Chapter 11 Insular Southeast Asia 425never talked about what was invisible, but very much alive in Bali. Talking was
too dangerous, regarding the Dutch. Margaret Mead herself never broached a
political discourse” (Rony 2006).
But Mead and Bateson in the 1930s were interested in psychological ques-
tions. They found Bali photogenic, its people innately theatrical (as even the
puputan demonstrated), but what they made an effort to document was a schizo-
phrenic quality to the culture. They were funded by the Committee for Research
in Dementia Praecox (i.e., schizophrenia), and their most significant research
method was extensive visual documentation of Balinese behavior. They took
over 25,000 still photographs and 22,000 feet of film. It took years after they
returned home to process all this visual data into two books and six films.
Their most important ideas were presented in Balinese Character: A Photographic
Analysis (1942). Here they assembled 759 stills organized into groups illustrat-
ing themes of character formation, many of them focusing on mothers and
babies, habitual bodily gestures, episodes of trance, and rites of passage. “The
Balinese enjoy very much the gay impersonal atmosphere of crowded occa-
sions... a Balinese crowd will pack almost solid, without any of those spaces
which we try to preserve around ourselves,” Mead wrote (Bateson and Mead
1942:64). Six photographs illustrate this point: a thousand people carrying
ashes to the sea for the deification of a dead father; women and girls carrying
offerings for a temple festival; and so forth. However, the opposite can happen:
a trance-like withdrawal they call “awayness” in which individuals surrounded
by others become vacant and unresponsive, illustrated by small boys, a mother
with her child, a psychopathic vagrant, and a woodcarver.
They explained these psychological patterns in adults through Balinese
child-rearing practices, providing photographic evidence. Mothers tease their
children; they make them jealous by coddling other babies; they scare them with
shouts of “snake”; they arouse their emotions, sending them into tantrums.
Then, rather than enclosing them in warm embraces for reassurance, they go
“away.” They emotionally withdraw rather than responding to the child’s fears
and emotions. Gradually the child learns alternative emotional strategies like
Photo spread on the following two pages: Photos from Mead and Bateson, Balinese Character,
- This work published 759 photos displayed as in these two plates, each a set of nine
photos portraying psychological traits instilled in early childhood and projected into
adult culture. In the photos on the left, a mother responds to her child’s fretting (1 and 2),
but when he responds to her (3) she looks away. In (4) she laughs at some external stimu-
lus; then rhythmically pats his head, (7) again looking elsewhere as the child seeks emo-
tional connection through frantic nursing. In the photos on the right, we see scenes of
men engaged in trance dances. In (1), a Balinese drawing, three men fight a witch with
krisses, each in a different stage of falling into trance. The man in (2) is about to attack
the witch; in (3) and (7) a trance dancer is in the final state of self-attack. Photo (8)
depicts a small boy in a tantrum as his mother laughs at him, perhaps an original emo-
tional formation for adult trance dancing with self-attacking krisses. (5) through (9) are
additional shots of trance dancers in extreme state.