The Ancestral Home

Since coming back from Bali, I've been thinking a lot about the concept of the "ancestral home," which is really important to Balinese people, and pretty much irrelevant in the West. Take my own family, which is spread all over the place. A couple of years ago, my folks sold the house we grew up in and moved full-time to their summer home on Maryland's Eastern Shore. I've been living outside our home state (and now outside the country) for more than a decade, while for the past few years my brother has lived in Delaware and Hawaii. This is perfectly normal in the U.S., and most of my peers' families are similarly far-flung.

In Bali, however, over many successive generations a family will continue to inhabit the same compound comprised of a kitchen building, a temple, and individual houses with just a bedroom inside each for the grandparents, parents, sons and their wives, and any unmarried children, typically adding up to between 12 and 24 people. The effect is a really weird clash of traditional and modern. These compounds are quite ancient, but often the people who live there have electricity, cable TV and Internet service and even videogame systems (our cycling guide mentioned having a Playstation), and many of them ride motorcycles to work at upscale resorts everyday. And can I draw your attention for a moment to the awesome photo above, in which an Iron Maiden poster hangs on the wall of a family compound building?

Instead of moving into more modern homes, Balinese people continue living in the family compounds their great-greatgrandparents (and much further back) lived in, because they believe ancestors inhabit the spirit world and should be honored almost as highly as gods. To sell your home would be to abandon your ancestors, an act considered shameful and very, very bad karma. Young people from well-off families might go away for a few years and work in another city, on a cruise ship, etc, but they always come back home. At least the boys, anyway, because the ancestral home passes down the paternal lineage, while the female children of each generation join their husbands' households once they get married.

But anyway, learning about the Balinese household culture cast an interesting light on my own. Balinese people couldn't really wrap their heads around our families being spread across the U.S... not to mention the fact that John and I currently live in different countries!