Every Village Writes Its Own Awig-Awig

There is a book in almost every Balinese village that decides who belongs, what each member owes, and what happens to those who break the rules. The book is the awig-awig, the written customary law of the desa adat, and the most remarkable thing about it is who holds the pen. No ministry in Jakarta issues it, and no office in Denpasar drafts it. The village writes its own awig-awig, argues over it in its own assembly, and changes it when village life changes around it.

Because of that, there is no single Balinese customary code. There are hundreds of local ones, each fitted to what Balinese call desa, kala, patra: place, time and circumstance. Two villages an hour apart can share the same religion, the same ceremonial calendar and the same language, and still fine the same offence differently, because each awig-awig answers to its own ground.

To call it a rulebook is accurate but a little flat. A customary village head in Seminyak, interviewed by Universitas Indonesia researchers, compared the awig-awig to the constitution of a country: it is the frame everything else hangs on, and like a constitution it is rarely changed. The day to day detail sits one level down, in implementing rules called pararem, decisions of the village assembly that fill in the frame and can be revised or revoked without touching it.

What an awig-awig contains

Start with the name. In the reading offered by Balinese legal writers, wig means broken or damaged, and awig means unbroken, made good. An awig-awig is, at root, a set of provisions meant to keep communal life unbroken.

Almost every awig-awig is built on the same skeleton, the philosophy of Tri Hita Karana, the three causes of wellbeing. The first field is parhyangan, the village's relationship with the divine: its temples, their upkeep and the round of worship. The second is pawongan, the people: who counts as krama, a full member of the customary village, who counts as a resident who has come from elsewhere, and what rights and obligations each of them carries, from ceremonial labour and dues to questions of membership and marriage. The third is palemahan, the territory: the village land, the house plots families live on, and the natural surroundings the village answers for.

A governor's regulation issued in 2020, setting out how villages should write their rules down, fixes a minimum table of contents: the village's name and territory, its foundations and aims, one chapter for each of the three fields, a chapter on dangers, disputes and sanctions, a chapter on how the awig-awig itself may be amended, and a closing. The skeleton is shared by everyone. The flesh on it is local, which is precisely the point.

Not every village even uses the same label. In some places the body of rules travels under older names such as sima, dresta or pengeling-eling, and awig-awig is simply the term that has become standard. What matters is not the label but the arrangement underneath it: a community small enough to meet in one pavilion has written down, for itself, who belongs to it and what belonging costs.

I have written before about the desa adat, the customary village that governs itself. The awig-awig is the instrument that makes that self government more than a slogan, because it turns custom from something elders remember into something a community has actually agreed, in writing, to be bound by.

From palm leaf to printed book

These texts are old. One survey of Balinese customary law, drawing on documentation held by Bali's provincial cultural office, records the awig-awig of Sibetan village in Karangasem, dated to the Saka year 1300, roughly 1378 in the Western calendar, among the oldest known customary texts on the island. For much of their history, though, the rules lived as much in memory and habit as on any page, carried by what elders recalled and assemblies enforced. Written copies were inscribed on lontar, palm leaves; a lontar copy of the awig-awig of Pengelatan village, catalogued to around 1900, is held today by the Library of Congress in Washington.

That balance shifted, on paper at least, with Bali Provincial Regulation No. 4 of 2019 on customary villages, and the implementing rules that followed in 2020. Every desa adat is now obliged to write its awig-awig down and register it, in Balinese, in both Balinese script and Latin letters, and in Indonesian. Composing one is treated as serious, almost sacred work: legal journals describe villages choosing an auspicious day for the task, so that the finished text carries taksu, a kind of spiritual charisma. Amending one, by contrast, is ordinary democracy. Changes are debated and agreed in the paruman, the village assembly, the same gathering that settles disputes and sets the ceremonial calendar.

Sanctions that climb from an apology to silence

The back of the book is where most rulebooks turn vague. The awig-awig does not. Its sanctions climb a ladder, and the rungs have names. At the bottom is mengaksama, a formal apology. Then come dedosaan, a money fine, and kerampang, the seizure of property from someone who will not pay or will not comply. A prayascita, a cleansing ceremony, can be ordered to repair the balance an offence has disturbed. And at the top of the ladder sits kasepekang.

What gives the ladder its weight is not the size of the fines. It is dependence. A Balinese life runs through the village: ceremonies need dozens of hands, a cremation needs the whole banjar, and the burial ground belongs to the community. Even the lower rungs bite socially, because assemblies discuss cases openly and the names of offenders are spoken in front of their neighbours, so that shame does much of the enforcing long before any fine is collected. Kasepekang, the heaviest sanction in the book, works by switching all of that off. Neighbours stop speaking to the offender, help stops arriving, and a family is left alone inside a crowded village. Researchers who studied sanction systems in Badung describe exclusion as the peak of the pyramid for exactly this reason. Balinese legal writers add that an offence is felt to disturb more than the peace of the street. It upsets a cosmic balance, so the sanctions are meant to repair two worlds at once, the visible one and the unseen one.

When the rulebook learned to talk about plastic

A text that can be amended can also learn new subjects, and the clearest recent example is rubbish. In 2018 the governor of Bali issued a regulation limiting single use plastic, and the province asked customary villages to fold that norm into their awig-awig and pararem, reasoning that villagers follow their own customary rules more readily than instructions from the capital. A Universitas Indonesia study of waste rules in Badung regency traces how this worked on the ground. In Seminyak, the customary village had already built its own waste management bureau by village consensus in 2003, then strengthened it through a pararem, and businesses operating in the territory, hotels included, were required to use the service. The machinery behind that is unglamorous and constant: Seminyak's assembly meets every six months by the Balinese calendar, and one standing item on its agenda is whether the existing pararem still deserve to exist, to be kept, revised or revoked. Environmental officials interviewed for the study were candid about the strategy: the customary rules work because the community wrote them, recognises them, and fears their sanctions more than a circular from Denpasar.

I find that admission quietly extraordinary. A modern provincial government, facing a modern waste crisis, reached not for a bigger inspectorate but for a book of customary law whose ancestors were carved into palm leaves. It understood that in Bali the shortest route to a person's behaviour still runs through the village assembly.

Two legal orders on the same street

None of this floats free of the Indonesian state. Bali Provincial Regulation No. 4 of 2019 recognises the desa adat and its rulebook, and the 2020 implementing regulation defines the awig-awig formally as a rule made by the customary village that binds its members, its resident outsiders and its guests. But recognition comes with a hierarchy. Legal scholars who have tested these texts against national law and human rights standards point out that the desa adat is not a fully autonomous lawmaker. Its awig-awig sits inside the national legal order and is expected to stay in line with it, and the fiercest arguments, over sanctions such as kasepekang, happen exactly where the two orders rub against each other.

A Balinese villager therefore lives under two legal orders at once: citizen of Indonesia in the morning's paperwork, krama of a village by the afternoon's ceremony. The two do not always ask for the same thing. What keeps the arrangement workable, I think, is that the smaller order knows its limits, and the larger one has mostly learned to work through it rather than around it. The plastic rules reached Seminyak's drains through a pararem faster than they ever would have through a circular.

Every village writes its own awig-awig. Read several side by side and you are reading Bali in the plural: the same faith and the same philosophy, argued into different sentences by different assemblies, on different ground. A national law tells a hundred million people what they must do. An awig-awig tells a few hundred neighbours what they have agreed, in writing, to owe one another. It is law at the smallest scale that still deserves the name, and perhaps because the scale is small, it is the law that people in Bali actually feel.