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The analysis of culture in complex societies

Fredrik Barth

To cite this article: Fredrik Barth (1989) The analysis of culture in complex societies, Ethnos,
54:3-4, 120-142, DOI: 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

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 connect-
edness is mostly conveyed in the language of structuralism, with its empha-
sis 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 impreci-
sion 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;
 The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies 121

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 trouble-
some history of verbal definitions and redefinitions of "culture" and "soci-
ety". 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 con-
cepts 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 occa-
sion.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 coopera-
tion and contract, but working modern high-yielding strains of rice gov-
erned by an intensive regime of irrigation and artificial fertilizer, dependent
on water provided from recently upgraded reservoirs supplying old irriga-
tion 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%
122 Fredrik Barth

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) isomor-
phies 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 shoul-
ders 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 dialo-
gic 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.
 The Analysis oC Culture in Complex Societies 123

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, institu-
tions. 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 contin-
ue 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, non-
cultural 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 communi-
ty, and which has lent intuitive plausibility to Malinowski's theoretically
124 Fredrik Barth

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 ac-
tion, 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 elabora-
tion 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 contentious-
ness 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 integra-
tion 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 frag-
ments 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-
 The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies 125

nalized in moral and metaphyscial learning; ritual and worship; legend; art;
architecture; theatre; dance; music; shadow puppetry; etc. Various ac-
counts 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 character-
izes 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 god-
head 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 enchant-
ed reality, and a very partial representation of the structures in society.
126 Fredrik Barth

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 consider-
ations of available technology, labour, and the exchange values of alterna-
tive products, not priorities and valuations derived from or consistent with
the symbolic and expressive constructs of Bali-Hinduism; and these activi-
ties 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 tour-
ism. 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 encum-
bent 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 connec-
tions 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.
 The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies 127

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 Sanskrit-
derived manuscripts has been retained and supplemented through a thou-
sand 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 them-
selves 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.
128 Fredrik Barth

(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 oracu-
lar 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 atone-
ments.
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
 The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies 129

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 Bali-
Hindus, and the fundamentalism whereby Islam claims complete hegemo-
ny 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 trans-
mitted 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.
130 Fredrik Barth

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 meta-
physics 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, uni-
verses 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 cluster-
ing 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 assump-
tions of just what it may be that holds the elements of each co-tradition
 The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies 131

togetherthis is precisely what we should seek to discovernor any expecta-

tion 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 rela-
tions can likewise be plausibly assumed to form a culture historical substra-
tum, 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 seventh-
eighth century, with its renderings of caste, godhood, suffering and Nirva-
na. When Islam came to Indonesia in the 11-12 hundreds, a new compo-
nent 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 per-
sonal 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
132 Fredrik Barth

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 contin-
ually 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 simulta-
neously 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 prob-
lems, 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
 The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies 133

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 (Han-
nerz 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 depart-
ment? 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 opera-
tion. 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).
134 Fredrik Barth

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 conse-
quences 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 contin-
gent 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.
 The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies 135

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 stimulat-
ing 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 motiva-
tions 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 interpre-
tations very wide of the mark, which arc then combined in elaborate
constructions that do not reflect the understandings and meanings enter-
tained 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 grand-
parents 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 organiza-
tion 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 contemporar-
ies, abstract and anonymous fellowmen who shrink from the close encoun-
ter 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
136 Fredrik Barth

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 empha-
sized 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 orienta-
tion 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 devel-
op a comprehensive account of personhood, emotion and social relations in
North Bali.
 The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies 137

"Culture is Distributive..."
Thus, for example, to produce the "cultural text" (to highlight the inappro-
priateness of that metaphor) of a particular Bali-Hindu cremation ceremo-
ny 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 anthropo-
morphic 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 com-
moner 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
138 Fredrilc Barth

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 repre-
sentations evoke Bali-Hindu ideas, myths and images. Rich cultural materi-
als 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 collec-
tive 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 construc-
tions 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
 The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies 139

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-e-
Haram in Mecca for three years, before returning and becoming the village
Imam at home. Thus, the Muslim congregation is created from a distribu-
tion, 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 distri-
butive, I am thus helped towards a view of the reproduction of these two
deeply contrasting traditions, as well as the other traditions I have mention-
ed. 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 repro-
duction 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 com-
munity. 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 anthropolo-
gist'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 necessary-
escape 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 em-
brace, 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 accessi-
ble 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.
 The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies 141

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 prem-
ises, 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 sam-
menlignende 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
142 Frcdrik Barth

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.

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