The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies

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Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology

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The analysis of culture in complex societies

Fredrik Barth
a a
Ethnographic Museum, University of Oslo, Norway
Version of record first published: 20 Jul 2010.
To cite this article: Fredrik Barth (1989): The analysis of culture in complex societies, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 54:3-4, 120-142 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.1989.9981389
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The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies

by Fredrik Barth
Ethnographic Museum, University of Oslo, Norway
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 13:24 11 October 2012
Field materials from North Bali are presented to question conventional anthropological conceptions of culture and common practices in its analysis. The author argues that there is a needfor anthropology to reshape Us assumptions, particularly in response to recent reexive and deconstructionist critiques. A revised set of assumptions is presented with regard to cultural meanings, sharing, positioning and function; and its fruitfulness in the analysis of cultural reproduction in Bali is explored.
The expression "complex" societies in the title may strike you as quaint, a word that begs important questions and harks back to untenable positions.. But quaintness, and question-begging, arc also embedded in most of the other words we use in anthropology, not least in the various senses of the terms "culture" and "society". Like most anthropological concepts, they are fundamentally stamped with questionable assertions of holism and integration: They celebrate the connectedness of disparate institutions; the fitness of custom for a place and a lifestyle; the sharing of premises, values and experiences within a community. In our day this assertion of connectedness is mostly conveyed in the language of structuralism, with its emphasis on abstractable logical patterns embedded in superficially diverse forms abstractions which are supposed to capture the true import of these forms. Our usage of "culture" is furthermore flawed by the deep imprecision of referring simultaneously to (a sumtotal of) observable patterns, and to the ideational bases of such patterningwhich invites the recurring fallacy of misconstruing description as explanation. Finally, we are faced with an ambivalence in our appreciation of culture: on the one hand as something immensely intricate in its overwhelming detail, an intricacy which the competent ethnographer should demonstrate that she commands;
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on the other hand an ideal of boldness as the way to abstract and reveal the underlying essence. I shall not try to improve matters by adding to anthropology's troublesome history of verbal definitions and redefinitions of "culture" and "society". Rather, I suggest that we can most usefully work substantively, by exploring the extent and kinds of connections which obtain in the domain of culture under various conditions of society. And the role I choose in this task is not that of erudite and elegant scholarship, but rather that of H. C. Andersen's little boy observing the Emperor's Clothes. Theory and concepts in anthropology should be tested in the analysis of life as it unfolds in some particular place in the world. So any such place can serve as a provocation to challenge and criticize anthropological theory. The island of Balia truly complex societywill serve as my provocation on this occasion.1 Bali and Anthropological Praxis We should try to look at our object of study without having our view too closely determined by received anthropological conventions. Get off the bus in North Bali, and what you will see is an incoherent bustle of activity in the densely inhabited zone between high mountain and encompassing sea. Modern traffic thunders by. Passengers and bystanders, variously wearing sarongs and blue-jeans, mingle with exquisite politeness and grace, even in their welcoming of uncouth tourists. Children, immaculately dressed in school uniforms, swarm by on bicycles. Labour teams arc busy harvesting rice in the surrounding fieldsteams based on traditional rules of cooperation and contract, but working modern high-yielding strains of rice governed by an intensive regime of irrigation and artificial fertilizer, dependent on water provided from recently upgraded reservoirs supplying old irrigation channels. And if it is afternoon, chances are you will see a line of women balancing elaborate, colourful offerings on their heads as they move in solemn procession towards one of the innumerable irrigation temples that are scattered through the countryside, where complex worship follows ancient customs and calendars. This (at least apparently) disconnected diversity of people's activities; and the mixture of new and old in a creolized cultural scene, are obtrusive features which will confront the anthropologist nearly anywhere; but we are trained to suppress the signs of incoherence and multi-culturalism in the scene as inessential aspects of modernization. Yet we know that all cultures have always been the conglomerate results of diverse accretions, as Linton showed us in his delightful vignette of what it involved to be 100%
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American in the 1930s (Linton 1936: 326-7). In a deeply conditioned protest against a long discredited shreds-and-patchcs account of diffusion and cultural growth, we still dutifully insist on seeing such evidence as a threat to our subject matter and premises. So instead of trying to make our theories embrace what is there, we are led to picking out some small, distinctive pattern in this confusing scene, and applying our ingenuity to salvaging a (functionalist) holism by constructing (structuralist) isomorphies and inversions of this randomly chosen pattern, as if it encoded a deeper connectedness. I can readily imagine a colleague responding to the North Balinese scene I have sketched for you by producing an article on mountain : sea :: up : down :: man : woman :: sacred : profane :: head : body; and then point out how this allows women, who arc lower, to carry burdens on their head and therefore to carry the sacred offerings, whereas men who must protect their head's sacrality carry burdens on their shoulders and can thus only carry secular burdensexcept for the ashes of cremation, carried into the sea on the head of a man, perhaps as women bring babies, regarded as reincarnate deities, into this world through the nether parts of their bodies. Our journals are full of such bagatelles which, though at their best they may be engaging, essentially argue nothing and change nothing. Note how they function: they serve their authors as a means to escape having to confront what is problematic in the world around us. They silently reaffirm the assumption of pervasive logical coherence in culture without exploring its extent and character; and they leave the axioms of received wisdom on "culture" undisturbed by any number of such reports from the field.
Reshaping our Concept of Culture

There is a growing modern reaction to this scholasticism. In the words of Clifford & Marcus, we need to throw culture in its totality into the "contested" pot, because it cannot be represented as a "unified corpus of symbols and meanings that can be definitely interpreted" (Clifford & Marcus 1986:19). But having established this view, we do not need more programmatic literature on the elusiveness of absolute truth and the dialogic character of the ethnographer's conversations in the field. We need to find the templates best suited to the phenomena that confront us, and work towards building theory about the realm to which words like "culture" and "society" were intended to refer. To do so, I would argue that we must start making positive, falsifiable assertions about the phenomena we observe. This means being bold, at the risk of being proved simpleminded.
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There are ingredients for such bolder assertions in the convergence, in several contemporary traditions of scholarship, towards a view that people's realities are culturally constructed (see, for example Wuthnow el al. 1984, reviewing the perspectives of Berger, Douglas, Foucault and Habermas). Much of what the members of any particular group regard as given in the world can reasonably be shown to be merely a reflection of their own presuppositions. Yet they, as all of us, act and react of necessity to the world as it appears to them, and thus imbue it with consequences arising from their own construction. Thus every people's reality will be composed of cultural constructions, held in place by mutual consent as effectively as by inevitable material cause; and this consent would seem to be embedded in collective representations: in language, categories, symbols, rituals, institutions. What anthropologists have referred to as "culture" then becomes very central indeed to an understanding of humanity and the worlds humans inhabit. So far so goodbut we must now step gingerly. What might be. the necessary entailments of this plausible insight, and what should we continue to contest in the old conception of "culture"? Wuthnow et al., reflecting I think fairly the thrust of the literature which they are summarizing, urge that cultural analysis be pursued as "the study of the symbolic/expressive dimension of social life" (1984 : 259). But thereby, en unstated assumption is introduced that all the patterns we observe in cultural constructs arc somehow related to, and essential for, culture's symbolic and expressive functions. "Culture" can be represented as the independent variable and prime mover; and received assumptions of holism and essentialism within closed universes of distinctive cultures can be perpetuated. Yet the assertion that reality is culturally constructed in no way settles the question of how or whence these cultural patterns arise. Unhinging them from a previously assumed correspondence with an objective, noncultural reality does not necessarily render all cultural patterns autonomous and a property of culture as such; nor docs it underwrite an axiom of the existence of multiple, discrete and internally integrated local cultures. I see, on the contrary, in the thesis of the cultural construction of reality an enhanced need to explore empirically the extent of patterning in the realm of culture and the variety of sources for such patterns as can be found. Specifically, I see scope for an argument that major patterns of culture may be the results of particular social processes, and neither functionally nor structurally essential to culture's symbolic and expressive operations. Thus, for example, let us reflect on that compelling sense of fitness and pervasive order that arises during a fieldworker's immersion in a primitive community, and which has lent intuitive plausibility to Malinowski's theoretically
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flawed dogmas of functionalism.2 Does it expose the roots of that meaning and force which the culture possesses? In the conventional anthropological argument we are asked to see it as evidence of an all-embracing and compelling logical consistency permeating all aspects of meaning and action, to be teased out like the transformation rules of a linguistic code or the articulation of the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Might we not more usefully be able to develop a method both to question and to map the extent of connectedness in the local culture, and show it to be an artifact of life in a small-scale, socially dense context?3 Be that as it may: the Bali I have seen certainly can give no such impression of pervasive logic and connectedness. Living in a North Bali ambience one is overwhelmed by the extraordinary richness and elaboration that characterizes the symbolic/expressive domain, but not by its unity. One senses that it has an aura or style which becomes familiar though remaining elusive; it also has a multiplicity, inconsistency and contentiousness that defeats any critical attempt at characterization. Clearly, these are very imprecisely formulated intuitions, only crudely retrieved by the label "complex". Yet they should be sufficient to force us to discard a vocabulary celebrating harmony, fitness and unity and an analysis assuming integration and logical consistency. What we need is to develop other templates, which would enable ut to grasp its features better and more directly, not filtered through a negation of the inappropriate. Systems models, and holism in the sense of an ambition to embrace a wealth of phenomena and provide a comprehensive account, should continue to provide challenges, but cannot provide blueprints of what we should find. How can we best transcend the debris of discredited schemata and become able to sec and articulate characteristic features of what is there? I see no way, and no reason, to escape anthropology's time-honoured naturalist task of working through a careful, meticulous description of a broad range of data. So that must provide our discovery procedure, even though it cannot be performed in the format of the present article (but see Barth, forthcoming; Wikan 1987, 1988, and forthcoming). Let some fragments and outlines of such a description indicate the substance of my argument.
Bali-Hinduism
The outstanding symbolic-expressive tradition in North Bali is that of the Bali-Hindu religion. This is a spectacularly prolific and diverse religion which cultivates an ancient heritage of Indie philosophy and myth, exter-
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nalized in moral and metaphyscial learning; ritual and worship; legend; art; architecture; theatre; dance; music; shadow puppetry; etc. Various accounts of it have been given in an ever-growing literature that includes Covarrubias, Belo, Bateson & Mead, Geertz, Boon, Lansing and many othersyet its interpretation remains highly problematical. One major difficulty arises from the great local institutional variation which characterizes Bali. Anthropology is notoriously weak in its method when faced with the task of abstracting valid models of complex phenomena which show such local variability. Thus each of the above cited accounts falls into the trap of identifying as fundamental and necessary particular institutional forms which prove to be locally variable and sometimes absent. Bali-Hindu religion constructs and conjures forth a marvellous world filled with gods, spirits, and mystical forces, where dead ancestors partake actively in social relations and intervene powerfully in events, where godhead and humankind fuse and souls transmigrate and are reborn again and again in patterns conditioned by a moral cosmos. Above all, this world, is created through worship. In North Bali, nearly every village has its temple (Pura desa) where the god and founders of the village are honoured; nearly all have a death temple where the souls of the uncremated dead hover; and nearly all have a share in an, often distant, sea-side temple where the nurturing and regenerating forces are celebrated. There are chains of water templesfrom the point of origin of the stream that irrigates the land and down to simple shrines by every riccfieldwhere the irrigation societies and each individual cultivator perpetuate the lovely goddess of rice and fertility. There are shrines by the wayside; there are family shrines in every house and collective temples for descent groups where ancestors are worshipped; and a wide variety of temples and shrines to manifestations of Siwa, the central godhead of creation and the universe and the changeability and destruction of all, who is also manifest in the great volcanic peak that dominates the island. All these gods, or aspects of godhead, are propitiated in the arts, in song and procession and dance, and above all in prayer and "the art of sacrifice" (cf. Ramseyer 1977)an elaborate symbolic code of flowers, cut and plaited coconut leaf figures, fruits, pastry and other foods. Brilliant and anthropologically influential attempts have been made to show the coherence between this symbolic-expressive realm and the social' structure (e.g. Bateson 1949; Geertz 1973); yet strictly pursued, such analyses can provide only a rather monochrome projection of this enchanted reality, and a very partial representation of the structures in society.
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Material Concerns To address the latter point first: salient as worship and religion are in Balinese life, most of the social activity in North Bali is none the less not concerned with ritual but directed towards providing food, material goods, and income. Contrary to the explicit philosophy of Bali-Hinduism which denies the desirability of becoming rich and belittles the importance of the material world, these activities reflect a pervasive desire among people for material benefits: to feed and clothe themselves and their families ever better; to obtain an increasing variety of consumer goods; to educate their children; to celebrate their gods and ancestors in sumptuous fashion; to enhance social standing and each person's sense of self-worth. In pursuit of this they engage in activities conspicuously shaped by pragmatic considerations of available technology, labour, and the exchange values of alternative products, not priorities and valuations derived from or consistent with the symbolic and expressive constructs of Bali-Hinduism; and these activities have deep and ramifying consequences for the structures of their society. New crops and techniques are introduced to enhance productivity and profits from the lands, and a bustle of petty enterprises mushroom in response to new opportunities in transport, trade, construction, and tourism. How deeply these penetrate and interconnect comes out in nearly every life story and every community. Here is the old priest in a mountain village who turns out to have spent 30 years as a carpenter building luxury hotels in South Bali (and who only returned to his village when offered temple lands there, by a faction who wished to displace the ex-communist encumbent priest). There is the roadless coastal hamlet that houses a major enterprise based on catching fish fry by the millions for immediate truck transport in plastic bags (they die within 48 hours unless released) to stock the fish ponds in the Javanese tidal zone. A "deep structure" of society generated by these activities is the "central place" role of the main town of Singaraja, serving a hinterland of dependent, producing villages. One of the tertiary results is that Singaraja sustains a population of sufficient size so a subsidiary university campus has been located there. A variety of highly significant patterns in the lives of the North Balinese can thus only be understood if one pursues a nexus of such independent causes and connections affecting the objective conditions of society. Being there, these present people with facts on which they attempt to place a cultural construction,but which are not in themselves the products of those constructions; and we can only understand them by embedding our cultural analysis in a wider matrix of processes.
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Many Authorities Nor does it seem plausible that Bali-Hinduism itself, seen purely as a symbolic/expressive system, can have and maintain the kind of consistency and coherence which structuralist and interpretive analyses so valiantly attempt to impose. Bali-Hindu religious traditions appear to me far too internally contentious and alive for so to be the case. Observe the diversity of authorities within the tradition that make conflicting claims to be heard in Bali-Hinduism's variously instituted liturgies and priesthoods: (1) A large and still only partly mapped heritage of originally Sanskritderived manuscripts has been retained and supplemented through a thousand years of literacy. But these manuscripts are sanctified in ways that have precluded their functioning as a coherent, critical literature. Each manuscript is the revered property of a person, a family line, or a temple congregation and embodies sakli, holy potency. It cannot simply be read, it must be approached as godhead is approached, with offerings, incense and prayers and only at the ritually appropriate momentsthen it may. be read or chanted. Not few keepers of such manuscripts are so terrified of their powers that they have never once in their lives tried to read them. Yet these various fragments of texts each provides an ultimate authority for the teachings and ritual functioning of their keepers as priests. (2) The highest ranking priests, commanding the largest troves of such manuscripts, are of Brahmana caste. Born of, and living in, endogamous marriages they are immensely respected and highly sacred persons, and during their liturgy they become incarnated by the great Siwa himself, and thus transmit the ultimate power and blessing to the holy water which they prepare. Such Brahmana priests perform the life crisis rites for families of all other castes, who are attached to them personally as disciples and utilize them, to variable extent, as spiritual advisers. Yet perhaps half of the population of North Bali have no link with such a priest; and whole communities, some of them with rich collections of ancient documents of their own, brag that no Brahmin has ever performed a single rite in their village, as they use their own commoner priests to attend Siwa temples and prepare holy water. There is also the inconvenient structural impediment that Brahmins cannot be priests in village temples, since they are themselves so divine that they cannot serve divinities of lower caste, such as village founders. (3) The main body of temple priests are thus of commoner caste without any centralized, institutionalized system of training; selected by rights of inheritance, or by vote of the congregation, or by the gods themselves through possessed temple mediums.
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(4) Most numerous are the ranks of family and descent group priests, selected, with considerable attention to seniority, within the descent group itself. Though such priests are also highly respected, authoritative and influential in the interpretation they impose on life for their flock, they are inevitably somewhat cramped in their style by the accessability of (5) the deceased ancestors themselves who spontaneously possess their descendants or can be brought down for conferences by professional trance mediums, and who speak with great moral and spiritual authority to their children on all cultural, personal and practical matters. (6) Finally, the gods themselves speak to the Balinese; not through the casting of knucklebones, the cracks formed in scapulae or in cryptic oracular statements, but in full presence when they descend during the great ceremonies and possess the temple mediums. I have been present in a death temple when Durga, the cosmic principle of destruction, through the body of a common peasant ranted and scolded her high priest, and the whole congregation, until the priest collapsed in hysterical sobbing and the whole temple staff was sent scurrying about to make the demanded ritual atonements. To approach such a raucous cacophony of authoritative voices with the expectation that their messages and their teaching will be coherent, in any sense of the term, one would have to be a very dogmatic anthropologist indeed. My argument is certainly not that what is said and done will be devoid of pattern; it is that we must expect a multiplicity of partial and interfering patterns, asserting themselves to varying degrees in various fields and localities; and any claim to coherence should be contested where it has not been demonstrated. The force of this as a first premise for any analysis of Balinese culture is even more compelling when one recognizes that Bali-Hinduism is not only itself a conglomerate of questionable coherence, it is also in North Bali only one strand among many in the culture of the region. Thus, on the night of that dramatic visitation by Durga, while the cymbals and the incense were preparing the way for the gods (possession is expected; which gods may come, and what they will say, no one can foretell)I suddenly heard through the night air another congregation being called. For the time was 3 a.m., and the Muslim mu'ezzin was calling the true believers to prayer. Islam About 10 % of North Balinese are indeed Muslims, living scattered through the rest of the population, or occasionally in separate wards or villages. Theirs is a religon about as opposite to Bali-Hinduism as could be, yet one
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that penetrates as deeply into the everyday life of its membership: in its person-definition, naming system, inheritance law, calendar, and idea of history as well as its worship, morality and cosmology. Yet also these Balinese are participants in the common larger society, mingling in work and in leisure, forming cross-category friendships, and even defying the orthodoxies of both sides and intermarrying. Despite the flood of imagery and symbolism that saturates the expressive dimension of the life of BaliHindus, and the fundamentalism whereby Islam claims complete hegemony over the cultural construction of the Balinese Muslims' reality, the' two camps do indeed meet in a common society and are capable of interacting and communicating complexly within it. Bali Aga We may add further diversity. A scatter of villages, many but not all in the mountains, are known under various designations as Bali Aga or Bali Mula - "aboriginals". These communities deny caste, rejected the traditional kingship of the central areas, live by a diversity of social organizations based on seniority among married couples (also an important element in many other village constitutions), and are governed either by strict seniority or by possessed priestesses. Yet also their members blend freely in the larger society with Hindus and Muslims whenever they so choose.
Western-Inspired Modernism During our longest period of fieldwork, we lived with a schoolmaster and his family in Singaraja and there saw a fourth, and widely influential, construction of reality. Our host spoke Balinese, Indonesian, Arabic and English, and to enlarge his world further he was working on Chinese. He was politically active in the regional committee of Soharto's GOLKAR political organization; he was patron and broker as well as teacher to the educated lower middle class youth moving up through the burgeoning Indonesian educational system; he was busy and influential in the elite network of modern administrators and bureaucrats. His world was thus mainly structured by the modern school system, modern politics and administration, and the massive flow of information and knowledge transmitted by modern media. His children were systematically being trained, groomed and married to move in that same world, where they will join thousands of others who have their reality constructed by the same forces.
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Wizards and Sorcery But rumor said that this schoolmaster was also a powerful magician. If so, he wasas so many other Balineseparticipating fully also in an entirely different world, constructed over very different premises regarding persons, social relations, causality, and material and spiritual forces. A social metaphysics of concealed passions, mental balance and hygiene; love magic, death magic, rain magic; wizards inducing and combatting disease, this construction represents an immensely powerful undercurrent behind polite social facades of etiquette codifying ideals of collective civic obligations, friendliness, virtue and consideration (Wikan 1987). I could go on picking out further, perhaps less salient, strands; but I choose to end with a vignette of my last visit to one of our friendsan active member of his family's and village's religious life, and as Balinese as I am Norwegianin which we conversed about his recent phonemic analysis of some Sumbawan languages. My simple point should be abundantly clear: an honest respect for what goes on between people in North Bali suggests . that no deep-structural slight of hand, or other facile interpretation, can reduce these phenomena to a homogenized unitary "Culture" by destilling and generalizing whatever regularities one can discern in institutionalized expressions. People participate in multiple, more or less discrepant, universes of discourse; they construct different, partial and simultaneous worlds in which they move; their cultural construction of reality springs not from one source and is not of one piece.
Questioning the Nature of Coherence

Our most general task as anthropologists studying complex societies must be to explore the interdependence of elements in such conglomerates. We need to develop discovery procedures that do not impose a false ontology of "holism", yet do not abdicate to a multiplicity of more-or-less plausible ad hoc "interpretations". How can we be at once sceptical to the coherence of cultural things, yet alert to causal and necessary interconnections where they seem to occur, mapping out their extent and carefully identifying their limits, nature and force? Analysing the cultural pluralism of parts of the Middle East, I have found it illuminating to think in terms of "streams" of cultural traditions (Barth 1983, 1984), each exhibiting an empirical clustering of certain elements in syndromes that tend to persist over time, although several of them can variously be seen to mingle in the life of local and regional populations. This template of "stream" entails no pre-set assumptions of just what it may be that holds the elements of each co-tradition
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togetherthis is precisely what we should seek to discovernor any expectation that all streams should show homologous features and a similar essential dynamicsthey may be differently constituted and differently reproduced. The main criterion is that each tradition shows a degree of coherence over time, and remains recognizable in various contexts of coexistence with other streams in different communitites and regions. The five rubrics I have introduced in the preceding descriptionviz.: Bali-Hinduism; Islam; Bali Aga villages; the modern sector of education and politics; and a sorcery-focused construction of social relationseach seems to show these characteristics. Thus, they each have a historical dimension. Perhaps there was a wave of megalithic migrations, from which the Bali Aga social organizations are descended. At any rate, thousand-year old historical sources attest to village organizations based similarly on seniority (Goris 1954, Lansing 1983). A sorcery-based view of social relations can likewise be plausibly assumed to form a culture historical substratum, and is similar in many of its particulars to sorcery beliefs elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Hinduism and Buddhism appeared as a historical stream out of India into Southeast Asia, reaching Java and Bali in the seventheighth century, with its renderings of caste, godhood, suffering and Nirvana. When Islam came to Indonesia in the 11-12 hundreds, a new component was added to Southeast Asian civilization, from a new external source. It brought a new awareness and a wind of change, preaching universal law; the equality of mankind; individualization among men through their personal and voluntary submission before a non-anthromorphic god; the finite, unchangeable truth of the Koran and the Last Prophet. Later a very different curriculum and perspective appeared from the West, and was instituted in modern education, political parties, and statehood. All these streams now together into what is today the complex culture and society of Bali. The Search for Deeper Structure For an anthropological analysis, it would hardly be sufficient to write this unfolding history and show that certain impulses have adhered to each other: we are expected to be able to take the matrix of culture and society apart and show why-it coheres. Could the careful study of the cultural forms themselves, in search or~tn4r__CQmrjrehensive logic, provide a suitable discovery procedure? Attempts to do solof~Bali-HJnduism have proved it to be a frustrating task. The luxuriant imagery of Bali-HTH3uisro-seerns to base itself on a logic arising from other premises and epistemologiesfhanours, and is thus difficult to trace if it is abstracted from a context of social pras
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Thus, Bali-Hindu thinkers seem to assert that 1. Whatever is, is continually changing: continuously coming about, being sustained, being dissolved (the principles of which Brahma, Wisnu, and Iswara are manifestations). In these processes of being, entities are continually changing, and particularly liable to turn into their opposites (cf. Hobart 1986 a, b). 2. What our senses report is illusion; it is difficult to distinguish appearances from truth; reality is like a shadow-puppet play. 3. Something is often a manifestation of something else. So there is a network of identities connecting overtly very different entities as manifestations of the same. 4. There is harmony and resonance between macrocosmos, buana agung, and microcosmos, buana alii, the latter usually identified with the person/the individual consciousness. So cosmic disturbances are reflected in sickness within me; and my bad act may engender cosmic upset. 5. Partly for this reason, and partly because gods, ancestors, spirits and ogres arc powerful and whimsical and continuously active around us, the material world is as much and as often shaped by magic, virtue and evil as it is shaped by labour and physical causation.
But if we follow Bali-Hindu sages into such abstractions, how do we reverse the process and recreate out of these principles a flcshed-out cosmology and a real world such as they inhabit? Taken together, and applied simultaneously as if they were one unitary set of universal principles, they provide far too many options, and become indeterminate in the reality they might generate. Or what do we make of a "theory" of reincarnation which encompasses the following Bali-Hindu assertions: a Buddhist longing for Nirvana; the celebration and deification of individual dead ancestors; the principle of karma pahala, i.e. the just return for acts; the assumption that rebirth always occurs in the dead person's descent group; a belief that one child may contain the "souls" of several ancestors, while one ancestor is often reincarnated in several descendants with widely discrepant life courses? Much scholarship can be (and is!) wasted on puzzling over such problems, which are artifacts of an improper and unproductive framing of the questions, one that prejudges and limits our vision to one of searching for underlying logical premises and principles for the patterns we discover. I advise that we should try seeking our insights in the wider and opener field of social processes. Social activity is an ongoing activity of world-making (Winner 1986:15); the forms of culture are not best explained by abstracting
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their general principle but by asking what each particular pattern may be evidence of. We must ask just what kind of consistency we find in each particular pattern, and why this form develops just here? It is the trend towards some partial order that needs to be explained, by particular efficient causes, whereas the absence of order needs no explanation.
A Sociology of Knowledge
So we must go into each of the streams we identify, as a universe of discourse and (i) characterize its salient patterns; (ii) depict its production and reproduction, and its boundary maintenance; (iii) in this depiction discover what makes it cohere, and leave it as an open, empirical question how and to what extent its idcational contents achieve logical closure as a tradition of knowledge. We likewise must identify the social processes whereby these streams intermesh, sometimes with interference, distortion and even fusion. Moreover, we may find each stream to be characterized by a different essential dynamics. For example, the fundamentalism of Islam where all scholarship inevitably gravitates back to the one shared, finite text of the Koranis impossible to produce in a world where Durga steps down into a congregation and speaks. This is a sociological, not a purely logical, assertion; and it represents a plea for a broad sociology of knowledge that shows how the traditions and their parts are constituted by showing the processes that generate them. Thus, in a world where reality is culturally constituted, we must seek to show how the shapes of culture are socially generated. This is a perspective I find echoed in Hannerz, in his exploration of urban anthropology in terms of the generation of shared meanings (Hannerz 1980:287). Where does it happen in the social structure of the city, he asks: in the salon, in the coffee house; by a street gang, a cult group, a university department? We must press these questions for the insights they can produce: What difference does it make, how does it show in the cultural product whether it is the creation of a street gang or a university department? Applied systematically, such questions provide us with a method to discover and map the significant forms of coherence in culturenot by meditating on shapes and configurations but by identifying social processes and empirically observing their consequences, i.e. modelling their operation. Thereby, we should become able to trace out the parties to the discourses that take place, and the "segment of the infinite and meaningless World process", in Weber's terms, "on which they confer meaning and significance" (Weber 1947).
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Reconceptualizing Culture
To conceptualize culture as such a product, we need to purge our concept of a number of inappropriate connotations, misleading conveniences, and absurd tacit assumptions. In contrast to the sum of received wisdom on Culture, an attempt to use the concept critically in complex societies demands a new set of assertions: (1) Meaning is a relationship between a configuration or sign and a viewer, not something enshrined in a particular cultural expression. To create meaning requires an act of conferring, as Weber implies. To discover meaning in the world of others, contra much contemporary anthropological method from Lvi-Strauss to Geertz, we need always to link a bit of culture and an actor with her/his particular constellation of experience, knowledge and orientations. (2) Culture is distributive in a population, shared by some but not by others. Thus it cannot, with Goodenough, be defined as what you need to know to be a member of a society and cannot, with the cthnomethodologists, be. systematically elicited from an informant, by linguistic frames. The most significant structures in culturei.e. those with the most systematic consequences for people's acts and relationsmay not be embedded in its forms but in its distributions, its patterns of on-sharing. (3) Actors are (always and essentially) positioned. No account "in their own voice" will have privileged validity, and any model of a relationship, group or institution must be the anthropologist's construct. Differences in positioning provide the main impetus for the "long conversation" within communities (Malinowski 1922) through which people interpret and share their experiences, and enhance their grasp of their own life and that of others. Recent reflexive anthropological writing, while stressing the contingent and positioned nature of accounts, has focused too egocentrically on the natives' dialogue with ourselves and too little on their dialogue with one another. (4) Events are the outcome of interplays between material causality and social interaction, and thus always at variance with the intentions of individual actors. The structural-functional positionstill deeply entrenched in the mental reflexes of anthropologistswhich equates purpose, function and effect cannot be sustained. We need to incorporate both a dynamic view of experience, as the outcome of individuals construing events, and a dynamic view of creativity, as the outcome of the struggle of actors to overcome this resistance on the part of the world, into our model of how culture is generated.
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This simple set of assertionsin no sense original and, in their conventional verbal contexts, not even particularly controversialwhen combined and pursued with reasonable consistency provides a most fruitful and stimulating instrument in the study of North Bali. In conclusion, I shall seek to sketch this in respect to some of the major themes I am pursuing in that study, and have illustrated in the preceding pages.
"Meaning is a Relationship ..."

This assertion does not presume a particular theory of meaning; but it inevitably guides our discovery procedures: It directs us to look at the link between any vehicle of expression and the person employing or responding to that vehicle, as a necessary step to ascertain the meaning of cultural things. Particularly in a complex society, where the cultural expressions and symbols that are produced are almost inexhaustibly many, elaborate and multi-layered and their connection with the persons, groups and forces that produce them are far from transparent, the conscious search for such links becomes essential. Without that injunction, anthropologists with a salutary reluctance to become enmeshed in the exploration of private, covert motivations and repressed, deep symbolism may tend to short-circuit the whole matter by performing only an externalist extrapolation of the apparent logical entailments of formal customs. This only too easily leads to interpretations very wide of the mark, which arc then combined in elaborate constructions that do not reflect the understandings and meanings entertained and communicated among real people. Heeding the emphasis on meaning as a relationship, one is led to give much greater attention to context and praxis. In North Bali this was brought home to me at a very early point in fieldwork, when I discovered that the Balincsc Muslim community in which I was working employ teknonymy, i.e. the renaming of parents and grandparents as father-of-x, grandmother-of-x, etc. on the birth of a first-born child. My research design at the time was mainly to study social organization and personhood among Balinese Muslims and compare them to South Baiinese Hindus as represented in Geertz's corpus of writings, especially his "Person, Time and Conduct . . . " (Geertz 1966/73). In it, Geertz interprets teknonymy as one of a series of cultural patterns whereby the Balinese construct personhood and depict each others as stereotyped contemporaries, abstract and anonymous fellowmen who shrink from the close encounter with each other's unique and temporal selves; and I tried gently to hint at this significance to the small circle with which I was conversing. Their initial disorientation swiftly changed to a confident putting-things-right as
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they explained how, on the contrary, they employ the custom to flatter the proud parents/-grandparents of a first-born by giving prominent attention to this personal event which will be very much on their mind. Later, using that name will evoke this happy time, and a feeling of cameraderie in its joint recollection. I later found that Bali-hindus in North Bali construe the custom in the same way. Its meaning to those I know who use it, and the orientations it reveals, are thus the very opposite of what Geertz depicts. Far from anonymizing and stereotyping, individual achievement is emphasized in a manner designed to flatter the personal vanity of the other, while also the shared memory of this valued event-in-life is evoked between intimates. Likewise, the pervasive use of public titles to address and name persons who have achieved such titles: the effect of the practice falls into place if you imagine all your former fellow students calling you "Prof." or "Dean" from the day of your appointment and through all the subsequent years, always in an approving and positive way. I am still prepared to accept as fairly plausible an argument that the wide practice of such name-changes will render the complete biographies of distant and genealogically senior public persons somewhat more opaque in being less simple to retrieve. But the "meaning" of the practice: what it expresses in the social relationship in which it is employed, and the orientation it reveals to us, as outsiders, to understand, are in most respects the stark opposite of Geertz's externalist construction. Casting back to the opening assertion of this discussion: one can only have reasonable assurance to have grasped meaning correctly if one pays close attention to those cues of context, praxis and communicative intent and reading which alone allow us to enter tentatively into the world they construct.4 In the words of Unni Wikan: "The starting point for any analysis of person beliefs ... must be the actor's own use of this construction to interpret events and aspects of the self and other persons ... [T]he most eloquently elaborated analysis of time, person, and conduct in Bali has little value as an entry to the understanding of Balinese culture when viewed only in the realm of concepts within which their experience moves, so long as we are given no notion oFwkat that experience in fad is" (Wikan 1987:343). Using this perspective, Wikan (1987) develops a powerful and detailed critique of the interpretation of Balinese culture constructed from the imputed logic of the form of certain institutions. In a more comprehensive monograph (Wikan forthcoming) she uses this same methodological principle to develop a comprehensive account of personhood, emotion and social relations in North Bali.
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"Culture is Distributive..." Thus, for example, to produce the "cultural text" (to highlight the inappropriateness of that metaphor) of a particular Bali-Hindu cremation ceremony in which we were involved as friends and participants, a number of parties were mobilized, with very different interests and skills and deeply divergent conceptions of what was being performed, i.e. the meaning, in the rites. Two different ancestor-possession mediums (balian matuunan) were independently consulted to check with the deceased what the required scale of the ceremony should be (an order in excess of what the majority faction of the family had hoped was confirmed, and they reluctantly had to sell about half of their inherited estate to raise the sum required. Thereby, of course, they harvested the social rewards of conspicuous consumption from some but from others, the opprobrium of exaggerated ostentation). An astrologer (balian usada) determined the auspicious time for the rite, according to a system and cosmology inaccessible to those he was assisting. Officials of the town quarter, with their records of communal labour obligations and performances of the quarter's citizens, approved of the dates and mobilized and organized the large apparatus of collective labour in scores of different tasks for men and women. The high priest of the great death temple of the town, and three family priests, led the rites, whereas no Brahmin priest was used. But the high priest was steeped in the philosophy of Karma and Nirvana, and furthering the abstract goals of dissolving pcrsonhood and facilitating the reunion of the soul with its source. The family priests, on the other hand, seemed mainly intent on conjuring the dead souls back into anthropomorphic representations, again and again, and securing purified and deified ancestral persons for the family shrines. An enormous volume of highly differentiated offerings were provided by an offering-making house in another town quarter (whereas the anthropomorphic soul representations were made by the family). The contractor for the offerings (tukad banlen) was of Brahmin family; but most of the labour of cutting, plaiting and assembling the materials was sub-contracted to commoner women of that other quartera quarter, incidentally, for political reasons mostly not even on speaking terms with the cremating family and quarter. This matters little, however, as disasters caused by faulty sacrifices will boomerang on those.who committed the mistakes, not the family who purchases the offerings. The cremation tower was built in a distant village, specialists in the esoteric rules of its dimensions and construction. Its height, however, was determined by the family's wish to avoid having to cut electric wires along the route of the processionan expensive matter to arrange with the electricity board. The cooking of rice for the town quarter feasts, performed in a closely guarded room, was in the hands of a woman
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particularly knowledgeable in the rites and the magic required to keep it uncontaminated by the sorcery-poisoning no doubt being attempted by vengeful enemy participants. Clowns for the procession, gamelan orchestra for entertainment and ritual accompaniment, a puppetteer for a Ramayana performance, etc., were called in from various places. To perform their sacred duty to the dead, the descendants are thus utterly dependent on all these others: all the neighbours in the town quarter who are like them in the relevant respects and must be mobilized to provide communal support, and all those specialists who are unlike them in one or another component of cultural competence. Together they then create a characteristic Bali-Hindu festival, in which a plethory of collective representations evoke Bali-Hindu ideas, myths and images. Rich cultural materials are thereby actualized and taught to children and adults, bereaved and general populance alike. But not only are these materials a product of different people with diverse skills and ideas: what is seen and heard, and how the message touches you, will also vary immensely. To the community at large this cremation was, after all, only a festive and demanding episode (it was the fifth in that town quarter held during the last year). To the celebrating family it was a major hurdle and milcpostthey had not held one for about 60 years, and ten adults and thirty four children were cremated. To the orphaned 9-year old girl who was led up to throw money on her mother's pyre, or to the family priest who twice fainted during the proceedings from the confrontation with his father's spiritual presence, the meanings were others again. As a consequence, the precipitate from the eventthe experience that transformed the living and their personal store of knowledge and insight, i.e. their own cultural competencewas one that will reproduce differences between people, not reduce them. So the collective product is not only a result of distributive culture being temporarily pooled: it also reproduces the distributive character of culture in the tradition. Contrast this dynamics with that found in the differently structured tradition of Balinese Muslims. It is one that propells persons into other trajectories, generating quite other events, patterns, and cultural constructions and distributions. Thus, in a community of Balinese Muslims where I worked, the basic spiritual relationship is not to one's ancestors but to one's guru, one's teacher of religion. This follows from the premises that Islamic knowledge is one, it should ideally be held by all and is accessible through scholarship, and it provides the only valid basis for society, morality, and civic authority. All children must therefore attend a guru; and when they have mastered their first guru's curriculum, young men of talent and ambition set off into the world in search of greater knowledge. It can be
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obtained from the great teachers of Islam in Lombok and Java, and best of all in Mecca; and this road leads to a career as scholar and teacher, to membership in the governing board (Majlis ulama) of the village, and ultimately, if your effort is crowned with success, to the position as Imam in its Mosque. From the village I studied, nearly all boys go out for some years, and climb to their appropriate level in the pyramid of scholarship. The pinnacle ofthat pyramid was reached by the greatest son of the village, Hajji Makhfuz, who was himself a teacher of Shafi law in the Masjid-eHaram in Mecca for three years, before returning and becoming the village Imam at home. Thus, the Muslim congregation is created from a distribution, and consequent flow, of cultural items: between gurus and pupils, wandering between the schools of Muslim Indonesia; Imams preaching to their flocks; jurists and village assemblies applying Shariah to conflicts. All contribute to transforming the message of the Koran into the practice of Islam: submission to the will of the one God. Developing the perspective of my second assertion, that culture is distributive, I am thus helped towards a view of the reproduction of these two deeply contrasting traditions, as well as the other traditions I have mentioned. A close attention to the distribution of culture shows how it animates social life and generates complex cultural constructions. It leads to a sociology of knowledge that can illuminate cultural production and reproduction in a complex and hetcrogenous world. "Actors are P o s i t i o n e d . . . " It would extend this essay intolerably if I were to continue to illustrate in substantive sketches the various findings that each of these assertions facilitate in the study of North Bali. But it may be helpful to indicate in more general terms some of the perspectives for which this third assertion opens the way. In one sense it provides the very gateway to the analysis I wish to develop: it supplies me with the challenge and the freedom to construct my own analysis of my object of study. There is no place where the true informant can be found who will tell us what it all really means; and there is no writ that makes us the captives of the culture we are describing, the particular concepts that are embraced and used in a community. But this does not turn anthropology into mere writing: it is a misjudgment of the true implications of this circumstance that makes it a justification for modern deconstructionist programmes in our literature. My understanding, on the contrary, is that the fact of the positioning and partiality of every view has no such implications for the epistemology of anthropology as an empirical science. It in no way reduces the primacy we
140 Fredrik Barth
must give to the realitites which people construct, the events they cause to happen, and the experiences they harvest. But it forces us to acknowledge that peopleeach of uslive our lives with a consciousness and a horizon that encompasses much less than the sum of the society, institutions and forces that impinges on us. Somehow, people's various limited horizons link up and overlap, producing a world much greater, which the aggregate of their praxes create, but which no one can see. It remains the anthropologist's task to show how this comes about, and to chart that larger world that ensues. To do so is important, since it is a world which its members unwittingly inhabit, and which covertly shapes and limits their lives. This realization also provides our brief to write about other cultures and other lives in English and as anthropology. To do so is not to deny the cultural construction of reality, and the primacy (and difficulty) of the task of gaining entry into those particular worlds which are the constructs of real people; but it clarifies the need and legitimacy of locating them in a frame of our construction, in which you and I also have a place. For my analysis the concept of positioning also provides a necessaryescape from a conundrum of my own making, which my template of "streams" might otherwise produce. I could put it that each person is "positioned" by virtue of the particular pattern of coming-together in her of parts of several cultural streams, as well as particular experiences. To construct the internal dynamics of each of those streams, we have taken aspects of the person apart and linked them up with parts of other persons in encompassing organizations and traditions; but the way the parts are variously embedded in complex persons remains a primary fact of life. "Positioning" provides a way to put together again what we have wrent asunder, and to relate persons to the multiple traditions which they embrace, and which move them. Thus, it can facilitate a first step towards the modelling of a number of important social processes. For example, the differences between people which are retrieved as positioning probably provide the main impetus to essential forms of interaction, conversation, and reflection. Your experience and horizon being different from mine (within bounds), your interpretation of events becomes interesting and potentially insightful for me, but accessible only through special communicative effort. Indeed, the experience which we thereby shape and share may provide me with the main materials I use to challenge interpretations foisted on me by an authority person I am linked to through my participation in another stream. There may be tools here for the modelling of pervasive processes of influence, interference, and revision of conceptions and behaviours in heterogeneous and complex societies.
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The Disjunction of Intent Meanings and Consequences

I asserted also that often "intentions differ from outcomes" and also from construals of events. This assertion seems to me to provide an escape from the stalemate of conceptions of "emic vs. etic" and "models of and models for". It makes it more possible to give clarity and precision to our empirical descriptions. Further, it enhances our ability to handle macro-phenomena without doing violence to people's own interpretations and realities. We certainly need concepts and vocabulary to integrate our discussions of symbol and meaning with those of labour and market, political dynamics, demography, and ecology. Moreover, I hope also by clearing out this debris of other assumptions about culture to be able to see more clearly the creative work that Balinese are doing to refashion their consciousness in a changing world. A substantive analysis along these lines would be more useful for the critical reconstruction of general anthropological theory. I would not claim that the assertions I have formulated above hold the key whereby we can contribute equally and profoundly to all the themes I have raised. Nor am I arguing that every anthropological analysis should be designed to encompass or address them all. But I do wish to argue that it is important that we struggle to make a coherent anthropology capable of addressing these themes and issues. Too much theory is constructed with narrow and limited objectives in mind, without pursuing its force or failures in other parts of anthropology's vast enterprise. Nor do I think it is healthy, or defensible, to retain in one nook or cranny of anthropology such premises, conceptions or heuristics as have been proved baseless or unfruitful in other parts of our field. Our efibrts to rebuild, reform, discard and construct theory should be ceaseless, and strive towards comprehensiveness and consistency. The present essay has tried to take a few steps in that direction. NOTES
1. This account is based on fieldwork by Unni Wikan and myself over about 11 months each since December 1983, partly together and partly separately. I gratefully acknowledge her stimulus to this work, her major insights in the analysis I present, and her permisson to use freely of her field data for my purposes. The research has been supported by the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities (N.A.V.F.) and by Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning. In Indonesia, the research was sponsored by the Indonesian Academy of Sciences (L.I.P.I.) and advised by professor Ngurah Bagus. 2. Even Malinowski, of course, admitted to having idealized his description of Trobriand life along these lines by portraying it without the European influences that had indeed "to a considerable extent transformed" it (Malinowski 1935:480). 3. Without especially developing these implications, I made a first step in such a direction on my analysis of symbol and meaning in the ritual of the Baktaman of New Guinea (Barth
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1975). There I attempt to show their ritual idioms to be based on analogue coding, entailing sources of meaning which do not require the assumptions of digital structure, minimal contrast, or bounded domains, and thus leave the effects of social process on the structure of the code capable of demonstration. 4. A more extended discussion of these issues will appear in Barth, forthcoming, and parts of my perspective have been developed with respect to data from elsewhere in Barth 1983 and especially Barth 1987. For an analysis of Bali highly compatible with the present argument, see Wikan 1987, and forthcoming.
REFERENCES
BARTH, F. 1975. Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea. Oslo/New Haven: Universitetsforlaget/Yale University Press. 1983. Sohar: Culture and Society in an Omani Town. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1984. Problems in Conceptualizing Cultural Pluralism. In The Prospects for Plural Societies, edited by David Mabury-Lewis. The American Ethnological Society, Proceedings. 1987. Cosmologies in the Making: A Generative Approach to Cultural Variation in Inner New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. forthcoming. Balinese Worlds. BATESON, G. 1949. Bali: The Value System of a Steady State. In Social Structure, edited by M. Fortes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. C l i f f o r d , J . & G. E. Marcus 1986. Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. GEERTZ, C. 1966. Person, Time and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in Cultural Analysis (reprinted, Geertz 1973). 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books Inc. Goris, R. 1954. Prasasti Bali. 2 Vols. Bandung. HANNERZ, U. 1980. Exploring the City. New York: Columbia University Press. H o b a r t . M. 1986a. Thinker, Thespian, Soldier, Slave? Assumptions about Human Nature in the Study of Balinese Society. In Context Meaning and Power in Southeast Asia, edited by Mark Hobart & Robert H. Taylor. Ithaca N. Y.: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program. 1986b. Balinese State and Society. Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology, International Workshop on Indonesian Studies No. 1, Leiden. Lansing, J. S. 1983. The Three Worlds of Bali. New York: Praeger. Linton, R. 1936. The Study of Man. New York: Appleton-Century Co. MALINOWSKI, B. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1935. Coral Gardens and Their Magic. London: Allen & Unwin. RAMSEYER, U. 1977. The Art and Culture of Bali. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, M. 1947. A Methodology for the Social Sciences (transl., E. A. Shils & H. A. Finch). New York: Free Press. Wikan, U. 1987. Public Grace and Private Fears. Ethos Vol. 15, No. 4. 1988a Illness from Fright or Soul Loss: A North Balinese Culture-Bound Syndrome? Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry Vol. 13(1):25. forthcoming. Managing the Heart to Brighten Face and Soul: Culture and Experience among the Balinese. Winner, L. 1986. Technology as Forms of Life. In The Whale and the Reactor: a Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
WUTHNOW, R., J . D. HUNTER, ALBERT BERCESEN & EDITH KURZWEIL, 1984. Cultural Analysis:
The Work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault and Jrgen Habermas. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology