associated with the full moon and some are associated with nights where
the moon is dark. In practically every village cluster there is apura subak
dedicated to the rice goddess Dewi Sri. There is also apura dalem, dedi-
cated to the dead (and reincarnated). The village priests (pemangku) and
the high priests (pedanda) officiate at pura ceremonies. Pedanda have
knowledge of very early forms of Balinese. One must be a Brahman male
to be a pedanda. The highest God isSang Hyang Widi Wasa. The empty
throne symbolizes this Godhead. Sang Hyang Widi Wasa manifests as
Brahma the creator (with his consortSaraswati), Wisnu the sustainer, and
Siwa the destroyer and re-creator. (Siwa is sometimes depicted as a sun
god, Surya.) Siwa’s consort is the evil Durga. Durga is manifested visibly
through the avatar widow and witch Rangda. All of the god manifestations
have many avatars. Buddha is considered an avatar of Wisnu (Sanskrit
Visnu). There are also many demons (bhuta) and witches (leyak).
It is very important to placate all of the gods and demons with frequent
and abundant offerings (banten, usually carried by women on their heads,
even if they are on the back of a motorscooter!). Since political indepen-
dence a new supreme deity has appeared: Jagat-nata, the Lord of the
World. (There are pura forJagat-natain Den Pasar and Singaraja, the two
largest cities, but not elsewhere.) There is a great deal of animistic, pre-
Indic belief mixed up with the Balinese version of these essentially Buddhist
and Hindu deities and demons. Good is represented bydharmaand evil is
manifested asa-dharma. It is a kind of Manicheanism. The dance drama
performed regularly for tourists is a struggle between the evilRangdaand
the symbol of the forces ofdharma(goodness):Barong. (Barong can take
many forms, but usually “he” is in the form of a kind of lion or dragon-
like lion creature.) It takes awhile to catch on to all of this. But nothing I
have written here is really based on any kind of thick description. A careful
reading of good guidebooks gets you a long way. If you then read the nine-
teenth century Dutch literature and such standard works as the edited
collection byBelow (1970 [1953b])itall starts to make a lot of sense. So
what is the “value-added” component of my own work? In order to start to
answer that question I have to go back to the basics. It is very easy to pre-
tend that we learn something “in the field” as a result of “thick description”
when in fact we learned in quite a different way. Our own individual contri-
butions may simply be a subtle nuance of interpretation of already well-
known facts. It is very easy to “lie” by pretending that our fieldwork is the
basis of our generalizations when in fact the fieldwork component is only a
small part of what we are narrating (Duneier, 2011; Lofland & Lofland,
1984). What I know about the odalan from direct observation in one place
Geertz’s “Thick Description” and a Balinese Temple Ritual 95