Time, Rites and Festivals in Bali

Time, Rites and Festivals in Bali offers a lucid ethnographic portrait of how Balinese time is woven from ritual cadence rather than clock hands. The authors situate calendars, seasons, and temple cycles within daily life, arguing that sacred time orders social space as insistently as any season or market day. Through close readings of ceremonies, offerings, and communal rites, the book reveals a calendar system whose logic is at once precise and poetic, demanding interpretive attention from both scholar and lay reader. It traces how agricultural work, religious duties, and communal obligations converge in the repetitive timing of festivals, processions, and temple anniversaries. The authors thereby illuminate a worldview in which time is not a neutral measure but a moral and cosmological force. Readers are invited to see Balinese calendars as intricate grammars of devotion, memory, and social cohesion. The text blends fieldwork with comparative reflection, positioning Balinese temporalities within broader Southeast Asian and global contexts. In doing so, it converts a seemingly opaque calendrical maze into a lucid map of ritual life and communal identity.^*