Communities and Nature Bond - Boundary Creation in Bali
A Quest for Better Living Place
Fransiska Prihadi
When the term community is used, the first thing that usually comes to mind is a place in
which people know and care for one another. The word community it self means a mixture of
living things that share an environment. The individual living beings can be plant or animal;
any species; any size.1 Sharing interaction in various ways is the character of a community.
The best force of community is that all individual subjects in the mix have something in
common.
All human beings generally are instinctively connected to a certain community after having
identified their specific kind of social interaction need. People often have a misconception
that modern urban development works better just because they have been designed by
architects or urban planners. A better living place does not only refer to those things that we
can see or feel such as infrastructure, road, buildings, public place, but also depends on the
unseen factors which involve things beyond culture, class, and religion. Through a process
of socialization people start to create relations with each other and within the context of
community they start to think about doing things which can improve their quality of life, which
can or can not be depending on a certain distance boundary.
Community lays claims on their members. The interesting situation that occurs in Bali is that
actually the local and international community works in contradictory claims for their
members. The local community (the Village – Desa Adat) has a tight but yet democratic
rules that control the members. Meanwhile the international community (of which I took the
Bali Hash House Harriers as the role model) has a very loose rules and yet still maintain
their boundary. |