Eat, Pray, Love

ates, by necessity, with elaborate communal cooperation. Rice terraces require an unbeliev-
able amount of shared labor, maintenance and engineering in order to prosper, so each
Balinese village has a banjar—a united organization of citizens who administer, through con-
sensus, the village’s political and economic and religious and agricultural decisions. In Bali,
the collective is absolutely more important than the individual, or nobody eats.
Religious ceremonies are of paramount importance here in Bali (an island, don’t forget,
with seven unpredictable volcanoes on it—you would pray, too). It has been estimated that a
typical Balinese woman spends one-third of her waking hours either preparing for a cere-
mony, participating in a ceremony or cleaning up after a ceremony. Life here is a constant
cycle of offerings and rituals. You must perform them all, in correct order and with the correct
intention, or the entire universe will fall out of balance. Margaret Mead wrote about “the in-
credible busy-ness” of the Balinese, and it’s true—there is rarely an idle moment in a Balinese
compound. There are ceremonies here which must be performed five times a day and others
that must be performed once a day, once a week, once a month, once a year, once every ten
years, once every hundred years, once every thousand years. All these dates and rituals are
kept organized by the priests and holy men, who consult a byzantine system of three separ-
ate calendars.
There are thirteen major rites of passage for every human being in Bali, each marked by a
highly organized ceremony. Elaborate spiritual appeasement ceremonies are conducted all
throughout life, in order to protect the soul from the 108 vices (108—there’s that number
again!), which include such spoilers as violence, stealing, laziness and lying. Every Balinese
child passes through a momentous puberty ceremony in which the canine teeth, or “fangs,”
are filed down to a flat level, for aesthetic improvement. The worst thing you can be in Bali is
coarse and animalistic, and these fangs are considered to be reminders of our more brutal
natures and therefore must go. It is dangerous in such a close-knit culture for people to be
brutal. A village’s entire web of cooperation could be sliced through by one person’s murder-
ous intent. Therefore the best thing you can be in Bali is alus, which means “refined,” or even
“prettified.” Beauty is good in Bali, for men and women. Beauty is revered. Beauty is safety.
Children are taught to approach all hardship and discomfort with “a shining face,” a giant
smile.
The whole idea of Bali is a matrix, a massive and invisible grid of spirits, guides, paths and
customs. Every Balinese knows exactly where he or she belongs, oriented within this great,
intangible map. Just look at the four names of almost every Balinese citizen—First, Second,
Third, Fourth—reminding them all of when they were born in the family, and where they be-
long. You couldn’t have a clearer social mapping system if you called your kids North, South,
East and West. Mario, my new Italian-Indonesian friend, told me that he is only happy when