Tightly wound in golden costumes, quivering flowers atop tooled leather crowns, the dancers’ eyes dart from side to side, matching the energy in their hands as their fingers seem to shimmer in their joints. Balinese dance is perhaps one of the most well-known in the world.

Steeped in sacred religious rituals, dance is one way Balinese communicate with their gods and deified ancestral spirits. Dance (and theater and music) entertains both the mortal and divine audience. Both males and females dance and begin to study at a very young age. Towns are filled with dance studios (sanggar) where children go after school a few hours a week. Recitals and
performances at temple festivals are de rigeur , whether or not the piece is polished or not. The process of learning is almost as important as the finished dance and the entire community can get involved, from the teachers to the musicians to the vendors who feed the hungry students to the drivers who take them to the venue. Rituals are replete with children as young as 3 and 4 years old performing the sacred forms of Rejang Dewa and Baris Gede. The deities don’t mind that the feet are in the wrong position or if you look at your neighbor when you forget a step–it is dance as an act of devotion that is important here.

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Mark Hobart in his thesis entitled “Violence as Social Institution” has an interesting insight on Balinese concept of violence. Here is the part of his thesis which deals with Balinese concept of violence.

What is violence? Before proceeding to representations of violence, it may be useful to sketch in some background. For a start what do we mean by violence? That standard fallback source, the Oxford English Dictionary, shows the range of uses of ‘violence’ alone to be wide. They include ‘the exercise of physical force’, causing ‘bodily injury’, ‘forcibly interfering with personal freedom’, ‘to outrage or violate’, ‘undue constraint applied to some natural process, habit etc., so as to prevent its free development or exercise’, ‘perversion of meaning’, ‘great force, severity, or vehemence’, ‘vehemence of personal feeling’ and ‘passionate conduct or language’.

These are only the positive aspects. Perhaps the most effective forms of violence are indicated by the absence of signs or representations (like the constraint on choice of the unemployed or the elimination of those deemed unqualified - like students, or women - from taking part in certain activities or discourses). If violence is a useful notion, we need to consider silences and exclusions as well.

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Hierarchy is an important notion in Bali and still plays a dominant role in Balinese culture. In Bali, hierarchy is believed to be the foundation of order in the family, society, even in the universe. Most aspects of Balinese culture are influenced by this hierarchal system. In short, everything in Bali is set with hierarchal order.

Space and direction are ranked from the most auspicious mountainwards (kaja) to the least auspicious seawards (kelod). House compound is set with standard hierarchal order in which family temple occupy the most auspicious place (kaja), house for the Balinese occupy the middle area and pigsty occupy the least auspicious place (kelod). Person is ranked base on their caste, Brahmana (high priest), Ksatrya (nobleman), Wesya (gentry), and Jaba (commoner) though some reformist abhorred this idea. Priests are elaborately ranked by their kin group, the level of initiation rituals that have been done for them, and the size of temple they tend. Like persons, ancestors and deities are ranked, sometimes indicated by the number of levels (meru) on their shrines. Language is ranked from refined (alus), common (kepara), and rough (kasar). Religious ceremony is ranked from small (alit), medium (madya), and large (agung). Even the cosmos itself is ranked, from demonic beings and animals, to humanity, to ancestors and gods.

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