428 Part V: Southeast Asia
withdrawing themselves into emotional remoteness even in intense social situa-
tions like crowded temple festivals. Perhaps the most distinctive outcome is the
trance state that Balinese culture provides multiple opportunities to exhibit. In
temple festivals, dancers go into trance as the mythological Witch, Rangda, or
the Dragon Barong, along with their followers, and do battle in the temple
grounds. The Witch’s followers are danced by little girls, and Barong’s by young
men with krisses. The drama goes on for hours, with performers falling into deep
trances, the young warriors turning their krisses onto themselves. At the end, the
dancers in deep trance or comas are taken inside the temple to be brought back
by incense and holy water. Bateson and Mead hypothesize that the Witch is a
projection of the frustrating mother of early childhood, and that the trances and
self-stabbing with krisses are the tantrums promoted by the unreachable mother.
These connections between early childhood experiences and aspects of the
larger culture were of great interest in this period; this area of research began to
be called “Culture and Personality Studies.” Psychoanalysts believed that cer-
tain configurations of early experience tend to produce certain personality con-
figurations in the adult. Transferring these findings to the investigation of
societies as wholes, it becomes possible to make tentative predictions as to
what sort of people the child-rearing techniques of a particular society would
be likely to produce (Craig 1947). The idea was that people in small-scale soci-
eties are likely to treat their children in similar ways (i.e., in culturally patterned
ways) and that these children as adults will have similar personality outcomes.
And since child-rearing practices are different from culture to culture, so might
resulting personalities of adults vary from culture to culture (i.e., modal person-
ality types). Thus, they believed, it makes sense to speak of a typically Balinese,
Japanese, American, or other personality type.
Another study with these theoretical suppositions was conducted about the
same time in Alor by Cora DuBois (The People of Alor, 1944). (Alor is a small
volcanic island just down the Indonesian archipelago from Bali at the eastern
end, near Timor.) She studied mother–child relations at length, finding that
because of mothers’ responsibilities in their fields, children are given too little
attention, are not trained systematically, are disciplined with teasing, ridicule,
and frustration rather than by praise and encouragement. The mother does not
become a dependable object, producing anxieties and inhibitions in the emo-
tionally brittle child. As a result, individuals “develop as highly isolated units,
with little capacity for satisfying personal relationships, and filled with pent-up
hostility;... insecure, suspicious, lacking in self-confidence and self-esteem,
devoid of enterprise and initiative and helpless in mastering their environment,
and... with slight development of conscience” (Craig 1947:369).
Eventually this research approach began to lose its momentum. We had
learned a great deal about how culture affects personality, but we had to retreat
from extreme cultural determinism with the realization that much of human
nature is common across cultures. For example, aggression may indeed vary
across cultures in terms of the forms that aggressive action may take (i.e., gun