Spending for ritual offerings reaches Rp 1t
Ananta Wijaya, Contributor, Denpasar
Women and girls packed the Badung traditional market on a Saturday morning last month. They were all buying fruits, flowers and other essential ritual materials for the Galungan and Kuningan festivals.
The festivals, which fell on Aug. 20 and 30 respectively, are the most joyous religious celebrations for Bali’s Hindus.
There were so many shoppers the market’s spacious main area could not accommodate them all.
Dozens of traders took this opportunity to set up makeshift stalls in the market parking area.
Naturally, customers soon gathered around these stalls, creating severe traffic jams around the market, located at the heart of Denpasar’s downtown.
“Yes, it’s a regular traffic jam. This always happens around any major Hindu festival. But traffic jams around Galungan are the worst,” a traffic cop said, sighing.
Inside the market, the biggest crowd flocked around people selling busung, young coconut palm fronds. The pliable yellow fronds are an essential material for making temple offerings.
The fronds are cut into various shapes and fashioned into offering containers as well as into decorative elements which adorn the multi-tiered structures.
“Spending on coconut leaves is the highest compared to the amounts spent on other offering materials,” said Ni Wayan Oktariani, a third-year high school student at SMAN 3. The other significant expenditures were on fruit, flowers and cakes.
Oktariani had just finished a research project on how much the Balinese spend on offering materials for the two major holidays.
Research on the financial aspects and economic consequences of Balinese Hindu festivals and oftentimes extravagant rituals is rarely done. That such research has been carried out by a high school student is unheard of.
“The spending on coconut leaves constituted 39.67 percent of the total spent on offering materials,” Oktariani said.
Translated into hard cash, that percentage equals Rp 383,494 (US$40). That is the average amount of money spent by a single Balinese household on young coconut fronds to prepare for the Galungan and Kuningan festivals.
The Galungan and Kuningan festivals actually consist of several smaller preparatory and post-festival rituals which begin one month before and end one month after the two principle celebrations.
Oktariani’s research covered expenditures during a shorter period, starting a week before Galungan and ended 25 days after Kuningan.
The student collected sample data from households in three different economic sites — households in a tourism area in Sanur, in an urban setting in Denpasar and in rural parts of Badung regency.
“On average, a single family spends Rp 977,215 for offering materials during the period surrounding these two festivals,” she said.
“The festival falls once in seven months, so I gathered expenditure data from three festivals over a two-year period, then divided the total to determine the average annual spending.”
She found the average annual expenditure per household for this festival period alone was about Rp 1,4 million.
“If we multiply this number by the total number of Hindu households on the island we will arrive at a figure of more than Rp 1 trillion per year,” she said.
Balinese Hindus celebrate more than a dozen major festivals each year, not to mention the myriad minor ceremonies.
Economics and development scholar AA Ngurah Made Arwata said the stratospheric amount underlined the economic importance of Balinese Hindu rituals.
“Such rituals shouldn’t be viewed from a religious perspective alone but also from an economic perspective,” he said.
He attributed the island’s relatively stable economic situation during the 1997 countrywide financial crisis to the island’s extensive spending on offerings, which kept the island’s economy running, albeit at a much slower pace.
Oktariani’s research results confirmed Arwata’s statement.
The research found the expenditures on Galungan and Kuningan festivals offerings constituted 2.7 percent of the island’s total gross domestic product (GDP).
“If we expand the research to include expenditures on all Balinese Hindus religious festivals, then the actual contribution of this sector to the GDP would figure much higher than just 2.7 percent,” she said.
Source: The Jakarta Post
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