Chapter 11 Insular Southeast Asia 423below. Rosaldo describes his tremendous grief upon recovering her body. Although
American culture tends to emphasize the sorrow of bereavement, there are many
other emotions as well, among them anger. His first responses had been rage:
How could she abandon me? How could she have been so stupid as to
fall?... I felt like in a nightmare, the whole world around me expanding
and contracting, visually and viscerally heaving.... I experienced the deep
cutting pain of sorrow almost beyond endurance, the cadaverous cold of
realizing the finality of death. (1993:9)
Finally, when he could return to the writing of anthropology, he reflected on an
aspect of human experience that scholars have tended to overlook, even in the
anthropology of death: emotional force rather than symbolic complexity. The
analytic emphasis on formal events and the unpacking of complex symbolism
in mortuary rites that go on for days, weeks, and years had been the fashion in
scholarly writing. But it failed to grasp the intense emotions of the bereaved. He
felt he at last understood the emotional depth of Ilongot who have little interest
in elaborate symbol systems but will say only, in one-line accounts that leave so
much unspoken, that head-hunting allows throwing away unbearable grief.Romanticized Bali
Trance and Dance in Bali
One of Haddon’s students, Gregory Bateson, married American anthropol-
ogist Margaret Mead, who was a student of Franz Boas, the founder of Ameri-
can anthropology. They met in New Guinea where they were both doing
fieldwork, and in 1936 they married in Singapore on their way to Bali for a
three year research trip. Bali in the 1930s was already a privileged enclave of
expat Europeans and Americans, a kind of “tropical café society” (Rony
2006:7) for artists and academics. Bali was highly romanticized: the people
were beautiful, the culture aesthetic, the landscape luscious. It was the begin-
ning of a stream of scholars who would make their reputations and Bali’s fame
as one of the most-studied cultures in the world.
Yet it was only 30 years after the puputan (the fight to the death, mass ritual
suicide). Following a dispute over who had the right to plunder a sunken Chi-
nese ship, Dutch forces had moved into Bali against the southern kingdoms
(described in chapter 10), who defiantly resisted Dutch rifles with krisses
(knives) and flung jewels. The ultimate resistance occurred when the raja of
Denpasar, dressed in white cremation clothes, ordered his high priest to plunge
a knife into his chest, and by the end, a thousand Balinese died in a mass sui-
cide. Whether the violent end of the old order had any enduring impact on the
psyches of surviving Balinese 30 years later was not a question that Mead and
Bateson explored. They were deeply interested in ritual violence, however,
even while the “representation of Balinese political violence was taboo” (Rony
2006). Years later, their Balinese research assistant, I Made Kaler, said: “I