Balinese women do in their tightly wrapped, elegantly patterned sarongs. I met his wife, Wayan, his tiny daughter, Putu Ana, and his ancient grandmother. Also living in the same compound were his mother-in-law and his father-in-law, the chief priest at the temple next door. Adjoining the back garden I found the rice fields that appear to extend all the way to the misty feet of the volcanoes that pierce the horizon. Not far along the narrow dikes that define the paddies an old temple slumbers under one of the largest banyan trees I’ve ever seen.
When I stay overnight with the family, Nyoman and I like to walk at dawn in the cool, quiet streets of the village just as it is waking up. We stroll by homes grand and modest, all with no front doors to lock. We pass the woodworking studios that have made this village, Sumampan, famous. We skirt stone shrines built to appease the evil spirits that lurk almost everywhere. The Balinese honor trees and rocks that are out of the ordinary, and not far from Nyoman’s corner a gigantic boulder broods silently under a wrapping of gold cloth. Nearby we find the ritual cock-fighting grounds and across from that rises Sumampan’s most important temple. Here I once watched short, pudgy Nyoman lead the village men in the classic warrior dance, as graceful as any professional troupe. The family has taken me with them to worship in their favorite temples; taught me the prayers that include incense, flowers, and holy water; and included me in the traditional New Year’s trek to the seashore to appease more evil spirits.
Bali life is full of ceremony, music, and dance, all in the service of sekala and niskala, the seen and the unseen. Over the years I have become increasingly acquainted with the island’s unseen. Even educated and worldly-wise Balinese believe in this niskala, which has led me to ponder: If the spirits inhabit Bali, why not elsewhere. Why not in America, where we ignore them. Should we pretend they are not there?
As for sekala, the world of the seen, I love staying with families where I am welcome to watch, even participate in, food preparation, child rearing, and the occasional plumbing emergency. Whenever someone says to me, “Please come to—a wedding, a tooth-filing, a cremation,” I reply with an enthusiastic yes and I have not been disappointed. But I don’t have to attend a special celebration to understand that religion and spiritual life are not separate from everyday life or to observe that the rhythm of the rice fields—planting, flooding, harvesting—affects everyone.
As much as I have been immersed in Balinese culture and as often as Nyoman and others have been eager teachers, I find that as I learn more I understand less. I’m no expert. I call myself an engaged observer. Sometimes I’m a nervous observer—and a sad one.
My sadness took shape when I discovered the work of Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, a nonprofit concerned with the protection of biological and cultural diversity. Helena spent seventeen years living in Ladakh, a remote region of the Himalaya, where she studied the traditional way of life—extended families living in harmony with the land. I learned that she came to believe that preserving that culture would bring more happiness than attempting to update their standard of living. In her book Ancient Futures, she writes: “I used to assume that the direction of ‘progress’ was somehow inevitable, not to be questioned. . . . In Ladakh I have learned that there is more than one path into the future and I have had the privilege to witness another, saner, way of life. . . .”
Helena believes that Western development workers should not blindly impose modern “improvements” on ancient cultures. She put into words what I had been trying to articulate about Bali: “I have seen that community and a close relationship with the land can enrich human life beyond all comparison with material wealth or technological sophistication. I have learned that another way is possible.”
Another way—of families living in harmony with their rice fields, of people in touch with the universe, seen and unseen, that’s what I witness in Bali. I come from a culture that is embraced by millions of Americans, a clutch of values that we forcibly export to millions and that is happily imported by millions of others, but I have learned that another way is possible, that there is another way to live and be happy without being quite so attached to machines, screens, and keyboards and being more connected to trees, rocks, and the wind.
As I have gotten to know the gentle culture of this lovely little island, I’ve noticed changes creeping into it. The most worrisome is the bulldozing of rice fields to make way for tourist hotels. These hotels have the potential, though perhaps not quite the reality expected, of bringing in more cash than a rice harvest. With fewer rice fields, the island must buy more foreign rice at a price subject to world market demands. Even in the remaining rice fields, and Bali is still covered with them, a revolution has been taking place. Native Balinese rice produces two harvests a year, not enough to feed the growing population. Scientific laboratories developed a rice strain that yields three harvests a year. Sounds like a boon for the island, but this new rice requires fertilizers and pesticides that the older species does not. The degradation of the environment has begun, the expense of rice farming has risen, and all the water is contaminated—everyone drinks bottled water.
Around the edges of the rice fields, I glimpse TV satellite dishes as well as antennas. The families I visit have state-of-the-art DVD players and spend their evenings watching American basketball tourneys, first-run movies, and MTV. I cringe that Britney Spears is one of my culture’s most heartily embraced exports.
Putu Ana, Nyoman’s doll-like daughter, was probably a year and a half old when I met her. She developed into a bright and motherly leader among the children that scamper up and down the alley that leads to the rice fields. Nyoman confided to me on that first day of our friendship that he wanted Putu Ana to attend high school in America (and he was probably thinking of my school) so she could learn English well. I nodded and smiled at this dream, but inwardly I was horrified. This sweet, gentle child, so typically Balinese, would be destroyed by the hard-edged, in-your-face culture she would encounter even in my suburban town of 56,000. Violence, consumerism, and scantily dressed girls and women assault us from every direction; wealth and celebrity form our nirvana. I hoped I could discourage Nyoman from sending his daughter abroad. Out loud, I ventured that she might not feel comfortable or safe in a place where people don’t honor the spirits. In my heart I felt it would make more sense for my town to send some if its young people to Nyoman’s village for a year of closer acquaintance with the interface between the seen and the unseen.
The last time I visited, almost two years ago, hand-held computer games had become the rage. Even Putu Ana, then about seven, possessed one and remained completely wrapped up in it the entire time I spent with Nyoman’s family. She no longer ran with the neighborhood kids. She spoke not one word or even glanced my way, and her family did nothing to change this behavior. I saw her caught in the glitzy web of Western culture. It was like watching in slow motion the beginning of a fatal traffic accident.
A few days before I returned home I made my usual visit to Nyoman’s classroom. The period begins as always with a prayer led by the class president. It ends the same way: Shakti, shakti, shakti, peace, peace, peace, intone the students. This shakes me to the core and fills me with a deep sadness. Don’t lose this, my whole being seems to be shouting. And I say so to the students: Please don’t throw away your culture.
Are they listening to me as they sit there—quiet, respectful, attentive—while issues of People magazine and Seinfeld DVDs await them stuffed in the backpacks shoved under their chairs? I hope they’re listening, but I can see they too have discovered another way.
