Bali has long been reputed for its capacity to maintain a distinctive social and cultural “Balineseness” in face of sweeping change. One persistent component on anthropological lists of Balinese institutions has been the island's “ancestor cult,” often presented as a static custom of principally theological significance. This paper portrays some complexities in the formulation, maintenance, and recent intensification of ancestor lore in a particular group through time. Our subject is a large Sudra group in Tabanan district: how its members explain the origin of their house in the classical era, account for its trials and accomplishments during the Dutch colonial period (1906–1948), and with little sense of discontinuity justify its role in modern Balinese politics, from Indonesian independence through the national elections of 1971. We first detail legends, rituals, and stories—cultural forces in their own right–celebrating central ancestors and leaders from the group's classical, colonial, and modern history. We then describe practical social, political, and economic matters indirectly involved in these traditions. Finally, general conclusions are drawn regarding the significance of ancestors in Balinese society, where legends and rituals commemorating specific deceased leaders are no mere antiquarian escape from the present nor a pale reflection of more practical realities, but an active commentary on, and a contributing force to, a group's internal dynamics and self-esteem.

Recent studies of peasant rebellions in colonial countries have tended to focus attention on the persons who rebelled. The egregious conditions that aroused their indignation, the social and economic transformations that gave them the capacity to act, the leaders who came forward to mobilize them—these are the questions most commonly asked to explain peasant militancy and rebellion.

This perspective can yield only a partial view, for it leaves in the shadows one of the two major actors in such a confrontation; the regime. It is too easily assumed that the fate of traditional or colonial regimes is sealed, and need elicit little interest except as a source of grievances. Yet comparing regimes that have experienced rebellion with those that have not reveals that some have dealt much more successfully with modernization than others. While the attempts of some to modernize institutions only exacerbated the grievances of their restless populations, others have developed new capabilities for ruling. Indeed, the capabilities of political systems are probably more various than either the grievances or the capabilities of the groups challenging them.

Study of China in the Soviet Union has just experienced a decade of rapid growth and fundamental change. Until the early 1960's the overwhelming reality for Soviet specialists was the fact that the Chinese revolution had succeeded—China had joined the camp of Soviet allies building socialism. Under these conditions, interpretations of the society which emerged after 1949 and of the historic circumstances which gave rise to revolution reflected both a need to reaffirm doctrinal principles about the uniformities of history and a hesitancy to contradict official Chinese communist positions. By the mid-1960's these limitations had been removed. Soviet sinologists repudiated the previous period for the “uncritical use of tendentious Chinese materials” and switched abruptly to demonstrating what had gone wrong in China, i.e., the abnormalities of history. The search was begun for those exceptional qualities of China's past which had deflected its advance to socialism and before that to capitalism.

All forms of nationalism profess belief in the uniqueness and value of their particular national quintessence. But not all nationalist sentiments germinate in the decay of a tradition convinced of the cultural superiority and universality of its values. Chinese nationalism did. It developed, moreover, in a context in which the bungling monopoly of power of the alien Manchus as well as foreign aggression constantly tempted its exponents to appeal to racial distinctiveness. And it matured amidst the frustrations of prolonged political and societal chaos surrounding the Republican period, which provoked many nationalists eventually to resurrect the old assumption that a country's greatness should be defined in cultural terms, and to reassert the conviction that Confucian values were cosmic. Tai Chi-t‘ao was such a pioneer nationalist, whose career in politics was spent trying to create national unity through revolution, and whose efforts as an ideologue were directed at defining national unity in terms of Confucian universals. This made him a “conservative revolutionary,” whose commitment to nation found expression alternatively in militant action and in rationalizations for action in the name of traditional values.

Japanese poetry has for a long time been credited with truly miraculous powers of concision, suggestion, and philosophical insight by some of its Western admirers. Other Westerners, from Chamberlain and Aston on, have been less charmed, and have criticized the classical poetry of the Japanese court in particular, for excessive artificiality, and for a lack of breadth, grandeur, and sustained power.

The court poetry which was the supreme literary genre of the Heian and Kamakura periods is indeed restricted. In mode it is confined to lyricism; in form, to the 31-syllable tanka which becomes synonymous, in these periods, with waka, or Japanese poetry. Its vocabulary is circumscribed, generally limited to that employed in the KokinshŨ of 905, first of the twenty-one imperially sponsored anthologies of verse. There are some subsequent additions, primarily from the lexicon of the great early collection, the Man'yōshŨ (ca. 759), but the admissibility of such words was hotly contested.

Following the collapse of the old indigenous social order, tenth-century Korea was engaged in innovative cultural borrowing of a societal scale under the influence of the brilliant and mature Chinese civilization. Among the many institutions borrowed during this period, the civil service examination system (k‘o-chü in Chinese and kwagŏ in Korean), introduced in 958 by King Kwangjong (r. 949–975) of the Koryŏ Dynasty (918–1392), constitutes perhaps the most engrossing case of institutional borrowing in traditional Korea. Aside from its long-range consequences for Korean society and culture, the significance of this particular instance of institutional transplantation lies in the wholesale manner in which the borrowing was made, adopting the system complete with its Confucian examination content as well as its Chinese system of writing. Significant too is the fact that the proposal for this institutional borrowing did not come from a Korean but the king's Chinese advisor, Shuang Chi. It was also to Shuang Chi that the youthful Korean king entrusted the role of cultural innovator in instituting the examination system. The far-reaching social and cultural implications of this undertaking and its great success as a cultural borrowing make this particular case a fascinating subject to study; that is, when fully explored, it may shed light on the problems of ongoing cultural borrowing in Korea today.

For thirty-five years a major scholarly dialogue, (which often spilled over into abrasive debate) has enlivened the study of comparative Indo-European religions and mythology. At the center of this academic storm is Georges Dumézil, whose brilliant insights into the nature of early Indo-European cosmology, myths, rites, deities and social structure, have sent dozens of historians of religion, philologists and linguists to the texts in efforts to either corroborate or disprove his theories. The extent of Dumézil's influence may be seen in the number of scholars who have developed and amplified his ideas in their own research. Another, equally significant measure of his influence may be found in the number of well-informed critics which the French scholar has attracted. Dumézil's central theory, concerning the tripartite ideology of the Indo-Europeans, has proven to be suggestive and stimulating for scholars in Germanic, Roman, Celtic, Scandinavian and Indie studies. Certainly, Dumézil ranks alongside other great contemporary French scholars such as Braudel and Lévi-Strauss. Like them, his work has had an incalculable effect upon his discipline and upon the world of scholarship.

Georges Dumézil's research on the myths, legends, rites, and social structures—in short, what he calls the “ideology”—of the Indo-Europeans has had, for the most part, considerable impact upon recent scholarly interpretation of the various Indo-European traditions. This holds not only for articles and monographs on specific matters. Better measure might be taken by noting the favorable discussion of his views and results in works whose intent is introductory or popular: Proinsias Mac Cana's Celtic Mythology (London, 1970), E. O. G. Turville-Petre's Myth and Religion of the North (New York, 1964), H. R. Ellis Davidson's Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Penguin Books, 1964) and Scandinavian Mythology (London, 1969)—of whom none of the above are to be associated with Dumézil's “school”— and in responses pro and con by Iranicists. What one misses is a similar impact upon studies in two areas: Rome and India. And this is a remarkable and ironic fact, for it is Dumézil's work on these two pillars that, if one may say so, has fashioned the entrance to his edifice. It is not my intent to talk about Rome, but it is my impression that the situation is comparable to what one finds in the recent introductory and panoramic works on Hinduism: either no recognition of Dumézil's contribution at all (Thomas J. Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition [Encino, Cal., 1971], Veronica Ions, Indian Mythology [London, 1967]), or facile dismissals (Robert C. Zaehner, Hinduism [London, 1966]).

In a long series of important and stimulating publications Georges Dumézil has for almost half a century not only re-established a complex of theories with regard to the comparative study of ancient Indo-European mythology, but also applied a modernized comparative method. In investigating the foundations of the Indo-European socio-religious conceptions he bases his arguments and conclusions, it is true, to a certain extent on linguistic data, but these are always amplified and corroborated by a thorough consideration of the social structure, religious beliefs and ritual institutions of the ancient Indians, Romans, Germans, Celts and Greeks. Especially these last thirty-five years his work is of great originality in that he has founded and developed the theory of the trois fonctions, of the “three fundamental activities which the groups of priests, warriors and producers must fulfil and assure in order to maintain their community”. In this theory it is not the tripartite social organization of the prehistoric Indo-Europeans that is emphasized, but the principle of classification, the ideology to which, in Dumézil's opinion, this organization has given rise. Being reflected in the groupings of, and mutual relations between, the divine powers and in the very structure of Indo-European mythology and view of the world it is here again the ideological rather than the strictly sociological aspects that invite the reader's attention.

It should be emphasized at the outset that Georges Dumézil does not consider himself to be a social theorist of any sort, least of all a “structuralist.” Indeed, his opinion of the structuralist movement, to say nothing of the extent to which others have attempted to associate him with the origin and development of that movement, is less than enthusiastic; and in the Introduction to Mythe et épopée III he has explicitly denied any connection whatsoever with structuralism per se and, implicitly, with the theories and methods of the leader of the movement, Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Depuis quelques années, le mot “structure” est devenu ambigu. Tout en gardant sa valeur précise, ancienne—lorsqu'il est question, par exemple, de la structure d'une démonstration, d'un roman, d'un État—, il a pris un emploi technique beaucoup plus ambitieux dans un système philosophique aujourd'hui fort en vogue, auquel il a même donné son nom.

Historians of religion who investigate the myths, rites, and symbols of the multilocal Indo-European speakers are not unlike historians of the planet earth who investigate the dispersed continental land masses and ocean floors of the present time. The former labor to reconstruct from hundreds of thousands of mythological, philological and iconographical details the language, religion and social structure of an ancient parent culture, while the latter proceed from an equally bewildering variety of geological and oceanographical puzzle-pieces to determine the character of that primordial “Pangaea” from which continental plates of the earth's surface originated. Interestingly, both areas—comparative mythology and earth science—have recently been reinvigorated by fresh schools of investigation after long lapses subsequent to the discrediting of nineteenth-century hypotheses. A generation ago no Asian studies scholar would have supported the claim that the massive Indian epic Mahābhārata and the Iranian epic Shāhnāmeh have preserved significant structures of the Indo-European mythological worldview that went unreflected in the vedic and avestan texts, any more than a reputable earth scientist would have maintained the idèa that the Himalayan massif was created by a wayward “India” crunching into central “Asia” after a multithousand-mile journey from the loins of South Africa.