GREGORY BATESON, MARGARET MEAD AND BALINESE CHARACTER:

SCHISMOGENESIS IN A DISCIPLINE OF WORDS.

By

Jason Michael Brooks

Thesis submitted to

the Department of Anthropology, Princeton University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Bachelor of Arts

4th April, 2005.

I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. I authorize Princeton University to lend this thesis to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research.

Jason Michael Brooks

I further authorize Princeton University to reproduce this thesis by photocopy or other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research.

Jason Michael Brooks

Princeton University requires the signatures of all persons using or photocopying this thesis. Please sign below, and give address and date.

for Edwin.

Acknowledgements This project has been an awfully big adventure for me and I could never have begun

without the help of a small army of individuals, too numerous and diverse to try to list. Thank you all.

However, like all good adventures, mine has featured a few defining characters - without whom the entire story would have followed another path: My advisor, Larry Rosen, who has successfully interpreted my ramblings for three years now, and showed me how my ideas could become something more. Jim Boon and Hildred Geertz, who offered their valuable experience at just the right times. Raphael Alvarado, who first introduced me to Bateson’s thinking, with appropriately unique explanatory grace. Susan Stewart, who taught me to ‘see’ text, and ‘read’ pictures. My Mum and Dad, who gave me copious amount love and editing. Andre Lazar, who was always French in the face of danger. The sisters of mercy, Rel, Rena and Mary, who gave me their comfort, and later they gave me their song. Page, who reminded me how nice life can be when I needed it most. Special thanks to John Thompson III, Mike Brennan and the Princeton University Men’s Basketball team, for starting my American dream.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1-5 Chapter 1 6-24 Chapter 2 25-55

Planning 27 Work in the Field 46

Chapter 3 56-73 Plates 66 Annotations 69 Section Introductions 71 Conclusion 74-102

Description 75-88 Bateson 76 Mead 82 Balinese Character 86

Explanation 89-103 Schismogenesis in a Discipline of Words 90 Original Intents … 92 …and Eventual Understandings 98

Appendix 104-106 Bibliography 107-109

schismogenesis (sĪzməΏd3єnĪsĪs). Anthrop. [f. SCHISM n.+-O+GENESIS, after biogenesis, parthenogenesis, etc.]. A term proposed for the origin of differentiation between groups or cultures caused by the reciprocal exaggeration of behaviour patterns and responses that may result in the destruction of social balance. Hence schismo genic a.

1935 G. BATESON in Man XXXV. 181 A position is set up in which the behaviour X, Y, Z, is the standard reply to X, Y, Z. This position contains elements which may lead to progressive differentiation or schismogenesis. 1936 R. FIRTH We, the Tikopia p. vii, Attempts are made to analyse cultures in terms of Schismogenesis. 1940 Brit. Jrnl. Psychol. Oct. 133 The growth or divergence between the two kinds of game [sc. rugby football]is an excellent example of what Bateson has called ‘schismogenesis’ the development of cultural traits in opposition and divergence. 1949 G. BATESON in M. Fortes Soc. Structure 47 In schismogenic theory it was tacitly assumed that the individuals would maximize intangible variables such as prestige, self-esteem, or even submissiveness. 1969 B. MCLAUGHLIN Stud. in Soc. Movements 477 Norman Miller, ‘Formal Organization and Schismogenesis’, unpublished paper.

Introduction

In 1942, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead published Balinese Character: A

Photographic Analysis. In the book’s opening passage, they qualified the suggestion implicit in

their choice of subtitle by identifying “the form of presentation used in th[e] monograph [as]

an experimental innovation” (Bateson and Mead 1942:i). Whilst this is indubitably true, it is

also a dramatic understatement: Balinese Character, the book, is merely the end product of a

project conceived and executed under axioms which are themselves accurately described as

experimental innovations. Mead and Bateson’s shared thought processes, as documented by

the volume itself, represent a significant reconsideration of the methodological and

theoretical assumptions of their contemporaries. Although Balinese Character has since

received critical acclaim for its achievements, it has been treated as an exceptional

undertaking rather than an exemplary piece pushing the limits of methodology.

Bateson and Mead claimed explicitly that the value of their work in Bali was of

twofold significance, both as a collection of data, and as an exemplary analysis. Considering

their claims, the treatment of Balinese Character in the years since its publication is surprising

Introduction

to say the least. This thesis seeks to clarify the precise nature and extent of the

methodological and theoretical innovations made during this project, by performing a

contextualized analysis of the book with the eventual intention of evaluating its various

actual and potential contributions to anthropology as a discipline.

Balinese Character was written during a period of significant adjustment for

anthropology as a whole; facing the reality of World War I (WWI) and with the outbreak of

another war immanent, anthropologists were realizing the significance of their work’s

potential applications. A new generation of theorists was beginning to receive widespread

attention in its attempts to address the shortcomings found in the work of its evolutionarily

inclined predecessors. The anthropological emphasis was shifting from speculative

evaluation of historically derived data, towards engagement with living subjects and theories

concerning social and psychological phenomena. Educated within the newly established

British and American schools, Bateson and Mead were among those who, having taken

careful stock of ethnography’s historical development began to search in earnest for ways to

refine their methodology.

Balinese Character can be seen as the point of intersection of Mead and Bateson’s

ongoing theoretical careers, before which their interests were converging in many ways, and

after which each continued on their separate courses. They began work in Bali in 1936

directly after their marriage, having met only four years previously. The couple soon realized

that in order to satisfy the combination of strict methodological premises and ambitious

theoretical aims they had defined, their work would have to incorporate a previously

unheard of volume of photographic documentation. The choice to continue was a direct

result of their commitment to empirical rigor in social science. It resulted in a project whose

value resides not only in its physical manifestation, the book itself, but also in the vast

2

Introduction

catalogue of photographic field data gathered during its creation. Mead described their work

in Bali as “a quantum leap from the two to three hundred still photographs usually taken to

illustrate a study to twenty-five thousand still photographs that incorporated our

observations” (Mead 1972:295). The decision to create a book in which text functioned

primarily to annotate arrangements of images in a field accustomed to the inclusion of at

most a handful of snaps used simply to illustrate an ethnographers experience, should not be

ignored. Mead and Bateson were clearly aware of the revolutionary statement implicit in their

working methods. The unique format of Balinese Character is an accurate indication of the

degree to which both of them were willing (and eager) to question the assumptions of the

discipline.

One of the most fundamental theoretical shifts evidenced in Balinese Character, was

particularly characteristic of this period in anthropology. With the social sciences reeling in

the wake of Freud’s contributions, anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict in

America, and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski in England were still working

to integrate psychiatric theory more elegantly into the anthropologist’s traditional

perspective. Mead and Bateson were both convinced of the value of interdisciplinary

exchange throughout their careers: Mead’s earlier fieldwork was focused upon the personal

psychodynamics of growth and change, whilst Bateson devoted the later years of his life to

defining what he called an ‘ecology of mind’, which was an effort to reach a unified

understanding of the psychological processes within the human individual in terms of

systems and patterns common throughout the natural sciences. It is no surprise therefore

that, together Mead and Bateson engineered the Balinese Character project to accommodate

the tenets of psychiatric research as well as ethnographic description.

3

Introduction

In her important 1975 article “Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words”, Mead

criticized anthropologists for not taking full advantage of the research opportunities offered

by the availability of the camera. Her characterization of anthropology as a “discipline of

words” (Mead 1975:5) would certainly have been even more accurate during her period of

work with Bateson in Bali, thirty five years previously. Attempts to integrate visual

information into ethnographic accounts had been marginalized by anthropologists to the

sub-discipline of visual anthropology. Correspondingly the new field of visual anthropology

developed in opposition to this stance, with an ultimately limiting over-emphasis on the

value of purely visual information.

Almost as soon as visual anthropology was established (with the invention and

widespread availability of the Leica camera in the early 1930’s) it was rapidly dominated by

growing interest in ethnographic film, and tended to treat photography as appropriate in

only a limited range of contexts. As a discipline, it has remained as much the anthropological

study of specifically visual phenomena as the visually conducted branch of anthropology.

Although this distinction may at this point seem too subtle to be noteworthy, is a valuable

tool in explaining the anthropologist’s response to Balinese Character since its publication.

Visual anthropology has maintained a strict methodological adherence to certain

narrative precepts. Having originally derived its place from the previously established roles

of written description, ethnographic film has generally not represented a divergence from the

atemporal, and hence painstakingly presented narrative style of traditional ethnography. In

the same way that early ethnographic writing portrayed static structures and functional

networks, ethnographic films were produced to emphasize the stable aspects of human life,

and therefore largely ignored the dynamic elements of any situation being examined. In

Balinese Character Mead and Bateson defied convention and used photographic arrays

4

Introduction

specifically to depict aspects of individual and cultural development. In this context

photography can be seen as combining the respective benefits of both film and text based

narratives. Even alone, photographs can be used to clearly illustrate holistic change in

unrefined cultural configurations; with the addition of simple annotations, they may be

further used to demonstrate connections across the temporal development being

documented. Neither the temporal definition offered by film, nor the essentially fragmented

nature of text can provide an explanation of development in as accessible a manner as an

array of photographs. Photography allows the simple possibility of presenting a series of

different states in such a way as to indicate their relation to one another without forcing the

reader to understand or compare them in that sequence alone.

The unique form of Balinese Character is the product of a complex arrangement of

historical circumstances. The specifics of these circumstances are therefore of primary

significance in any detailed consideration of the book. It is necessary to locate Bateson and

Mead within the theoretical situation outlined above, before continuing with an in-depth

evaluation of the book and its implications.

5

Chapter 1

The first chapter of this thesis aims to provide a map of the intersecting theoretical

careers of Bateson and Mead; from their academic training in anthropology to the

conception of the Bali project, including a survey of relevant work completed since that

time. The narrative presented seeks to facilitate the later explanation of the various

developments exhibited in Balinese Character, as products of both Mead and Bateson’s

individual theoretical interests, and their shared criticisms of ethnographic methodology at

that time. This chapter is therefore not simply a description of Mead and Bateson’s work,

but also an attempt to clarify their respective positions within the theoretical and

methodological landscape of the period. It will recount their histories simultaneously, in the

manner in which they originally unfolded up to the point of their meeting. This will provide

a holistic understanding of the unique situation in which Mead and Bateson found

themselves shortly after meeting, fervently exchanging ideas - and falling in love: For it was

from this very situation that they conceived and produced Balinese Character.

* * *

Chapter 1

Gregory Bateson was born on May 9, 1904, to the renowned geneticist William

Bateson and his wife Caroline Beatrice Durham. William Bateson was famous as one of

Darwin’s most prominent contemporary critics, publishing his most important work

Materials for the Study of Variation in 1894. It exposed several inconsistencies in Darwin’s

account of the evolutionary process, and offered a more refined model incorporating his

divergent perspectives on the precise patterning of genetic mutation. Whilst Darwin

described an evolutionary process characterized by gradual changes in the gene pool,

requiring many intermediary forms between species, William Bateson emphasized the lack of

evidence for these forms in his account. He proposed that evolution must take place in a

more irregular fashion, with improbable discontinuous variations providing functional

advantages: These variations created subspecies that would then compete with one another

for success during ‘plateau’ periods of no significant genetic change.

William’s academic work was the focus of his life, and he “expressed fatherhood

through science and taught his children as he did his students” (Lipset 1980:44). It was no

surprise therefore when, in the autumn of 1922, Gregory followed in his father’s footsteps

by entering Cambridge as an undergraduate in Zoology. Having lost one brother, John, to a

German bomb in the trenches and the other, Martin, to suicide six months previously,

Gregory took his place as the lone bearer of a three generation family legacy at St. Johns

College, Cambridge.

* * *

Margaret Mead was born the first child of Emily Fogg and Edward Mead, on

December 16, 1901. At the time, her father was a recent addition to the faculty at the

University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Commerce and Finance, and her mother

was completing a Doctorate at Bryn Mawr. It seems that her parents were very influential in

7

Chapter 1

her upbringing, as academic role models as well as caring individuals. She later remarked that

she had “absorbed many of the premises of anthropology at home” (Mead 1972:111) from

exposure to the academic careers of her parents. However, she describes her paternal

grandmother, Martha Ramsey Mead as “the most decisive influence in [her] life” (Mead

1972:445). Martha was herself an experienced teacher and Mead describes sharing many

hours of her childhood with her, “learning both inductively and deductively” (Mead

1972:45). The influences of her empowered mother and grandmother were indubitably

responsible for the development of Mead’s own underlying sense of confidence, allowing

her the freedom to express herself in an era where women were still not fully accepted in

academic circles.

In 1919, having declared her engagement to Luther Cressman, and fostering

aspirations to become a writer, she began an undergraduate degree at DePauw. However,

she quickly became frustrated with the various forms of social discrimination surrounding

the prevalent sorority system and by the end of her first year, her low opinions of life at

DePauw motivated her to transfer to Barnard College. In the autumn of 1920, she

continued her studies in English in New York, where she experienced for the first time the

academic social life she had always hoped for.

* * *

In Britain, Bateson was applying himself to “zoology, botany, organic chemistry, and

physiology” (Lipset 1980:103). He spent his first two years at Cambridge revisiting several of

his father’s earlier experiments into the nature of genetic variance, including a study of pond

creatures and another on the patterning of partridges. He found the process of devising

theory rewarding, but by 1925 he began to question his interest in Zoology as a whole, and

was troubled in particular by the prospect of “sitting in a lab for the rest of [his] life” (Lipset

8

Chapter 1

1980:113). After a particularly disillusioning trip to the Galapagos, Bateson expressed a

growing sense that he was not being pushed to achieve in zoology as a result of his legacy,

and started to consider seriously the other academic options open to him. In July he

happened to meet A. C. Haddon, who, after a short discussion of Bateson’s experiences in

the Galapagos, offered him the chance continue the second half of his studies in Ethnology

at St. Johns. Bateson quickly agreed to the offer, and thus began his career as a social

scientist, a direction that he contrasted conceptually with his previous lack of motivation in

the “ordinary impersonal sciences” (Lipset 1980:115).

Haddon was one of the founders of the modern concept of ethnography, leading the

first systematic fieldwork expedition from Cambridge to the Torres Straight in 1899. He

realized the threat posed to many indigenous practices by the ravaging forces of colonialism,

and therefore set out to salvage what knowledge of these practices he could before they were

destroyed. Haddon was remarkably resourceful in his experimental fieldwork techniques; he

used a still camera, made audio recordings on wax cylinders, and even documented small

sections of ritual dance steps using an early Lumiere film camera. The Torres Straight project

took place as part of the response to the first wave of social theory since the Darwinian

revolution, which had explained observed differences in human behavior in terms of

absolute evolutionary relationships, to be revealed by historical reconstruction.

Haddon came to study anthropology at Cambridge from his previous position as the

Chair of the Royal College of Science in Dublin, when his zoological fieldwork experiences

provoked new ideas on the possibilities offered by the scientific study of man. Haddon

began to see parallels between the evolutionary processes he was documenting in his

zoological studies and the processes of “change in our material equipment and our modes of

thought” (Fleure 1941:453). This appreciation of the potential complexity of human thought

9

Chapter 1

marked the beginning of his enquiry into fieldwork methods, carried out during the Torres

Straight expeditions. It was directly following the success of these early expeditions that

Bateson met Haddon, and was introduced to the methodological and theoretical framework

that would soon separate into the sub-disciplines of modern anthropology.

Considering anthropology’s initially tentative position, it is understandable that

Bateson was somewhat hesitant (although optimistic) in his characterization of the fledgling

field circa. 1925 as “on the whole, pretty thin, which [he] suppose[d], was, in one way, lucky”

(Lipset 1980:121). His description can be effectively read as referring to the status of the

field as dominated by a few well defined positions, framed within the context of the

emerging British and American schools. Whilst British anthropology in the 1920’s featured

the work of Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, both students of Haddon’s,

the American school was equally distinct, following in the wake of Franz Boas’ massive

influence.

* * *

Between the years of 1920 and 1923, Mead studied English at Barnard, but soon

realized her limits as a writer and became bored with the course. She began the additional

studies required to become a psychology major, and was intrigued by reading the work of

Freud, although she remained somewhat unsure of her attachment to the discipline.

Knowing that she wanted to make a contribution to the society responsible for raising her,

she remained unsure as to which profession would allow her to do this effectively. In her

senior year, she chose to study anthropology under Franz Boas and his teaching assistant at

that time, Ruth Benedict. Mead described Boas as a “surprising and somewhat frightening

teacher” (Mead 1972:112), but quickly became fascinated by his vision of the anthropological

perspective. By the spring of her senior year she was hesitating between sociology and

10

Chapter 1

psychology and finally committed to anthropology when in a conversation with Ruth

Benedict, she realized that “anthropology had to be done now. Other things could wait”

(Mead 1972:114).

The influence of Boas and Benedict should not be underestimated in explaining

Mead’s shift of interest, for it was from the perspective offered by their teachings that she

took stock of the problems that occupied American anthropology in its formative stages.

Boas was a very experienced fieldworker, made famous by his early work in the

Northwestern tribes of Canada, which defined his methodological commitment to the strict

methods of the pure sciences. His training was in geography and he first considered culture

in the context of its relation to the landscape. His new interest quickly led him to translate

the precepts of his geography fieldwork into the arena of anthropology, which he believed

would progress more effectively if it limited itself solely to conclusions reached by rigorous

scientific observation and documentation. This virtuous position, however justified by his

background, had its drawbacks, as he was the first to recognize: Adherence to the strict

limitations he imposed on the anthropologist would, he suspected, prevent any truly valuable

generalizations from being reached. Boas believed that the study of man was importantly

unlike the study of physical phenomena in that it was less prone to produce valid

generalizations or laws, but that careful comparison of individual cultural traits could

produce useful (if more limited) generalizations from specific cases.

Boas’ work exemplified the belief that folklore was the most effective arena from

which to enter the deciphering of a foreign culture, and though he later went on to consider

the psychological effects of early life upon the eventual constitution of the adult individual,

he was on the whole against the use of psychoanalytic theory in the translation of myths,

rituals, and other cultural practices. He always favored field data that was gathered with

11

Chapter 1

statistical analysis in mind, both in his own work and the work of his students. As a result, he

was one of the biggest single contributors to the pool of ethnographic data on North

American Indians in the history of anthropology, and his students were able to work from

his precepts to conceive the next generation of American anthropological theory. Boas

fought constantly to redefine ethnography as an inductive, rather than a deductive, pursuit,

establishing a scheme of ‘culture areas’ that would facilitate comparison of data between

areas to reach a non-speculative reconstruction of their shared past.

Boas’ theoretical position is clarified when seen in opposition to those of his

contemporaries, of which Bronislaw Malinowski offers a particularly interesting example.

His position is also relevant to this thesis for various other reasons, which are explained later

in this chapter. Malinowski carried out fieldwork in Mailu and the Trobriand Islands

between 1915 and 1918, and in 1927, after publishing Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1920,

was offered the Chair of Anthropology at the University of London. At this time,

Malinowski’s style incorporated very detailed and often intimate details of particular

individuals’ accounts or actions, contrasting highly with Boas’ early emphasis on the value of

statistical data and other more abstract evaluations of behavior.

This initial difference in starting point increased as their respective work continued;

whilst Boas and Benedict continued to push the limits of the comparative method,

developing techniques towards the comparative study of ‘cultural genius’, Malinowski

worked alongside A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (another of Haddon’s students) to develop a strictly

functionalist explanation of cultural phenomena. Later in his career, Malinowski criticized

the work of Boas as “fostering a concept of culture which was so general and vague as to

defy any kind of scientific evaluation” (Kardiner 1961:173). It is perhaps ironic that during

his own quest for theoretical conclusions that he could consider objective, Malinowski

12

Chapter 1

rejected so definitely Boas’ approach, which had been developed to solve the same problems

of verifiability. The various differences between the styles of Malinowski and Boas are

illustrative of the emergent distinction between the American and British schools of

anthropology during this period. Whilst functionalism inspired British students of

anthropology with its apparently limitless applications, Boas became disillusioned with the

possible benefits of such a one dimensional analysis, and he and his students began to apply

inductive principles to a more holistic study of culture.

* * *

By 1925, Bateson had already adopted a critical stance towards accepted British

social theory. He rejected the tenants of functionalist thought as exemplified in the work of

Malinowski:

“The whole [Malinowskian] functional theory of human needs, that if you make a list of human needs, and then you dissect a culture on how it satisfies them – this seemed to me absolute balls” (Lipset 1980:123).

The root of Bateson’s concerns with functionalism lay in the theory’s inherent inability to

account for cultural change of any sort, since it seemed clear to him that both social

structure and its cultural manifestations were in a state of constant flux, he was unwilling to

commit to a system of theory that remained essentially deductive, haphazardly matching

observations to their imagined causes. In January 1927, having completed his studies at

Cambridge, Bateson set out for New Guinea to carry out his first fieldwork investigating the

effects of contact between native peoples and white settlers. However, before he began work

he was fortunate enough to meet E. W. P. Chinnery and Radcliffe-Brown during his time in

Melbourne and Sydney. Chinnery, who was also a student under Haddon, already had

extensive fieldwork experience in the region, and suggested that Bateson should not work in

the dangerous Sepik river region as he had intended, but rather spend time among the

13

Chapter 1

Baining people in New Britain. Radcliffe-Brown made his own significant impression on

Bateson, who became convinced, for a time at least, of the value of Radcliffe-Brown’s

concept of social structure.

“This ten days will modify considerably my aims and object in work on Baining. He is the only real “sociologist” I have come across … In any case, Radcliffe-Brown will soon have here the only school of anthropology with any sane inspiration in it” (Lipset 1980:127).

Radcliffe-Brown presented a definition of social structure derived from a biologically rooted

understanding of structure and growth. He believed that just as various organs and sub-

systems have evolved to regulate the workings of the entire organism, the different

configurations of social structure exist solely to regulate the workings of the whole society.

Radcliffe-Brown sided with Malinowski in denying the validity, and indeed existence of the

phenomenon of ‘culture’ as it was being studied in the U.S. His understanding of the

concept led him to view it as too vague to be of scientific value. Perhaps Bateson was

attracted to Radcliffe-Brown’s structuralist stance by its coherence with his later theoretical

affection for abstract models, where similar processes could be shown to be operating on a

multitude of scales. When read alongside one another, Radcliffe-Brown’s organic

structuralism is similar to the ideas Bateson considered in his later work, Steps to an Ecology of

Mind. It was in April 1927, having thus reconsidered his theoretical position that Bateson

began ten month’s work among the Baining. He was eager to contribute to the body of

contemporary theory, but still struggling to find a methodological process that he could

accept as at once sufficiently empirical, and yet still likely to produce coherent conclusions.

* * *

After Barnard, Mead began her Graduate education at Columbia, working towards

a Ph.D. in anthropology with Boas and Benedict, whilst also completing her Master’s essay

in psychology. She married Luther Cressman in September 1923, and began two years of

14

Chapter 1

relaxed companionship and study. During this period, Mead developed her critical

perspective and began to consider where and how she would like to start fieldwork upon

completing her education in 1925. She followed Benedict’s work with the Zuni tribes of the

Southwest, which featured pioneering ideas of cultural relativity in the quest towards an

integrated view of culture. From Benedict’s example, Mead learned the potential benefits of

a distinctively poetic approach to the written presentation of fieldwork, an approach which

empowered the sensitivities of the ethnographer to identify and analyze cultural traits in a

manner contrasted to the strict descriptive stance prevalent in Britain.

During her studies in psychology, Mead was introduced to the work of Carl Jung,

and became particularly interested in his suggestion of the existence of psychological ‘types’.

The idea that humans could be arranged logically by categorization or mapping of their

psychological types, is comparable to Benedict’s developing vision of cultural types, arranged

along an arc of possibility. In fact, Benedict herself made a similar observation in Pattern’s of

Culture, when she described culture as personality writ large. Mead’s early theoretical steps

incorporated aspects of both aforementioned conceptual schemes. She found herself drawn

towards considerations of cultural change and development, realizing, like Bateson, that this

focus would likely reveal the weaknesses of whatever theoretical system she chose to

employ.

Mead was aware that each significant ethnographer had his or her own ‘territory’

which, along with their methodology, played a defining role in their experience and eventual

contribution to the field. Her initial choice was to travel to Polynesia to carry out her first

fieldwork exploring cultural change, but she first had to convince Boas of the validity her

plans. He was of the opinion that living in Polynesia would be too dangerous for an

inexperienced worker, and suggested she work with Native American’s instead. By this point

15

Chapter 1

Boas’ interest had shifted to the study of culturally distinct responses to the period of

adolescence in particular, and he encouraged her accordingly. His input at this time turned

out to be significant in determining Mead’s eventual theoretical direction. Together they

reached a compromise, agreeing that she would study adolescence in Samoa, which was

situated in a safer part of the Pacific than the island of Tuamoto that she had originally

suggested. At the end of this lengthy process of negotiation, having received the fellowship

necessary to fund her work, Mead set out for Samoa at the end of the summer of 1925.

* * *

As soon as Bateson started to record observations of the Baining people, he began to

encounter methodological problems of the sort that he had been able to consider only

abstractly until this time. In the six months that he spent in this region, Bateson was unable

to reach any satisfactory observational conclusions. He viewed his lack of success as a direct

result of the secretive nature of the Baining, whose culture he found almost impenetrable.

However, this period of frustration did inspire Bateson to make various methodological

reconsiderations. He was particularly interested by the struggle to capture what seemed to be

the significant, yet disconnected fragments of daily life, which he realized “defie[d] any sort

of cold analysis” (Lipset 1980:128). His view of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown was further

improved as he realized the value of a concrete theoretical perspective in simplifying

fieldwork although, in reference to theory in general he commented that “the academic stuff

does not seem very real when one is in the presence of natives” (Lipset 1980:128). In the

autumn of 1928, having taught a semester of native language in Sydney and pondered his

lack of progress with the Baining, he returned to work among the nearby tribe of the Sulka

people. He was impressed by the highly visual nature of their culture and, whilst still plagued

by concerns that his interviews where limited primarily by what the particular informant

16

Chapter 1

wanted him to believe, began to consider the value of more holistic cultural characteristics, as

embodied in the works and lives of a people.

* * *

Mead arrived in Samoa feeling similarly unprepared for the responsibilities of

fieldwork, but remained aware of Boas’ expectations, and immediately used the theoretical

grounding he had provided her with to address the task of defining and testing her own

methodological stance. At this point, she was considering the problems associated with

integrating psychological empiricism into ethnography, without making the mistake Boas

attributed to Freud, namely of assuming “that the primitive peoples living on remote atolls

… were the equivalent to our ancestors” (Mead 1972:141). She was also paying close

attention to her treatment of work already carried out in the region, the conclusions of

which varied massively and thus offered as much potential for doubt as for reconfirmation.

Considerations of this nature were a part of a more general relativist trend in Mead’s

thought, as she realized that “the pattern one discerns is only one of the many that might be

worked out through different approaches to the same human situation, the grammar you

work out is not the grammar but a grammar of the language” (Mead 1972:144). In Samoa,

Mead quickly established a working understanding of the language, and entered a six month

period of intensive ethnographic enquiry into the lives of various adolescent Samoan girls.

During her work she became particularly interested in the precise dynamics of personal

growth and invented a “cross-sectional method” for assembling the probable developmental

course of an individual from the culture concerned, using composite studies grouped in age

categories, each corresponding to a defined ‘stage’ of development. This method

incorporated various experimental research procedures including picture recognition and

color naming tests, and is evidence of the influence of Mead’s early training in psychology.

17

Chapter 1

It was during her return voyage from Samoa in 1926 that Mead first met the New

Zealand anthropologist Reo Fortune, who was traveling from Sydney to England. They

exchanged stories and theories from their respective fieldwork experiences, and became

enamored with one another both as intellectuals and individuals. During her initial time with

Fortune, she received a letter from Ruth Benedict suggesting the work of Malinowski as

deserving of attention. After reading his work, Mead reached the conclusion that Malinowski

was playing a similar role in England to that played by herself and Ruth Benedict in America,

“both in making anthropology accessible to a wider public, and in relating anthropology to

other disciplines” (Mead 1972:160).

After a short time in England, Mead assumed a position as assistant curator of

ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, a job which allowed

her time to complete work on her first book Coming of Age in Samoa, which was published in

1928. During the writing process, Mead considered further the problems associated with

employing the psychoanalytical methods of Freud and his contemporaries during fieldwork,

in order to integrate the psychological theory that was clearly becoming a part of her

developing perspective. This shifted her interest towards the study of younger children, with

the aim of clarifying the relationship between western adult-child relations, and their

counterparts in primitive cultures. At this time, she was told by her doctor that she would

not be able to have children and, as a result, became even more devoted to a life of research.

This and other personal factors contributed to her separating from Luther, and to a

reappraisal of her new acquaintance, Fortune. Fortune met Haddon studying psychology in

Cambridge, and was converted to the anthropological cause. At this point, he and Mead

made plans to marry and subsequently to work together in the field in New Guinea. She

chose to study the Manus people, who had yet to receive significant ethnographic attention.

18

Chapter 1

Their journey to New Guinea allowed time for a stop off in New Zealand, where Mead and

Fortune where married.

* * *

After initial enthusiasm for his work among the Sulka, Bateson relapsed into

depression. He discovered that for all its finery, the Sulka culture was rapidly decaying, and

offered little opportunity for meaningful study. He was so despondent that he opted to take

a cruise to visit both the Manus and the Sepik River region in New Guinea, with hopes of

finding further inspiration or possibly meeting other anthropologists. During the journey he

became interested in a tribe of people called the Iatmul, who lived on the banks of the Sepik.

After spending a short time in their village, Bateson decided to shift location once again, set

up camp and begin six months work. Although he was initially hopeful that the Iatmul

represented “exactly the type of local cultural variation that [he] set out to study” (Lipset

1980:131), and was successful in recording fragmentary aspects of practice and belief,

Bateson lacked any sort of overarching theoretical framework within which to develop a

direction. In the spring of 1930 he returned to Cambridge to write up what he could from

his work, and consider how he could improve his situation during his next fieldwork

experience.

* * *

Among the Manus, Fortune and Mead’s work was progressing well. Between them

they developed an ethnographic division of labor, with Fortune concentrating on writing up

transcripts of interviews, whilst Mead further adapted her methodology to the study of youth

by way of various experimental techniques. She collected 35,000 drawings from Manus

children, organizing, analyzing and comparing them to reach conclusions about the relation

between the primitive and western states of childhood. In 1930, Mead published Growing up

19

Chapter 1

in New Guinea, which included Fortune’s description of the social structure of the Manus,

alongside an account of the play, conversation and personal details of 87 children. The book

presented the results of their work with flair and great attention to detail, Mead’s writing was

distinctive (continuing the trend she set with Coming of Age) in the degree to which it directly

compared the phenomena observed among the Manus to the relevant aspect of western

cultures. Mead worked hard to ensure that her work served a social, as well as a scientific

purpose.

During the summer of 1930 Mead and Fortune worked together with the Omaha

tribe of Native Americans. They were aware of the comparative disadvantages of studying a

people who had been forced to change their traditional ways as much as the Omaha, and

both eagerly planned their return to the relatively unspoiled New Guinea, a trip that they

were eventually able to make in December 1931. During this visit, Mead hoped to build

upon the comparative groundwork carried out by Benedict on American Indian tribes, and

so set to work among the neighboring Arapesh and Mundugumor tribes, “study[ing] the

different ways in which cultures patterned the expected behavior of males and females”

(Mead 1972:196). By the end of their work in the region, Mead was aware of growing

tensions between herself and Fortune, but also felt a sense of pride at having “invented a

new kind of field work” (Mead 1972:199), by now knowing how to “study children and place

their rearing within the total culture … and had learned to place small events within larger

contexts” (Mead 1972:199). Mead’s sense of methodological prowess was somewhat

dampened by her realization that although the Arapesh offered a chance to observe a new

pattern of sexual character, their choice of patterning itself downplayed distinctions between

the sexes and therefore offered little hope of theoretical advance. This fact led Mead and

20

Chapter 1

Fortune to journey to the Sepik River, where they had heard that Bateson was working, with

hopes of finding more interesting subjects among the tribes living there.

* * *

During 1930, Bateson wrote his master’s dissertation on the “Social Structure of the

Iatmul People” (Lipset 1980:133). His work featured a theoretical component heavily

influenced by Radcliffe-Brown, whose term ‘social structure’ Bateson adapted slightly to

define what he called a “series of formulations” (Lipset 1980:134) In January 1932, having

analyzed the extent of his previous research, he returned to the Sepik to carry out a second

round of field work. As he continued the ethnographic study of the Iatmul, Bateson became

disillusioned with his work, feeling once again that it lacked a specific focus or unifying

methodological perspective. After Christmas 1932, whilst encamped in the village of

Kankanamun, Bateson received a visit from Mead and Fortune who had arrived in the

region from the Arapesh. The three anthropologists entered immediately into intense

discussion, staying up long into the night. Their debate covered every aspect of their

respective methodologies, as Mead recalls, she and Fortune were “intoxicated by the

excitement of meeting someone so differently trained as ourselves … he moved so easily

from one science to another, choosing analogies now from physics and now from

geography” (Mead 1972:209). Although Mead and Bateson were both interested in each

other’s work, Fortune harbored a competitive resentment of Bateson, founded in his time at

Cambridge when they both studied under Haddon.

What occurred between Mead and Bateson, both agree, was a highly unexpected

period of complementary criticism and refinement of perspective. During their time

together, they gradually informed each other of their progress to date, and realized how well

their respective successes and shortcomings could be combined in future work. Mead

21

Chapter 1

characterized their situation: “Gregory was floundering methodologically, and we were

feeling starved for theoretical relevance” (Lipset 1980:136). After their discussions on board

a launch traveling up the Sepik, Mead and Fortune decided to study among the Tchambuli

people, viewing it as the obvious counterpart to Bateson’s revived work in the Iatmul. At

this time Mead was keen to illustrate the point that sex associated roles in a culture were

determined by temperament, rather than by biology. In the Tchambuli and the Iatmul, she

saw the opportunity to produce the perfect case study of locally coexistent yet opposing sex

role configurations.

Bateson’s contact with Mead had a catalytic effect upon his anthropological

perspective, largely by forcing him to reconcile his own ideas, derived from the work of the

British and Continental functionalists, with those of the American Boasian school. As well as

ongoing discussion with Fortune and Mead, Bateson was able to read a manuscript of

Benedict’s forthcoming Patterns of Culture. He cited the influences of Benedict, alongside

Mead’s later book documenting her work in the Sepik region: Sex and Temperament in Three

Primitive Societies, as his main influences during work on Naven. He describes his reconciliation

of these two perspectives as a shift “from a classification or typology to a study of processes

that generated the differences summarized in the typology” (Bateson 2002:179). This shift

was accompanied by a much greater emphasis upon the work of the psychoanalysts of the

time, including considerations of how to integrate gestalt psychology into the

characterization of culture.

Bateson gave Mead and Fortune a brief tour of the Iatmul in order to provide them

with context for their upcoming comparative work among the lake dwelling Tchambuli.

During this time, Mead was impressed by Bateson’s “sure sense for the technology of

research that was eventually embodied in the complexities of [their] work in Bali” (212Mead

22

Chapter 1

1972:212). Mead and Fortune soon left for the Tchambuli, whilst Bateson finished work

with the Iatmul. Among the Tchambuli they found a culture that completed the pattern of

sex roles they had already observed among the Mundugumor and Arapesh. Bateson soon

moved to work in the nearby village of Aibom, a lively exchange between the three

continued, and their respective work benefited as a result. Mead writes, “as we talked over

the Tchambuli with Gregory, the central emphasis of the Iatmul also began to emerge.

Gregory was interested in what he later came to call ethos, the emotional tone of a society”

(Mead 1972:214). Ethos was to become the theoretical centerpiece of Bateson’s Naven,

named after a ritual in which male and female sex roles were reversed temporarily. He

defined ethos as “the expression of a culturally standardized system of organization of the

instincts and emotions of the individual” (Bateson 1958:118). This definition belies the

concept’s roots in the fusion of the functionalist British school (standardized system of

organization) and the more culturally based Boasian school (instincts and emotions).

In the spring of 1933, Bateson returned from the field to Cambridge, where he

realized the degree to which his theoretical stance had become incompatible with the views

of his peers at home. He describes attending a meeting with Malinowski’s students in which

“no communication occurred. They hadn’t the faintest idea where I was at” (Lipset

1980:139). In 1936 Bateson published Naven, viewing it primarily as a critical refinement of

the functionalist accounts prevalent at the time. In Naven, Bateson established the two

concepts of schismogenesis and zygogenesis as the two forms of dynamic by which a system

could undergo change. Schismogenesis was the term used to describe a state of increasing

disintegration and differentiation, whereas zygogenesis was used to refer to systems that

were inherently stabilizing. These concepts were central to the theoretical mission of the

book, which was focused on the role of ritual in regulating social change. During writing,

23

Chapter 1

Bateson became aware of “the difficulty of “maintain[ing] distinct [theoretical] categories,

whilst all the while acknowledging that these were merely interpretive abstractions that were

independent of the data itself” (Lipset 1980:147).

Mead and Fortune left New Guinea and went their separate ways at the same time as

Bateson returned to Cambridge. Whilst Fortune returned to New Zealand, Mead traveled

back to New York, feeling that she had made progress on the question she set out to answer,

namely how to show “different culturally patterned types of personality as systematically

related to one another” (Mead 1972:217). The level of competitive rivalry that had developed

between herself and Fortune during their discussions with Bateson proved to be the last

contributing factor in their decision to divorce. It seems ironic, perhaps even romantic, that

the fourfold scheme of personal temperaments that Bateson helped Mead to develop from

the ideas of Carl Jung, was the scheme that first suggested to them how eminently more

compatible Mead was with Bateson than Fortune. Over the next two years, Mead worked on

the manuscript for Sex and Temperament, which was published in 1935. During the winter of

1935, she was involved in a “study of cooperation and competition among primitive

peoples” (Mead 1972:222), this work was undertaken in an interdisciplinary context and

indubitably provoked much of Mead’s thought on the Bali project. As she recalls: “the

central question had to do with the relationship between certain forms of social organization

and types of character structure” (Mead 1972:222).

In early 1935, Bateson visited Mead with Radcliffe-Brown in New York, during

which time they “made a further attempt to define what is meant by society, culture, and

cultural character” (Mead 1972:222). By January 1936, Mead and Bateson had decided to be

married, and set out together for Java. The Bali project had begun.

24

Chapter 2

In order to provide a comprehensive picture of the process of methodological and

theoretical combination and refinement represented by Mead and Bateson’s work in Bali,

this chapter aims to describe the project in terms of two phases, its conception and

execution. These two sections will each consider the couple’s progress in the distinct yet

interrelated spheres of data acquisition, methodological processing, and theoretical

perspective. This particular form is designed to facilitate a mapping of the historical situation

of Balinese Character, by connecting the parallel chronologies of the previous chapter to the

ongoing interests of Bateson and Mead as they are embodied in the book. This structure

implicitly regards their work in Bali as a nexus of ideas from which to extract threads of

theoretical continuity between their respective preceding and subsequent achievements.

To facilitate meaningful discussion of the conceptual advances embodied in Balinese

Character, the two sections of this chapter will respectively define the original formulation of

Mead and Bateson’s composite perspective, and show how their ideas were challenged and

modified during time in the field. The first section, ‘Planning’ will identify the various

themes evident in the pair’s previous work, and explain their unified development in the

Chapter 2

years previous to 1936. The second section, ‘Work in the Field’ will highlight various

relevant aspects of Mead and Bateson’s experience in Bali, and explain how these affected

their progress. The composite analysis formed by these two sections will provide the next

chapter with the tools to evaluate the structure and content of the book. Chapter 3 will

review Bateson and Mead’s writing process in full, from organization of field data to

publishing, culminating in an analysis incorporating specific examples from the pages of

Balinese Character.

26

Planning

The intensity of our discussions was heightened by the triangular situation. Gregory and I were falling in love, but this was kept firmly under control while all three of us tried to translate the intensity of our feelings into better and more perceptive fieldwork. – Margaret Mead, on her time in the Sepik with Fortune and Bateson.1

The kind of turbulent emotional and intellectual negotiation described above is

exemplary of the time Mead and Bateson spent together during the three years prior to their

departure for work in Bali in 1936. The relationship that developed between them did so

alongside a shared understanding of human character on a cultural scale. This understanding

and its accompanying theoretical implications, was married with Bateson’s technical

knowledge, and Mead’s tireless attention to detail, in order to lay the groundwork for Balinese

Character. It is this process of combinatory refinement or fusion of ideas that this section is

devoted to describing.

Both Mead and Bateson’s early works and the developments they represent are

clearly indicative of the schools in which they were trained. However, a number of common

themes emerge between their respective journeys of critical thought. By the time of their

meeting, they had already each developed a similar list of problems encountered during

fieldwork that remained insoluble within their entire native theoretical frameworks.

When James Boon described Mead and Bateson’s relationship as “a marriage of

misfits that paradoxically would uplift the standard norms of the cultures that produced

them” (Boon 1990:188), he was referring to the position of their specific personal characters

within the cultural status quo of their respective origins, yet this characterization holds

1 Mead 1972:217

Chapter 2 - Planning

equally true for their theoretical perspectives. As much as each character represented a

significant deviation from the traditional roles of an American woman and a British man, at

this time they had also both expressed significant and fundamental concerns with their

native traditions of anthropological thought. The courses of their respective divergences are

charted accurately by their writing during this time, culminating prior to the “quantum leap”

(Mead 1972:195) of the Bali project in the texts of both Naven and Sex and Temperament. It is

now beneficial to engage in an evaluation of these two texts and their surrounding writings,

in order to elucidate the theoretical concerns they raise.

Naven was written in Cambridge during the years between 1933 and 1936. Directly

after returning from his 1930 and 1932 trips to the Iatmul on the Sepik, Bateson began to

write. His first trip produced an analysis of Iatmul social structure; this was the basis for his

second more successful trip, which along with his interactions with Mead, informed and

inspired the critical discourse documented in Naven. He opens the first chapter of Naven

(“Methods of Presentation”) with an indication of his understanding of the overriding

ethnographic ambition, and a dialectic mapping of its competing approaches:

If it where possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as … in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives… Such an exposition can be attempted by either of two methods, by either scientific or artistic techniques (Bateson 1958:1).

During most of his work on Naven, Bateson remained convinced that the artistic techniques

referred to above were placed out of practical reach of the scientist. He considered the

literary art of Jane Austen and Charles Doughty, and saw its “impressionistic technique [as]

utterly foreign to the methods of science” (Bateson 1958:1). He had yet to fully consider the

possibilities offered by the camera in objectively recording “those aspects of culture which

the artist is able to express by impressionistic methods” (Bateson 1958:2). In the process of

formulating Naven, Bateson undertook a severe critical reappraisal of the functionalist

28

Chapter 2 - Planning

perspective. His exposure to the ideas of Mead, and the revelations they shared whilst

reading the manuscript of Benedict’s Patterns of Culture in the Sepik, had led him to reconsider

the ways in which “functionalism produced and sustained the fiction of self contained

encounters between an innocent observer and an autonomous culture” (Boon 1990:174). He

felt torn by the tension between the unavoidably fragmenting nature of any theoretical

framework and his holistic methodological aspirations. He recognized that the terms he had

been using to describe Iatmul culture, “Ritual, Structure, Pragmatic Functioning and Ethos

[were not] independent entities, [but] fundamentally inseparable aspects of culture” (Bateson

1958:3). This was a problem for Bateson, as it called into question both his fundamental

commitment to empirical rigor, and the idiosyncratically extreme emphasis he placed on

epistemological elegance. Bateson describes the compromise he felt forced to make in Naven,

with thinly veiled disdain:

Since, however, it is impossible to present the whole of a culture simultaneously in a single flash, I must begin at some arbitrarily chosen point in the analysis; and since words are necessarily arranged in lines, I must present the culture, which like all other cultures is really an elaborate reticulum of interlocking cause and effect, not with a network of words, but with words in a linear series (Bateson 1958:3).

Bateson’s frustration at this point takes on special significance in the context of his work in

Bali. It is clear that the specific problem of the linearity inherent to textual description was

one of the many seeds of the couple’s later methodological reconsiderations. Another issue

Bateson addressed in Naven (even if he eventually chose to ignore it), which he and Mead

continued to investigate in Balinese Character, was that of ongoing cultural change. Bateson

presented “synchronic explanations of the phenomena” (Bateson 1958:3) he studied, and

took care to avoid considering “what either the ceremonies or their cultural settings may

have been like in the past” (Bateson 1958:3). Bateson’s recognition of this limitation of the

functional method of analysis added yet another critical component to Naven, which was

29

Chapter 2 - Planning

quickly becoming a thorough epistemological revision of the contemporary assumptions of

British anthropology.

Of the many revisions of this nature featured in Naven, one of the most relevant

relates to the particular dynamic of his interactions with Mead during writing. Whilst Mead’s

exposure to the work of Boas and Benedict had encouraged her attempts to integrate the

psychoanalytic perspective into her ethnographic mission, Bateson’s grounding had placed

the discoveries of Freud and his contemporaries in a position of considerably more tentative

relevance to anthropology. During work on Naven, Bateson’s discussions with Mead, along

with his reading of Benedict, began his process of reconsideration of the possible benefits of

Freud’s analytical perspective. In keeping with the project’s roots however, he eventually

decided to leave his account free from a Freudian analysis of symbolic significance.

He later felt that “a greater contact with the Freudian ideas would have led me to

misuse and misunderstand them … [and] distracted me from the more important problems

of interpersonal and intergroup process” (Bateson 1991:51). Bateson’s history afforded him

a unique opportunity to understand the specific benefits available to a psychoanalytically

influenced ethnographic account, before he found an opportunity to attempt such an

account. As a result, his later work with Mead in Bali was able to fully integrate a

developmental theory rooted in a critique of the Freudian perspective, and remain free from

the confusions associated with a more symbolic employment of psychoanalysis. Bateson was

also aware of what he called the “distractions of psychological typology” (Bateson 1991:51),

pointing out the common mistake of anthropologists to attempt to explain cultural

differences using models conceived entirely in a western, psychoanalytical context. This

awareness was part of a larger realization for Bateson, relating the value of ‘ways of thought’

to their propensity to accommodate innovation. He wrote, “I want to emphasize that

30

Chapter 2 - Planning

whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition …

we lose something in the very ability to think new thoughts” (Bateson 1941:55). He was wary

of fully incorporating the theoretical equipment of the psychoanalyst into his

anthropological work, because he recognized the inherent limitations of adopting pre-

determined methods or unnecessarily strict categorizations during interpretive field work.

As the above observations suggest, a close reading of Naven, along with both its 1936

and 1958 Epilogues reveals the extent of Bateson’s reflexive obsession. His work is littered

with critical self-evaluation, and as a result takes the form of a continuing journey of

refinement. By the time Bateson wrote his second epilogue, the theoretical assumptions he

had been operating under among the Iatmul where but vague shadows in his intellectual

past, yet he was still able to enter into a staggeringly complex reconsideration of their

ongoing epistemological significance in light of his personal progress since that time. The

characterization of his theoretical perspective as possessing an unusually active reflexive

voice is also useful in explaining the most marked difference between the intellectual

characters of Bateson and Mead.

Bateson began his anthropological career occupied primarily with the unconsidered

implications of the methodology and theoretical apparatus of his predecessors, and

continued to place value on his work as “a study of the ways in which data can be fitted

together” (Bateson 1991:49) throughout his later transition from anthropology towards

psychology and other social sciences. Care should be taken at this point to avoid the

inference that Mead was somehow methodologically insensitive, indeed she too displayed

significant discrimination in crafting the various theoretical frameworks she employed.

However, certainly when considered in contrast to one another, Bateson provided the

ongoing, almost paranoic, reflexive bent to their work in Bali, whilst Mead provided the

31

Chapter 2 - Planning

complementary optimistic position, countering Bateson’s doubts with her undying

enthusiasm to continue studying the specific topics that had brought them to the field.

Throughout her earlier work, Mead struggled far less to place her observations

within a particular overarching framework, and as a result was free to pursue her natural

interests in the various themes of cultural change, biology’s place in determining sex roles,

and the related area of childhood development. When she met Bateson on the Sepik in 1932,

Mead was part way through what would eventually become a three-way cross cultural

comparison of differing sex role configurations. Having already spent time among the

Arapesh and Mundugumor in the lower Sepik and gathered complete accounts of their sex-

role patterns, she and Fortune had yet to find any satisfactory way to begin to organize the

observations they had made. Upon meeting Bateson, and discovering the Tchambuli people

during their time with him further up the river, Mead and Fortune made a huge step in their

attempts to organize their previous observations in a systematic manner.

Mead had been working closely with Benedict during the preceding five years, on a

problem Benedict first addressed in her 1928 paper, Psychological Types in the Cultures of the

Southwest. This work was primarily an attempt to demonstrate that any culture possesses

certain universal patterns that determine the sex roles of its constituent individuals, and that

any individual is forced to reconcile their own biologically determined character with their

parent society’s aforementioned patterning. It represented the first study of the mechanics of

the processes defining and maintaining an inculturated concept of deviance, and inspired

Mead’s chapter “The Deviant” in Coming of Age in Samoa, in which she further investigated

deviance as a culturally relative phenomenon.

Mead’s intimate understanding of Benedict’s work, reinvigorated by the arrival of the

manuscript of Patterns of Culture, was clearly a significant influence on the hypothesis formed

32

Chapter 2 - Planning

between Fortune, Bateson and herself in Kankanamun. Benedict’s conclusion, put simply,

was that the range of human cultural possibility could be mapped on to a finite ‘arc’ of

possibilities. This system was developed under the belief that cultures could be characterized

using similar methods to those employed by the psychoanalyst to characterize individuals.

Mead took this advanced conclusion as her fundamental assumption, and used her and

Fortune’s data from the Mundugumor and Arapesh to propose a compass point system of

the relative traits of the cultures they had studied. In order to accurately represent the

various emphases and dialectical inversions incorporated into their newly conceived

comparative scheme Mead, Bateson and Fortune chose to create a graphical representation

of its structure, one of their famous ‘squares’, shown in Mead’s figure 1.

After being introduced to the nearby Tchambuli people by Bateson, Mead realized

that the incomplete pattern she and Fortune had begun to formulate between the Manus,

Arapesh, Mundugumor and Iatmul studies would be clarified and reinforced by additional

consideration of the patterning of the Tchambuli. At this point it is important to notice the

33

Chapter 2 - Planning

resonance between this system of organization, the eventual centerpiece of Sex and

Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, and the relationship that Benedict formulated between

the Dobu, the Zuni and the Kwakiutl. It is formulated from the same underlying belief that

cultures can be productively viewed (or at least, selectively viewed) as arranged in dialectical

relationships with one another, in respect to certain culturally determined aspects of what

she and Bateson would eventually call character.

Mead’s account however, in accordance with the theory it embodies, does not

feature such an imaginatively abstract typology. Her distinctions do not rely on the adapted

associations of the terms Apollonian, Dionysian, Megalomaniac and Paranoid, but rather on

more objectively established psychological distinctions derived from observations of daily

behavior and the fundamental structural conclusions they reveal. Mead’s attempt to create a

more empirically inspired system of categorization than Benedict’s was influenced by the

recent successes of Carl Jung in arranging character types into similar four-way grid

formations and her discussions with Bateson on the subject of Mendelian genetic

experiments. This conceptual system became the original inspiration for the Bali project,

with the incorporation of the Tchambuli male and female roles leaving only the society

exhibiting westerly male and female characteristics (both free from associations of

submission or dominance in their sex patterning) unassigned. It was precisely the existence

of this patterning in Bali, suggested to Mead through the work of Jane Belo and others in the

years leading up to 1936, which lead her to consider fieldwork there.

The similarity between the Mead’s diagram of temperamental types and Jung’s

diagram of psychological types is no coincidence. During the conceptual discussion leading

up to its formulation Mead, Bateson and Fortune considered their own relative experiences

in the cultures they had studied and used their reflexive knowledge of one another (and their

34

Chapter 2 - Planning

respective national characters) to imagine more clearly the situation of their subjects. It is

emblematic of Mead and Bateson’s emerging shared perspective that the simple elegance of

even their first theoretical tools was as much a product of their considerations of one

another as of their shared interests and field experience. Mary-Catherine Bateson considered

the subtleties of their symbiotic introspective relationship in With a Daughter’s Eye, her 1984

biography of her parents:

In the search for such moments of insight, they would be dealing with points of congruence within the culture they were looking at and also points of personal response. The process is an aesthetic one, one of listening for resonance between the inner and the outer (Bateson 1984:163).

Adapting Erik Erikson’s terminology, she referred to this trait as “disciplined subjectivity”

(Bateson 1984:163), a characterization which will later prove useful as the basis for a more in

depth analysis of the term (including its relation to Bateson’s theory of ‘strict’ and ‘loose’

scientific thought).

Since her own childhood experiences, Mead had been fascinated by the processes of

child development and motherhood and her work early work in Samoa and New Guinea

reflected these interests. However, in the Sepik, her time with Fortune and Bateson brought

her thoughts of motherhood back to the fore, and she was offered ample opportunity

among the peoples of the region to continue her investigation into how the temperamental

traits she had identified among the Tchambuli were acquired in the process of growing up.

Mead and Bateson’s shared interest in the dynamics of cultural change and individual

development, alongside Mead’s specific interest in the concept of deviance, led them to

realize the potential significance of western psychology’s attempts to link various mental

disorders with constitutional types. This interest benefited from Mead’s reading of the work

of Ernst Kretschmer on her return to New York, and from her ongoing awareness of the

ideas of Erik Erikson.

35

Chapter 2 - Planning

One of the most obvious emphases of Mead and Bateson’s emerging perspective

originated in their appreciation of the critical significance of methodology in the greater

ethnographic mission. In anthropology, where data is necessarily abstracted to some degree

by the translation inherent to ethnography and the assumptions implicit in any theoretical

system, methodology occupies a privileged position between the two. Historically, whilst

ethnographic data has remained relatively safe from criticism, methodology has received a

correspondingly more significant degree of critical attention. Mary Catherine writes:

This was particularly true in the twenties and thirties when anthropologists had few theoretical models and were often working in previously undescribed societies. One must be open to the data, to the possibility that very small clues will provide critical insights (Bateson 1984:163).

Balinese Character, taken as the eventual fruition of Bateson and Mead’s shared considerations

in the Sepik, represents a response to their realization of the critical significance of

methodology in ethnography. It displays a consistent reflexivity that is pivotal in developing

an understanding of both its eventual successes and its ongoing treatment as an exception to

the historical anthropological rule, rather than a working model worthy of re-examination.

During the period between their first identification of the problems of methodology and the

beginning of their work in Bali, there occurred between them a fusion of perspective, or a

theoretical alignment. This allowed them to go on to work together in Bali, free from any

concerns of miscommunication or misidentification due to their intimate knowledge of each

other’s assumptions. This account will now briefly identify the developing form of Mead and

Bateson’s shared perspective, by describing the unification of their individual contributions.

The account presented in Balinese Character can be effectively understood as formed

by the reconciliatory combination of Mead’s blossoming theoretical perspective and its

accompanying specific interests, and Bateson’s ongoing mission to unify the epistemological

implications of his theoretical stance with its various methodological influences during

36

Chapter 2 - Planning

fieldwork. Both Mead’s specific interests and her mode of understanding can only be

evaluated relative to the significant influences of Benedict and Boas and their collective

interest in further unifying the fields of anthropology and psychology. However, in a similar

fashion to Bateson, her most significant individual contributions to the topics she chose to

consider are best characterized as rebellious, and so any consideration of her thought

processes during the Bali project must begin with an examination of the tension for her

between conformity and innovation. Bateson’s own advances are equally inseparable from

their theoretical background of Haddon’s methodological aspirations and Malinowski and

Radcliffe-Brown’s refinement of the functionalist approach which, if anything, represent an

even more skeptical attitude than Mead towards the supposed successes of his predecessors.

Bali, with its calm and accessible, yet at times highly dramatic, culture offered Mead and

Bateson a chance to simultaneously pursue their individual theoretical idiosyncrasies and

subsequently create Balinese Character to present “those aspects of [their] results and those

methods of research which [they] judged most likely to be of immediate use to other

students” (Bateson and Mead 1942:xv).

In the introduction to Balinese Character, Mead and Bateson situate the aims and

premises of their Balinese work in relation to their respective academic histories. Their

conceptual map places Mead’s methods in Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing up in New Guinea,

and Sex and Temperament, in a position dialectically opposed to those of Bateson in Naven:

The first method has been criticized as journalistic – as an arbitrary selection of highly colored cases to illustrate types of behavior so alien to the reader that he continues to regard them as incredible. The second method was branded as too analytical – as neglecting the phenomena of culture in order to intellectualize and schematize it (Bateson and Mead 1942:xii).

A clear parallel can be found between Mead and Bateson’s understanding of one another’s

relative position as seen above and Bateson’s aforementioned consideration of the potential

benefits of the opposing ‘artistic’ and ‘scientific’ approaches to fieldwork. Balinese Character, if

37

Chapter 2 - Planning

viewed as an attempt to resolve two historically competing methods, can be analyzed in part

by a consideration of the various intersecting methodological hierarchies engineered by

Bateson and Mead during this process of resolution.

For Mead, maintaining relevance to a wider audience was an issue of prime

importance. Mary Catherine notes that in Mead’s early writing she attempted to “make it

possible for readers to respond emotionally as well as intellectually, to get a “feel” for the

quiet backwater of Samoa in which she worked” (Bateson 1984:201). This feature of her

work, in its coherency with that of Benedict, is emblematic of the triangular flux of influence

that existed between Boas and his two most prominent students. “She was not in the least

interested in a statistical kind of representation” (Bateson 1984:196) wrote Mary Catherine,

further illustrating the difference between her mother’s descriptive and her father’s

comparative intellectual tendencies. Mead was interested in Bali because it would offer her

an unparalleled opportunity to study the role of child rearing practices in determining

cultural character and to complete her previous comparative work in New Guinea.

For Bateson, whose concerns had been, and would continue to be, largely

methodological, Bali was equally significant as his first opportunity to investigate his

developing concepts of ethos and eidos with the assistance of a fully organized and

theoretically focused group of working anthropologists. The confidence and guidance

offered by such a working configuration allowed him to make progress on the problem that

had been worrying him since the start of his anthropological career, namely how to

accurately identify, observe and record culturally significant details of behavior whilst

maintaining an awareness of their holistic form and place. Bateson felt that these details were

continually neglected by Malinowski’s functional emphasis as “the imponderabilia of daily

life” (Malinowski 1922:18).

38

Chapter 2 - Planning

This worried him as he believed that behavioral details could be vital in

reconstructing the subtleties of a ritual’s significance, or exposing the continuities and

discrepancies between child rearing techniques across an entire cultural group.

Bateson’s understanding of this problem was advanced during the period previous to

the Bali project by his consideration of Alfred Whitehead’s fallacy of “misplaced

concreteness” (Bateson 2002:6). This was the name given to the natural tendency among all

social scientists, to treat theoretical conclusions reached at an earlier point in their research

as concrete facts or aspects of the phenomenon under examination later in the process. This

explanation offers insight into the shortcomings of early anthropology, which was criticized

as lacking reflexivity; suggesting a solution in the form of continual, strategic re-examination

of the implications of any assumptions made in the field. It was Bateson’s investigation into

the implications of his theory of “logical types” (Bateson 1991:50), continuing throughout

and beyond his Balinese work, that eventually reconciled this problem for him.

Bateson realized that even the most apparently ‘objective’ of observations, once

recorded formed the first step in a rapidly spiraling staircase of abstraction, that would lure

the unsuspecting anthropologists to construct a tower of increasingly impressive (but

increasingly abstract) theoretical conclusions. His work on the theory of logical types

attempted in essence, to establish rules for the navigation and successful systematization of

these towers of theoretical ‘progress’ as they developed in both the Balinese, and many other

practical contexts. In the 1958 Epilogue to Naven, Bateson writes:

These theoretical concepts have an order of objective reality. They are really descriptions of processes of knowing, adopted by scientists, but to suggest that “ethos” or “social structure” has more reality than this is to commit Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The trap or illusion - like so many others - disappears when correct logical typing is achieved (Bateson 1958:281).

Again, it is clear that Bateson’s concerns derive primarily from his exploration of the critical

junctures between methodology and its necessary cause and effects, as represented by

39

Chapter 2 - Planning

fieldwork and theory. He described Naven as “a study of the nature of explanation … not

primarily an ethnographic study… Rather, it is an attempt at synthesis, a study of the ways in

which data can be fitted together” (Bateson 1958:280). Bateson’s obsession with the

abstraction of patterning, along with a staunch commitment to revealing the ontological

meaning of any theoretical model employed can be seen to be derived from his

understanding of the mechanics of engineering cultural change. His thoughts in this area are

recognized by Mary Catherine as illustrative of some of the most significant differences

between his and Mead’s respective world views. Whilst Mead believed that change could be

inspired by the active, educated individual in a direct manner and devoted her life to that

cause, Bateson was adamant that true change was only accessible through a paradigmatic

shift in understanding, which in turn was to be reached through consideration on an

epistemological level.

The theoretical divergence experienced by Mead and Bateson after their work, and

lives together can be explained (albeit one dimensionally) as the expression of their

fundamentally different understandings of the role of the individual in coercing change. It is

perhaps ironic that Mead and Bateson’s later divergence to the respective roles of activist

and skeptic was a result of the same opposing personality traits responsible for their shared

successes whilst working together2. During their time in Bali, there emerged between the

couple a theoretical exchange simply embodied in the dialectic between Mead’s undying

thirst for theoretical progress, and Bateson’s reserved suspicion of all but the most graceful,

and thus self-evident, of conclusions.

By 1979, Bateson’s epistemological understanding had developed considerably, but a

consideration of some of the methodological concepts he presented in Mind and Nature, a 2 This observation is certainly further evidence towards the previously suggested model of Balinese Character as Mead and Bateson’s point of intellectual intersection.

40

Chapter 2 - Planning

Necessary Unity remains beneficial to this analysis for a number of reasons. Mead and Bateson

both realized that their collaborative work in Bali produced more valuable observations and

covered more theoretical ground than they could hope to do justice to in their published

material on the project, as a result all of their subsequent work represents, to some degree, a

reconsideration of their progress in Bali. In this sense, Bateson’s later writing on “The Case

of “Description”, “Tautology”, and “Explanation”” (Bateson 2002:76) is relevant to their

work in Bali as it deals with problems of the same form, with some forty years hindsight.

In much of Bateson’s later work the empirical problems from which his

epistemological considerations arise are quickly lost in his pursuit of their purest logical

expression. Mind and Nature is no exception, it is comprised of a series of thought

experiments which Bateson explains are an attempt “to construct a picture of how the world

is joined together in its mental aspects” (Bateson 2002:18). For the purposes of this account,

it is useful to relate his considerations of description, tautology and explanation directly to

the process of ethnographic fieldwork. Bateson begins his discussion by defining its three

central concepts, before describing various ways in which they can be applied to a problem:

A pure description would include all the facts (i.e., all the effective differences) immanent in the phenomena to be described but would indicate no kind of connection among these phenomena that might make them more understandable (Bateson 2002:76). Tautology contains no information whatsoever, and explanation (the mapping of description onto tautology) contains only the information that was present in the description (Bateson 2002:77). On the other hand, an explanation can be total without being descriptive (Bateson 2002:76).

This depiction of the three processes holds both description and explanation as types of

organization, each designed to express fundamentally different configurations of facts.

Tautology then, is the critical link between the two configurations, what Bateson calls the

map, which he reminds us “asserts implicitly that the links which hold the tautology together

correspond to the relations which obtain in the description” (Bateson 2002:77).

41

Chapter 2 - Planning

Description, explanation and tautology can be seen as corresponding to the

categories of observation (and presentation of data), theoretical manipulation of data (and

presentation of conclusions) and methodology during fieldwork (the link between the two

otherwise independent forms). In this light, the precise characteristics of Bateson’s system

become valuable in understanding his philosophy of scientific enquiry. Of particular

significance is his appreciation that observation and its accompanying theoretical conclusions

only represent a coherent relationship under two conditions. First, that the tautology linking

the two must be internally consistent and logically sound and second, that its form should

correspond to those forms which it claims to reference in the description. This sort of

tautology represents a fieldwork methodology that perfectly balances the competing needs of

theoretical integrity and holistic observational methods. Bateson believed that adherence to

these strict rules would create an analysis entirely derived from the observations in question

and free from the negative effects of theoretical preconceptions. This dissection of the

anthropological method will prove useful in later considerations of the form of the Bali

project.

Bateson’s consideration of the problems involved in creating an accurate explanation

of any ethnographic description led him to realize the importance of appropriate

classification of data. As suggested previously, he considered a tautology valid in as much as

it derived the categories of its explanation from the distinctions inherent to the data. A

fundamental distinction for Bateson existed between the types of data represented by verbal

accounts and firsthand description. In his essay on “Form and Pattern in Anthropology” in

A Sacred Unity, he notes that during fieldwork a researcher must “construct hypotheses

without assuming the objective truth of the verbal datum” (Bateson 1991:38). He expands

upon the idea that anthropological data are largely heterogeneous, in order to express his

42

Chapter 2 - Planning

agreement with Mead that “there is, therefore, almost no possibility of handling the data

statistically” (Bateson 1991:38). He described his awareness of the problem of typological

ambiguity in ethnographic data in Naven as largely responsible for the books eventual form:

The book is a weaving of three levels of abstraction. At the most concrete level there are ethnographic data. More abstract is the tentative arranging of data to give various pictures of the culture, and still more abstract is the self-conscious discussion of the procedures by which the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are put together (Bateson 1958:281).

Having considered the various methodological concerns of prominent interest to Mead and

Bateson during this period, this account will now seek to situate their decision to study in

Bali within the complex of their specific intersecting theoretical interests. The single most

important factor in their choice was Mead’s grounding in the comparative thought and work

of Boas and Benedict, specifically in the ways it provided insight during her time with

Bateson in the Sepik region. The Bali project was conceived as a comprehensive study of the

cultural character that would complete the temperamental square outlined between the

Arapesh, Mundugamor, Iatmul and Tchambuli studies. It owes its comparative status relative

to the tribes of New Guinea to the influences of Boas’ idea that anthropological studies

should be divided into groups of mutually relevant cultural configurations or ‘cultural areas’.

As Boon suggests it is hard to ignore the resonance between Benedict’s choice of the

Dobu to complete the pattern she saw sketched between her impressions of the Kwakiutl

and Zuni people, and Mead and Bateson’s choice of Bali to complete the pattern they found

among the people of New Guinea. This is especially true considering the timely arrival of the

manuscript of Benedict’s Patterns of Culture during their conversations on the Sepik. Mead’s

thought plays the role of the catalyst in this equation, connecting the culmination of her

work with Boas and Benedict to the unique empirical data and theoretical groundwork

resulting from Bateson’s work in New Guinea. Her discussions with Bateson of the

problematic culture/character dialectic bridged the separate American and British schools of

43

Chapter 2 - Planning

anthropological thought and produced a uniquely valuable understanding of the cultural

significance of child rearing practices.

Considering the previous description, Bali itself can be seen as the ultimate

destination of two converging academic enquiries, Bateson’s reflexive and epistemological

journey as documented in Naven and Mead’s developing understanding of the complex

relationship between child development, cultural character and sex patterning as embodied

in her work in Samoa and New Guinea. As such, it represents a twofold critical revision of,

on the one hand, the British functionalism of Malinowski and structural functionalism of

Radcliffe-Brown and, on the other, the emerging American historical and diffusionist

perspectives led by the comparative work of Boas and Benedict.(Banner 2003,192).

It is possible to trace Mead and Bateson’s gradual divergence from the relevant

perspectives of their predecessors as it correlates to their attempts to integrate the

developmental hypotheses of Erik Erikson and other psychoanalysts more fully into the

ethnographic process. This interest is relevant to their decision to work in Bali due to the

special significance and form of ritual trance dances in Balinese culture. The physiological

state of a Balinese dancer during a trance had been identified by western psychoanalysts as

bearing a close resemblance to the episodes suffered by schizophrenic patients. As such it

offered a unique context in which to study the effects of culturally determined child rearing

techniques on the constituency of the adult individual and “the expression of character in

the arts and ritual” (Bateson 1984:166).

It should be noted at this point that, in addition to its relation to their previous work

in the Sepik region, the Bali project also incorporated a return trip to the Iatmul, made in

order to provide accurate comparative material for their body of experimental data from

Bali. The original motive for the New Guinea-Bali comparative project can be seen deeply

44

Chapter 2 - Planning

rooted in both Mead and Bateson’s academic heritages. It is hard to ignore the Sepik’s

historical significance as the source of field data for many of the early ‘evolutionist’ pioneers

and it is, at the least, ironically appropriate that Mead and Bateson’s innovative work used, in

part, data gathered from the same peoples, to produce a radical revision of the antiquated

evolutionary understanding of culture.

Mead wrote that Bali offered an “extraordinary contrast” (Mead 1972:227) to the

time she and Bateson spent working in New Guinea, possessing a culture that was not only

beautiful but, as they were soon to realize, impressively accessible to ethnographic enquiry.

“There were over a million people who spoke the same language, as compared with the few

hundreds - or at most a few thousands - in any one of our New Guinea cultures” (Mead

1972:227). Mead and Bateson were not the first to discover this haven of cross-cultural

inquiry. As previously mentioned, Mead was originally alerted to the possible benefits of

study in Bali by her exposure to the work Jane Belo, one of her student acquaintances from

Barnard. Belo was herself one of a team of Dutch ethnographers who, with the notable

addition of her husband Colin McPhee, lived and conducted research in Bali during the

1930’s. It was the expatriate owner of a small artist’s retreat, Walter Spies - a good friend of

Belo and McPhee - who welcomed the newlywed Bateson and Mead into his home in Bali in

1936 and helped them choose a location to begin their long anticipated work.

45

Work in the Field

We arrived in Bali in March 1936, on the Balinese New Year’s Day, Njepi. When for a whole day absolute silence is imposed on the island. No one walks the roads, no gong sounds, no voice is raised, no fire is lit, children hush in their crying, and no dog barks - Margaret Mead.3

Once in Bali, Mead and Bateson began an intensive process of cultural

acclimatization, in which they were helped greatly by the hospitality and advice of Spies, Belo

and McPhee. During this time, they were introduced to Katharane Mershon who was living

in a nearby village and decided to form a working group with her and Belo. The four

anthropologists realized that their own research would benefit from comparison with

ethnographic data from other areas and that sharing results would increase their efficiency in

the upcoming months. Belo was already involved in studying the trance behavior exhibited

by the people in the village of Sajan and Mershon was similarly occupied living with her

husband in Sanoer, a village “where even small children went into trance” (Mead 1972:236).

It was only due to the massive disruption caused by World War II (WWII), which it sent

field workers running back to the safety of their home countries, that the written work

produced by this extended period of collaborative work is not more unified.

Mead and Bateson also recruited a young Balinese secretary and translator, named

Made Kaler, who made transcriptions of events in Balinese and English for cross-checking

with Mead’s own notes. The addition of Made Kaler was a great help for Mead and Bateson

in overcoming the initial linguistic difficulties with their new Balinese subjects. He helped

them to learn Balinese during their first two months of work, although they still had to

navigate the Malay and traditional Sanskrit derived languages prevalent throughout Bali, in

3 1972:223.

Chapter 2 – Work in the Field

addition to the Dutch spoken by many of the academics in the area. This mild linguistic

alienation suffered by Bateson and Mead indubitably contributed to their reliance on visual

means of recording, and therefore to their development of a primarily visual understanding

of Balinese culture. This type of emphasis was far from unique among their hosts and peers,

who had each developed their own particular method of incorporating their appreciation for

the aesthetic aspects of Balinese culture into an academic study of their larger patterns and

significance. Most were adept in photography, and Belo had already made ethnographic

films to accompany the musical recordings made by McPhee during his work.

Early on during her work with Bateson and Mead, Belo voiced her concern that the

operating procedures they employed by were overly “cold and analytical” (Mead 1972:231).

Mead saw their Balinese work in a contrasting light, as an attempt to study Bali from the

ground up, “as [they] were accustomed to approaching a primitive culture, by using [their]

eyes and ears” (Mead 1972:230). She planned to avoid the shortcomings of previous Balinese

studies, which had based their evaluations of the culture on the assumption that much of it

could be explained as deriving from Indian and Java. Mead and Bateson chose to disregard

the details of previous accounts and attempted to maintain a self-contained empirical

perspective, a choice that was probably partly responsible for Belo’s criticism of their

approach.

Having found their feet among their new co-workers in Bali and discovered the

range of behavior available in the region, during the making of their ‘practice’ film Trance and

Dance in Bali Bateson and Mead developed a new method of documentation to

accommodate the scale of their upcoming observations. Mead called the process taking

“running field notes” (Jacknis 1988:163), based around the chronological description of the

developments recorded by Bateson (the photographer). Their records were precise, even

47

Chapter 2 – Work in the Field

incorporating the use of a stopwatch during complex trance rituals and other more

significant events.

As Mead and Bateson began to understand the more subtle details of Balinese

culture, they decided to simplify their studies by moving to the secluded mountain village of

Bajoeng Gede. Their move to from the coast to the mountains in June 1936 is significant as

the beginning of Mead and Bateson’s most secluded time in Bali, it also marked a qualitative

shift in their studies. This shift was intentional, away from the complex amalgamation of

cultural influences active among the coastal peoples towards a simpler, more preserved

variation of Balinese culture found further inland. “We decided that we would start our work

in as simple a village as we could find and learn Balinese culture as it was expressed in the

life of villagers” (Mead 1972:232), wrote Mead. Another major benefit of study in Bajoeng

Gede, although the cause of some suffering for the people of the village, was the unusually

high occurrence of hypothyroidism found there. This led to a local cultural variation that was

less complex than its surrounding forms, but represented an identical basic framework of

cultural character to that found in other parts of Bali. In their introduction Mead and

Bateson identify Bajoeng Gede as “a community in which cultural emphases were

schematically simplified” (Bateson and Mead 1942:xiii). Although they mention that “every

village in Bali differs from every other in many conspicuous respects” (Bateson and Mead

1942:xiv), Mead and Bateson do not seem to have been concerned by the possibility that

hypothyroidism could have caused unique and unpredictable distortions in the cultural

patterning they were studying.

Early on during their work in Bajoeng Gede, Mead and Bateson realized that the

seventy five rolls of Leica film they had originally brought with them was only a fraction of

the film their intended studies would need. They had used three rolls in one forty five

48

Chapter 2 – Work in the Field

minute period of observation, and the impressive mathematics of the situation soon became

clear. Mead writes, “we had come to a threshold – to cross it would be a momentous

commitment in money … and in work as well” (Mead 1972:234). Despite the burden of

these commitments, Mead and Bateson entered wholeheartedly into photographically

saturated documentation methods. They ordered film in hundred-foot rolls, which Bateson

cut and loaded every day before work, in addition to a hand winder for taking exposures in

rapid succession. Mead recalls the scale of their choice: “Whereas we had planned to take

2,000 photographs, we took 25,000. It meant that the notes I took were similarly multiplied

by a factor of ten … the volume of our work was changed in tremendously significant ways”

(Mead 1972:234).

The apparent ease with which Mead and Bateson were able to re-imagine the scale of

their observations can be understood when broken down into their individual commitments

to the project. For Bateson, this was the obvious opportunity to gather fieldwork data (a

description) within a methodological framework (a tautology) that allowed holistic

representation of phenomena, yet remained equally suited to a systematic analysis (an

explanation) of the phenomena documented. For Mead, her commitment to the conclusions

of her previous work rested upon the validity of the data she gathered in those regions. At

this point in her career, Mead was becoming more aware of the reception of her earlier work

which, although on the whole positive, voiced the suspicion that her impressionistic

recording of ethnographic data had allowed her to present complex conclusions as inherent

aspects of life among the people she studied. Mead was sensitive to these criticisms,

probably because she was unable to fully deny the simplified and intuitive nature of her

earlier conclusions. As a result, she felt obliged to conduct research during the Bali project in

49

Chapter 2 – Work in the Field

a manner so systematic and comprehensive as to provide ample backing for even the most

ambitious theoretical claims.

These shared motivations led Mead and Bateson into a period of research unique in

the history of the field. Their treatment of the camera as a primary research tool is the root

cause of the majority of the methodological and theoretical advances documented in Balinese

Character. In order to incorporate photographic techniques into their newly formulated

methodology, Bateson and Mead developed a set of operational procedures that allowed

systematic recording and cataloging of the events they observed.4

At this point it is useful to consider the practical differences between using

photography as a source of primary ethnographic data, as Mead and Bateson did and, using

it more conventionally, as what Bateson calls a “documentary” device. Instead of trying to

find scenes of particular significance using standard research methods, re-creating the scene

under optimum lighting conditions and photographing the staged recreation, Bateson carried

at least one camera with him at all times. For scenes in which the subject’s awareness of the

camera could interfere with the observation in question, Bateson used an angular view finder

to disguise the act of photography and, in the specific case of intimate mother-child

interactions, he focused his attention on the child in order to calm the mother’s concerns. In

the section of Balinese Character entitled “Notes on the Photographs and Captions”, Bateson

writes: “Of the 759 photographs reproduced in this book, eight can fairly be said to have

been “posed”… We treated the cameras in the field as recording instruments, not as devices

for illustrating our theses” (Bateson and Mead 1942:49).

4 This system was designed to foster truly dynamic photography in the field, as Bateson noted: “the best results were obtained when the photography was most rapid and almost random” (Bateson and Mead 1942:50).

50

Chapter 2 – Work in the Field

Their revolutionary use of the camera as an ethnographic recording device led them

to create an equally unique working method, a division of labor of sorts, which emerged

between them based on their previous experience and natural inclinations. Bateson

recognized that, “for work of this sort it is essential to have at least two workers in close

cooperation. The photographic sequence is almost valueless without a verbal account of

what occurred, and it is not possible to take full notes while manipulating the cameras”

(Bateson and Mead 1942:49). This method of dual recording was as much a product of their

individual skills and interests as of the challenges of their shared ambitions and working

environment.

Bateson was the natural technician of the pair. He was accordingly assigned

responsibility for the recording and organizing of visual data, whilst Mead’s astute awareness

of the multiple significances of a situation allowed her to easily adopt the position of

director. She would oversee the recording of an event, quickly scribbling down copious

volumes of written notes. These notes, which incorporated the technical and logistical details

of shooting into a chronological report of the entire period in question, concretized the

observations in relation to one another. Her communication with Bateson during

observation was largely in the form of a coordinator’s directions. Mead recalls:

Gradually we developed a style of recording in which I kept track of the main events while Gregory took both moving pictures and stills … We soon realized that notes made against time provided the only means which the work of three people could be fitted together and which would enable us, later, to match the photographic records of a scene with the notes (Mead 1972:231).

In the pursuit of a truly objective documentation of the phenomena into which he and Mead

immersed themselves, Bateson found himself loosing awareness of the presence of the

camera, or the act of photographing. His attempts to streamline the process of photographic

description into a series of clear arrangements of the significant components of an event, led

to a shooting technique that positively denied the presence or agency of the photographer.

51

Chapter 2 – Work in the Field

Bateson notes, with regard to his periods of saturated shooting that “it is almost impossible

to maintain camera consciousness after the first dozen shots” (Bateson and Mead 1942:49).

Close study of the plates displayed in Balinese Character reveal the products of a painstaking

photographic exercise, the contents of each frame are composed relative to their preceding

and succeeding arrangements, in order to provide as clear a view as possible of the

phenomena described. It is worthwhile to note that whilst the couple avoided ‘posed’

photography, Mead in her role as ‘director’ would often suggest to their subjects the kind of

behavior that would be useful to observe. As Ira Jacknis observes, this technique is apparent

to varying degrees in their work. In general, any arrangements incorporated into the

photography appear to have been relatively minor, whereas in the case of their film, Trance

and Dance, Mead and Bateson requested that a night-time ritual be performed at day, to allow

it to be filmed (Jacknis 1988:166-167).

By suppressing his impulse to use photographs to simply ‘tell the story’ of the events

he observed, Bateson was able to produce a photographically descriptive record that allowed

for the unbiased application of any one of multiple tautologies at a later date. Thus

improving the degree of oversight incorporated into any generalization suggested by the

specific data. It is easy to see why, as Mead points out in a symposium hosted by the

American Anthropological Association in 1971, “Gregory’s films of Balinese and Iatmul

parents and children were shown as models of what can be done with photography” (Mead

1972:235). However, such an impressive collection of photographs came at a price. Intensive

work during the day was matched by time spent processing at night, “we bought a

developing tank that would hold ten rolls at once and, in the end, we were able to develop

some 1600 rolls in an evening” (Mead 1972:234), recalls Mead. “Most of the time we worked

52

Chapter 2 – Work in the Field

together far into the night, went to bed after washing our faces in the remaining pint of

water when the last films had been developed” (Mead 1972:235).

Over the next seventeen months, Mead and Bateson worked furiously to enlarge

their understanding of Balinese character through its cultural causes. During this period they

developed their methodology in response to its perceived performance in the field, and

began to group their observations into conceptual areas of explanation. In the ‘Writing’

section, the structures embodied in these conceptual areas will be considered in more detail,

at this point it is sufficient to notice that, as they progressed, their work became more

complex, more insightful, and more stressful. Bateson reflected, “I wish there were some

means of preventing field-work, which god knows is hectic enough in the first months, from

becoming more and more hectic as the worker knows more and more about the culture he is

studying” (Lipset 1980:152).

Of the innovations made during this period, several reflect the pair’s reflexive

interests, including showing their films to the Balinese and recording their reactions to the

experience. This work represented a continuum of Mead’s earlier reflexive techniques, and

offered Bateson a new way to consider the values of this type of material. Bateson and

Mead’s continual attempts to refine their field methods and theory, as well as their attempts

at reflexive study of native learning, are closely related to a section of Bateson’s 1958

epilogue to Naven. During his considerations of the problems involved in finding a single

‘true’ mapping or tautology for a set of ethnographic data, Bateson described a process

recognizable in both the aforementioned features of Mead and Bateson’s work:

One significant duality has however already been mentioned in this brief survey, namely, the duality between observations of behavior and generalization, and this duality, I believe, here reflects a special complexity in the system: the dual fact of learning and learning to learn (Bateson 1958:296).

53

Chapter 2 – Work in the Field

In the case of their reflexive experiments, Bateson and Mead were effectively doubling the

analytical value of their film making work. Their awareness of the Balinese perspective of their

perspective gave them an obvious advantage in constructing an account of their understanding

of the interaction between two cultures. Again, in their adaptive approach to fieldwork

methods, Bateson and Mead appreciated the benefits of evaluating their own performance

(and the accompanying ability to generalize), independently of their progress in the field.

This kind of operational procedure is emblematic of Bateson’s commitment to empirical

grace motivating him to fully exploit the many dimensions of the observer-subject

relationship.

Perhaps it was Bateson’s intense consideration of his own part in the observer-

subject relationship that led him to a further appreciation of the value of photography in

ethnography. The process of observation occurs significantly twice during the entire

ethnographic process: once in the field - where the anthropologists observe the culture, and

once at the ethnography’s final destination - in the hands of the reader. The benefits of

photography to the ethnographer, as they became apparent to Bateson in the field, are

mirrored by equal benefits to the reader in reconstructing a description from the book’s

explanation. The complexities of “intertextuality” (Boon 1990:175), as considered by Boon

in his discussion of Mead and Bateson’s writing at this time, are summarized by his citation

of Culler: “To read is always to read in relation to other texts, in relation to the codes that

are the product of those texts and go on to make up a culture” (Boon 1990:175). By offering

access to a universal, visual vocabulary and syntax, photographic research endows the

ethnographer with the ability to sidestep the complex implicit associations of a text-based

narrative. By removing the ‘textual’ aspect of documentary photography using strict

methodological techniques, a researcher can produce a photographically saturated and, thus,

54

Chapter 2 – Work in the Field

visually self-explanatory account of their work and observations. Bateson’s reflexive

orientation, along with his interest in the mechanics of learning in general, put him in a good

position to appreciate the two-fold benefits available to the author of a photographically

based account.

In March 1938, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data that they had been

able to collect thus far, Bateson and Mead left Bali to return once more to the Sepik. This

trip represented a commendable effort to provide additional material appropriate for

comparison with their (otherwise unique) Balinese data. Their second visit to the Sepik was a

struggle, especially in contrast to the excitement and intrigue of Bali. Without their secretary

and his recording skills, Bateson and Mead found it relatively difficult to dissect the Iatmul

culture. However, after eight months work they had managed to gather enough material to

satisfactorily evaluate their Balinese work. Their timing was fortunate, as the outbreak of war

became more immanent and their movements were increasingly limited by the growing

chaos. Apart from two short return trips to Bali in February and March of 1939, their time in

the field was over and Bateson and Mead’s thoughts shifted to the massive task of

organizing data and writing up their findings. They returned together from New Guinea to

England via New York and began work living in Cambridge.

55

Chapter 3

This chapter provides an account of the important decisions made by Mead and

Bateson whilst writing Balinese Character. It will then relate this account to an analysis of the

innovations that are revealed by a close examination of the book itself. The first section

takes the form of a survey, whilst the analysis is divided to mirror the book’s structure, into

three sections on ‘Plates’, ‘Annotations and Plate Introductions’ and ‘Section Introductions’.

Each section will use examples from the book to illustrate the points made in the account of

their writing.

After Mead and Bateson’s two short trips to Bali in 1939, they spent time together in

New York, where Mead discovered she was pregnant. By the autumn of 1939 war was

inevitable and, in September, Bateson sailed to England intending to offer whatever

help he could in the war effort. Even before he arrived in England Bateson had considered

his options and realized, to his frustration, that there was probably no way in which he could

help to solve the problems presently faced by his country. This separation in 1939 marks the

Chapter 3

beginning of the problems that faced the pair during the writing of Balinese Character. Mead

recalls the struggle: “as the War engulfed us, Gregory turned to other interests and never

came back to this kind of field work” (Mead 1972:238). From this point on, for Bateson and

Mead, the Bali project was an aspect of their past, a tangled collection of vivid shared

experiences from which they attempted to extract threads of continuity and construct

theoretical systems.5

As previously suggested, the book itself represents a compromise on the part of

Mead and Bateson who, during their period of wartime turmoil, decided to organize the

most prominent aspects of their own data, along with a selection of Belo’s relevant material

to formulate a short but perfectly formed account. At this point they abandoned the lofty

aspirations of the previous years, disregarding (for the present time at least) many of the

collaborative aspects of their Balinese research, and focusing on material which they felt was

concretely significant and thus free from speculation. Much of the material that was not

included in Balinese Character became the empirical basis for various peripherally related

publications and films, which were often the product of collaborative writing. Of these

publications, most notable was Belo’s Trance and Dance in Bali, which more fully explored the

limits of their collaborative research on the trance ritual. Various essays published by the

group in the subsequent years explored aspects of the work not included in the book, several

commenting on the seven ethnographic films produced by Bateson and Mead from their

Bali material.

As they noted in the introduction to Balinese Character, Mead and Bateson felt that the

book “[wa]s in no sense a complete account of Balinese culture, even in its most general

5 In his excellent book, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and Highland Bali, Gerald Sullivan notes that “Bateson did not make contact prints of all the rolls of film, much less develop prints of most of the photographs, to this day there is neither a complete set of prints nor an even reasonably complete set of positive prints” (Sullivan 1999:18)

57

Chapter 3

outlines… A less pregnant period of history might have dictated another choice of subject

matter for our first publication” (Bateson and Mead 1942:xv). In order to understand Mead

and Bateson’s motives whilst writing, and the subsequent treatment of their work in the

following years, it is necessary to consider how they were affected by the dynamics of the

war. As Mead explained, “the events of the war divided the peoples of the world in two –

not as enemies, but as members of two generations, born and reared before the war or after

the events that changed the human condition” (Mead 1972:4). Balinese Character was

conceived, written and published during a time of massively significant change worldwide,

the shifts that occurred resonated throughout academia. This account will return later to a

consideration of the various effects of this time period on the eventual historical significance

of the book.

Late in 1939, Bateson gave up on finding a direct way to contribute to the war effort

at home and applied to return to the United States, where Mead was expecting their baby.

Bateson arrived in Philadelphia in January 1940, in time to meet Mead and his six-week-old

daughter, Mary Catherine. It was as such, amidst the personal and global confusions of

parenthood and the World War, that Mead and Bateson set to work to categorize, organize

and select prominent samples from their huge collection of photographic material.

Balinese Character, as an explicit cross section of their archives of documentation,

embodies not only a first-level photographic description of its Balinese subjects, but also a

second-level description of Mead and Bateson’s own choices during the writing process, as

described implicitly through their selection of specific photographs. This twofold account,

featuring both theoretically and methodologically reflexive devices, resulted from Mead and

Bateson’s commitment to making the most valuable contribution they could to anthropology

as a discipline.

58

Chapter 3

Similar considerations of clarity and efficiency led Bateson to temporarily abandon

the concepts he had used in Naven to document systems of cultural change, those of

schismogenesis and zygogenesis, as well as his character concepts of ethos and eidos.

Although he re-examined and applied these concepts to a multitude of different theoretical

problems later in life, Bateson felt that incorporating them post-hoc into the Balinese

observations would confuse the true value of the book as an isolated methodological

example. Mead and Bateson worked tirelessly through their data with the help of Claire Holt,

who also assisted them in analyzing their collection of Balinese carvings. Their selection

process reduced their collection of 25,000 photographs down to a final edit of 759 frames,

arranged into 100 plates by context. Bateson expressed his reflexive awareness in Balinese

Character, in his description of the “Selection of Photographs”:

We then projected all the diapositives [transparencies], one by one, and wrote category cards for those that seemed to merit further consideration for inclusion in the book. We thus obtained a list of about 6,000 frames. Of these, we enlarged approximately the first 4,000 in chronological order, desisting at this point because time was short. From these 4,000, the majority of the prints reproduced here were selected (Bateson and Mead 1942:50).

The plates were divided into ten sections: “Introductory, Spatial Orientation and Levels,

Learning, Integration and Disintegration of the Body, Orifices of the Body, Autocosmic

Play, Parents and Children, Siblings, Stages of Child Development, and Rites De Passage”

(Bateson and Mead 1942:vii). These sections reflected Bateson and Mead’s conceptual map

of their fieldwork data at this point in the writing process, from which the limits and

divisions of their later theoretical commentary developed. Whilst organizing data, Bateson

and Mead continually referenced their own notes of an event, in addition to those of Made

Kaler, in order to identify the significance of each series of pictures by its film and frame

numbers. This organizational technique allowed them to faithfully reproduce the relations

59

Chapter 3

between pictures from completely disparate times and locations, whilst minimizing the risk

of re-interpreting the original data to fit the categories defined by their investigation.

One of Balinese Character’s most pervasive theoretical concerns resides in its recurring

implicit statement of the relation between the particular (common in description), and the

generalized (common in explanation). “In the Plates, each single illustration is dated and

placed, and it is not safe to generalize from its detailed content for other parts of Bali”

(Bateson and Mead 1942:xv). This statement was the first part of Bateson and Mead’s

conceptual division of the text. They defined this particular aspect of their documentary as

contained in the visual record of their observations, from which they constructed the more

generalized aspect of their account, in the form of gradually more abstract textual summaries

and connections across the images. This decision reflects the most fundamental

manifestation of the pair’s ambitions to maintain an explicit relationship between description

and explanation through the reflexive devices of Balinese Character. The tautology developed

by Bateson in his analysis of the photographs (Mead was responsible for the more extended,

unifying writing in the explanatory sections), was conceived within the description-

explanation dialectic, clearly implied by the data’s aptitude to visual or written commentary.

As they note in their introduction, Bateson and Mead designed Balinese Character to provide

a series of crosscutting pictures of the culture which could be fitted together and cross checked against each other. The discussion which follows [Mead’s extended summary] is a synthetic statement based upon these various samples; the photographs are a carefully selected series, analyzed on the basis of the sampling (Bateson and Mead 1942:xvi).

The aforementioned dialectic between description and explanation can be mapped onto

Mead and Bateson’s understanding of the relationship between character and culture. Whilst

character is the active manifestation or description of the individual’s subjective understanding

of their relation to the cultural whole and depends on agency, culture is the abstract, perhaps

imagined, explanation of the same phenomenon, generalized across a body of people and

60

Chapter 3

depends on understanding. As the multiplicities of the epistemological ambitions contained

in Balinese Character begin to emerge from its initially complex form, its resonant devices

surround the analytically minded reader in a network of confirmation that is vital to the

book’s greater mission.

The mission of the book, as summarized by its authors was “to stat[e] the intangible

relationships among different types of culturally standardized behavior by placing side by

side mutually relevant photographs” (Bateson and Mead 1942:xii). During their work and,

doubtlessly, continuing throughout their analysis, they realized that “pieces of behavior,

spatially and contextually separated … may all be relevant to a single discussion; the same

emotional thread may run through them” (Bateson and Mead 1942:xii). This idea, combined

with their previous experiences of explaining culture through text, brought Bateson and

Mead to the conclusion that the restraints naturally imposed by rigorous employment of a

still camera, could perfectly match the requirements of an objective documented account.6

It is possible to avoid the artificial construction of a scene at which a man, watching a dance, also looks up at an aeroplane and has a dream; it is also possible to avoid diagramming the single element in these scenes which we wish to stress – the importance of levels in Balinese relationships – in such a way that the reality of the scenes is destroyed (Bateson and Mead 1942:xii).

By avoiding these issues, Bateson and Mead produced an account in which the reader’s

attention is suspended somewhere between the representative, edited description offered by

the photographs and its derived ontology, provided by their annotations and extended

explanatory sections. Bateson and Mead used this unique vantage point to address the issues

that developed from their attempts to link observations of the individual characters they

encountered in Bali to their understanding of Balinese culture’s role in defining them. This

theoretical standpoint locates culture as a derivative of the tension between human biological

6 At this point the implicit statement that this method not only could, but should be employed during field work for success in writing should be noted. However, this account will reserve considerations of this sort for its conclusion.

61

Chapter 3

universals and their environmental circumstances, the collective selection of imagined

norms, against which individual embellishments are defined (or enacted). This viewpoint

espouses an innovative conception of the role of individuals, who are not bounded by the

limits of their cultural inheritance but, rather, defined by their inherent degree of congruence

(or in Mead and Bateson’s cases, incongruence) with the cultural expectations of their place

of origin. Mead’s previous work on deviance as a cultural concept is relevant to the couple’s

thought in this area. It is easy to see how the increasing pressures of wartime politics

encouraged Mead and Bateson to incorporate a significant emphasis on this aspect of their

theoretical conclusions.

To identify the overlapping themes addressed by Balinese Character it is useful to ask:

“What are the implicit books that can be read from the one book in question?” This

provokes a consideration of the various systems that were reconciled by Bateson and Mead

during the writing process. Among the most notable of their achievements was the

application of Erik Erikson’s system of psychoanalytic periodization to aspects of Balinese

child rearing practice. This allowed a new degree of specificity in describing chains (or, as

Bateson would prefer, loops) of causality linking in the periods of infancy, childhood,

adolescence and adulthood. This structure is accompanied by a view of individual

development in which each period is affected by the sum of the previous periods, a revision

of Freud’s ideas on complex creation and their more proscriptive conclusions.

Bateson’s own considerations of the processes active in child adult relationships were

not included in his theoretical appraisal of the Balinese material, although they can not be

fully divorced from his thought as they reemerge in his later work. He considers the

significance of the Balinese material in his essay on “Form and Pattern in Anthropology”, in

which he compares Balinese and Iatmul parenting patterns to create an account of the way

62

Chapter 3

“symmetrical [behavioral] patterns are superposed onto a complementary base” (Bateson

2002:20). In the case of the Balinese, the symmetrical patterns emerge most prominently in

the arena of affectionate teasing, where an infant learns to replicate the states of calm

attention and, rarely, high temper that characterize adult Balinese life. Although

considerations of these sorts of behavior are certainly present in Balinese Character, they are

explained independently of Bateson’s proprietary theoretical concepts.

In order to explain the innovations contained in Balinese Character, this account will

now include a detailed analysis of the work, from structure to content, beginning with an

evaluative overview of its form, and culminating in consideration of the photographs

themselves. In Balinese Character, Mead and Bateson split their account into a hierarchy of

three distinct layers, presented as a sequence, from explanation, through tautology to arrive

at description. At the book’s descriptive foundations are the arrangements of plates,

presenting a specific selection of photographic artifacts and ordering them into a numbered

sequence. Evoking one level of abstraction are the pages of annotations facing and

preceding the plates, which identify the various active components, both present and

implicit, within the frame; providing simple explanations of their relative significances.

Building one level higher, the extended explanatory monologue by Mead that opens the text

takes each section of plates7 and explains their observations in a holistic manner, relating

their specific content to their overall impression of Balinese culture that is the product of the

book.

It is tempting perhaps, to go one step further and consider Bateson’s section “Notes

on the Photographs and Captions” (Bateson and Mead 1942:49) as representative of a forth

and final degree of abstraction in the book’s content. Here he uses his reflexive awareness of 7 Approximately five to ten per section, although the “Parents and Children” (Bateson and Mead 1942:144-176), and “Rites De Passage” (223-255) sections are notably longer.

63

Chapter 3

the practices used to gather the data that is the basis for the book, in order to comment

critically on its formal and methodological implications. It is interesting to note at this point

the Batesonian nature of the hierarchy just described, in which observation of pattern at the

highest degree of abstraction (purely reflexive methodological examination) becomes

simultaneously a consideration of the processes of observation occurring at the bottom of

the hierarchy. As Bateson would later document in his 1964 essay entitled “The Logical

Categories of Learning and Communication” (Bateson 1972:279), from Steps to an Ecology of

Mind, hierarchies of learning8 often operate in this way. The final step in a learning hierarchy,

equated by Bateson with reaching ‘wisdom’, would take the subject of learning back in a full

circle (or loop), to considerations comparable with their original, basic learning processes. It

is also interesting to note that Bateson himself described the most basic of his ‘levels’ of

learning as imprinting, a term indicative of his view of the photographic process as a learning

process.

Balinese Character, when dissected in terms of its three basic levels of explanatory

abstraction, can also be seen as a systematized representation of Bateson and Mead’s

contrasting anthropological preferences when characterized as scientific and artistic

according to Bateson’s previously mentioned scheme. Mead’s section, although here playing

the role of an overview, is similar in tone to her earlier ‘artistic’ work, overflowing with

descriptive detail and graceful explanatory theory, but due to its status as one part of their

threefold synthetic process, it maintains a greater degree of grounding and is able to indicate

clearly where the observations relevant to each theoretical point are located. Bateson’s work

analyzing and presenting the photographic plates is an impressive display of the most

prominent results from the Bali project, and its surprising clarity is the effect of his precise 8 For Balinese Character is ultimately the documentation of Mead and Bateson’s process of learning Balinese culture through their study of Balinese character.

64

Chapter 3

methodology during fieldwork. This, ironically more essentially ‘scientific’ section of the

book is made relevant to its audience by the accompanying ‘artistic’ explanatory passages.

This configuration allows both of the book’s authors a place to exercise their contrasting (or

complimentary) descriptive and explanatory methods, but maintains the mutual relevance of

its sections in an apt embodiment of Mead and Bateson’s intertwined modes of thought.

There will now follow an example-based analysis of the hierarchical documentary

form featured in Balinese Character, taking one page of plates along with its annotations and

examining its relation to its explanatory section, and indeed the book as a whole. This

dissection will seek to uncover the empirical and explanatory models underpinning the

book’s structure and, although it will consider the particulars of Balinese culture at times, it

will only be as an aid to explaining the ‘methods of understanding’ derived from the author’s

experience of those events. This focus is appropriate to describing Mead and Bateson’s

understanding of the value of Balinese Character, and has been adopted in order to allow the

later consideration of how that subjective value has been, or remains to be, appreciated by

anthropology as a whole. The analysis will follow the book’s implicit account of Mead and

Bateson’s theoretical process during writing, from pure ethnographic description (in the

plates), through tautology (in the annotations and plate introductions) to explanation (in the

extended overview). The chosen example in this case, Plate 49 “Borrowed Babies” (Bateson

and Mead 1942:152-153), is pertinent to this analysis for a number of reasons. At the most

basic level, it illustrates the nature and emphasis of Bateson’s photographic technique and

selection process. The photographs, alongside their detailed annotated labeling information,

present a good sample of the comparisons made throughout the book. This plate features

precise behavioral comparisons across situations, and its contents are centrally significant to

the section “Parents and Children”. This section incorporates sixteen pages of plates and

65

Chapter 3

eleven pages of Mead’s explanatory text. The parent-child relationship is central to

understanding the character analysis offered by the book and borrowing babies is an

important part of this relationship. An analysis of Mead and Bateson’s form as exemplified

in these pages, will allow true appreciation of the depth and intricacy of their work.

Plates9

The information displayed in the plates themselves is clearly unique in its degree of

flexibility compared to other forms of Ethnographic data. Each page describes a certain

aspect of Mead and Bateson’s observations, linking the disparate content of multiple frames,

which are themselves dislocated both temporally and spatially, to form a series of similar

frames onto which further narratives can later be superimposed. In the case of earlier,

introductory plates10 the series of photos is often used to imply the temporal progression

associated with their description. For example, Plate 1. Bajoeng Gede: Village and Temples

(Bateson and Mead 1942:56-57), presents the village as it would appear to a visitor arriving

for the first time. 11 The visual narrative approaches from afar, down the main street and into

the garden and interior of two buildings.

In the plate under consideration, ‘Borrowed Babies’, the temporal narratives are

grouped into three comparative examples from different locations, two in Bajoeng Gede12

and one in Belabatoeh13. Each sub-plot deals with a different aspect of the surrogate

mother-child relationship, and the presentation of the three in sequence implies a

progressive focus, if not a direct narrative to the page as a whole. The depiction provided by 9 Bateson and Mead 1942:153. 10 Plates 1-8 p.56-71. 11 Kohn notes: “Visually the relationship between the images is similar to a point-of-view shot (P.O.V.) in a film In this type of shot, a filmmaker creates the illusion that the camera, and hence the audience, sees through the eyes of a character in the film” (Kohn 1993:28). 12 Frames 1-2, and Frames 3-5. 13 Frames 6-8.

66

Chapter 3

the eight frames spans photographic material taken on four dates over a thirteen month

period14. The description includes details derived from the interactions of sixteen individuals,

five mothers and eleven ‘borrowed babies’ or onlookers15. The eight frames are arranged in

three rows of mutual relevance, depicting first two group configurations involving baby

borrowing, then continuing by establishing the relation between the behavior of Balinese

babies and the traditional image of the witch. In his portrayal of the culture-character

dynamic, Bateson often compares photographic evidence of a particular Balinese behavioral

trait with its embodiment in an artwork or other cultural representation. This can also be

seen as a form of reflexivity, allowing the reader insight into Mead and Bateson’s own

process of observation in the field.

These plates were chosen as emblematic of the techniques employed throughout the

book but, as with any individual example, generalizations made from its unique

characteristics require careful qualification. It should be noted that compared to the other

plates in Balinese Character, the one analyzing ‘Borrowed Babies’ can, in many ways, be

usefully seen as occupying a median position amongst the other plates. There are many

examples of much simpler configurations of plates, arranging photographs taken at most a

few minutes apart16, these pages are concentrated on a single aspect of behavior, rather than

a common practice and so are able to most elegantly illustrate their point in one continuous

sequence. Equally, there are examples of more complex arrangements17 than those featured

in ‘Borrowed Babies’, in which Bateson creates a survey of the pair’s various observations of

behavior associated with a specific phenomenon.

14 May 28, 1936 - Frame 5; August 6, 1936 - Frame 1; August 30, 1936 - Frames 6, 7 and 8; July 13, 1937 - Frames 2, 3 and 4. 15 Mother and three babies, Frame 1; two mothers and four babies, Frame 2; one mother and two babies, Frames 3 and 4; statue of mother and baby, Frame 5; one mother and two babies, Frames 6,7 and 8. 16 See Plate 71, Sibling Rivalry III, p. 196, and Plate 79, Child Nurse, p.212. 17 See Plate 57, Trance: Attack on the Self, p.168 and Plate 61, Little Witches, p. 176.

67

Chapter 3

Throughout the book, the arrangements of photographs maintain a misleadingly

calm composition, which is not to say that they represent a simple narrative18 but, rather that

the narrative that becomes apparent through a consideration of their content and

configuration makes no false claims to subjective clarity. By maintaining its objective

relevance, independently of its accompanying text, the photographic sequence that is the

heart of Balinese Character is able to fully justify its own existence. Bateson’s selection of

photographs represents a complexly self-aware presentation of results, balancing the benefits

and shortcomings of their research in Bali.

There remain a few short observations on the topic of Bateson’s refined

photographic style as it acts to enhance the account. Following these, the analysis will

progress to further consideration of the integration of text and image. A close inspection of

the frames on Plate 49 alone reveals Bateson’s skill behind the camera. The images are

clearly framed and rely upon precise awareness of the behaviors being recorded for their

timing and dynamic accuracy. Information is logically arranged within each frame, with a

painstaking attention to the edges of each composition19, which allows a seamless integration

with their annotations. Each image adheres to portrait-landscape convention, matching

seated or standing behavior to its appropriate format and displaying masterful manipulation

of lighting, exposure, and depth of field. All three devices are employed complementarily in

order to create images in which the relevant components are clearly arranged, in their

unposed positions, against a background that is usually separated by a difference in

lighting20, a difference in focus21 or combinations of both. Although these techniques are all

18 In fact it is probably more useful to view them as a form of hierarchical database, somewhat independent of the text, and their emergent ‘narrative’. 19 See the top of frames 6,7, and 8, and the contextualization offered in the background of frames 1-4 for examples. 20 See frames 1-4.

68

Chapter 3

easily available to the competent photographer, the speed and accuracy with which they

where employed by Bateson is illustrative of his reliance on Mead to provide the more

contextual aspect of recording.

Annotations and Plate Introductions22

The photographs may be reduced by analysis to Bateson’s attempt to clearly display

the inherent logical relationship of various, visually represented, cultural symbols - as they

occur in the ‘character’ (or behavioral details) of the individual. Their accompanying

annotations, by identifying these symbolic elements, are therefore the first step towards the

eventual explanation of the ontological relations contained (but invisible) within the

arrangement of frames. As Bateson mentions in his section ‘Notes on the Captions’: “the

detailed captions contain a blending of objective description and scientific generalization”

(Bateson and Mead 1942:53). Suspended as they are, between the extended prose of the

introductory passages and the visual constellations of the photographic plates, the

annotations offer the reader a bridge between the encrypted symbolic configurations of the

data and their comparative treatment in previous sections. They highlight relevant characters,

explain their relative temporal contexts (i.e. who is doing what to whom) and also provide

the critical link between a particular example illustrated and the general trend of which it is

but a fragment. Critical attention is given to aspects of the documentation that show deviant

or unusual arrangements. Much of the information presented during the account takes the

form of two contrasting arrangements or variations of behavior, with their relative

occurrences explained in their annotations.

21 See frames 6-8. 22 Bateson and Mead 1942:152.

69

Chapter 3

There is a strong sense that, as much as the annotations function to point out the

details of the pictures not immediately obvious to the unacquainted observer, they also

function significantly as a commentary between the pieces symbolic information contained in

the picture frames. Bateson writes: “Cross references from one photograph to another and

from one plate to another have been inserted often, and such insertions often carry implicit

generalizations like those implicit in the juxtapositions” (Bateson and Mead 1942:53). This

aspect of their form23 illustrates their tautological role, selectively linking descriptive

information to provide the background for further explanation. Here, just as tautology

(usually in the form of field notes) offers the ethnographer a way to access the dislocated

memories of research in the field during written analysis, the annotations offer the reader a

way to reconcile the raw, impressionistic information of the photographic description with

its comprehensive explanation.

Bateson explains the plate introduction as providing “an extreme of generality”

(Bateson and Mead 1942:53), these introductory passages vary from one to several

paragraphs in length and offer the reader an explanation of the overriding theme before

considering the plates or their individual notes. The plate introduction is short in the chosen

example, due to central role of ‘Borrowed Babies’ within the greater structure of the book.

In this case, the introduction serves to introduce the reader to the concept of baby

borrowing as it relates to the greater themes of Balinese motherhood.

23 This is suggested by their placement together, facing the frames rather than beneath each frame.

70

Chapter 3

Section Introductions24

As the Plate introductions offer a basic componential explanation of the relation

between the frames, Mead’s extended section introductions group the plates into segments

of common context, dissecting Balinese culture (as it is abstracted by the book’s narrative),

and rendering the sections into a whole. This part of the book bears a superficial

resemblance to Mead’s previous ethnographic writing; certainly it is thick with her

characteristic vivid description, it also incorporated native terms where they are useful.

However, a closer examination of the text provides insight into the restrictions and liberties

associated with unifying and explaining photographic field data.

The section divisions are clearly subjective, with the emphasis upon clarity of

explanation rather than the development of strict logical categories. Each group includes a

selection of peripherally related plates; in the case of ‘Borrowed Babies’ the parent-child

relationship is naturally used as a context for Mead and Bateson’s considerations of the

trance ritual. Mead’s writing is both graceful and complex, explaining the disparate aspects of

behavior documented in the plates in a tour de force of their various manifestations in Balinese

culture. Her account does not follow the progression of the plates exactly, but rather

explains the material covered (in this case twenty three plates) in the clearest possible

manner.

Due to the previously considered relative aptitudes of written and visual descriptions,

it may seem obvious that any account incorporating both must navigate the

communicational disconnect inherent to their relative forms. However, in Balinese Character,

the clear division between text and photograph is confused by the presence of the

annotations, which appear textual in form yet address a purely visual content. Mead’s text

24 Bateson and Mead 1942:29.

71

Chapter 3

can even be read as an advanced (if highly unsubstantiated) analysis of the phenomena she

and Bateson observed whilst in Bali, completely independently of its photographic basis and

annotations. Indeed this reading is implied by the structure of the book, in which the

sequentially arranged section introductions are homogenized by their mutual context, rather

than interspersed between their relevant plates. This form mirrors the placement of the

annotations together, facing the frames rather than under their respective frames. Bateson’s

epistemological obsession is clearly displayed in this recursive hierarchical format, which he

chose to most clearly express the tensions that must be overcome in any process

incorporating description, tautology and explanation. The chosen relationship between

Mead’s writing and Bateson’s photography is illustrated well by a thought experiment in

presentational methods, which also reveals some of the problems associated with their

attempt.

If Mead’s description is read as the transcription of an extended lecture on the

subject of Balinese Character, then Bateson’s photographs would approximate the slide

presentation accompanying the lecture, collected and displayed chronologically after the

transcription. This metaphor accurately represents the space created within Balinese Character

between its two parallel journeys through Bali, at the levels of particular visual description

and abstract written explanation. In the same way that two individuals, having respectively

heard the previously imagined lecture, and seen the accompanying slide show, would not

appreciate the full benefits of their knowledge without at least conversing with one another,

neither component of Balinese Character is fully expressed within its own bounds. This point

is subtle, for it is not enough to say that the two formal halves of the book rely upon one

another for their scientific relevance but, further, that the communicational experiment

72

Chapter 3

presented requires the reader to consider disparate textual and photographic information

simultaneously.

The highest level of cross-cultural understanding that can be gained from Balinese

Character is manifested ontologically, in typical Batesonian fashion. The book occupies a

communicative sphere that can be said to reside between image and text, in a space where

Mead’s theoretical explanation may be used as a customized lens, bringing into focus the

exotic details captured by Bateson’s refined photographic attention.

73

Conclusions

The concluding passages of this account form two complementary halves devoted

successively to a description and its explanation. The account formed by the two sections

will shift from synthesis to analysis. This format allows a logical presentation of the

significant conclusions reached during the preceding chapters, followed by an investigation

into the various implications of these conclusions in the context of Balinese Character’s praise

and criticism since its publication.

The first section will defy the chronological conventions of the account thus far, in

order to present a holistic view of Mead and Bateson as historically unique actors within a

particularly distinctive period for anthropology as a whole. It will include a description of

Mead and Bateson’s understanding of the value of Balinese Character circa 1942, leading into a

brief survey of the various compromises that eventually beset the project. The second

section will seek to reconcile the specific conclusions of the first with the anthropological

Conclusions

reception of Balinese Character since 1942, as illustrated by a summary of the various criticisms

it has received and comparisons with subsequent work on Bali.

75

Description

The synthesis presented in this section will offer a unified overview of the various

significant observations of the account so far. This overview will establish the unique

personal, academic and political conditions that together produced Balinese Character.

However, it will also cover issues raised by Mead and Bateson’s later work in as much as

they are relevant to the Bali project, this will later prove useful in evaluating the project’s

achievements and shortcomings.

Continuing the suggestion offered in the introduction, the following narrative will

regard Balinese Character as the product of an intersection of individuals: Boon’s ‘marriage of

misfits’ that unified Mead and Bateson’s parallel attempts to critically revise the theory and

methodology of their American and British predecessors. In order to communicate the

historical significance of the book, the narrative will sketch each individual personality in

terms of their primary personal influences, thus situating Mead and Bateson within their

greater academic context.

As previously noted, one of the most important commonalities between Mead and

Bateson’s anthropological thinking was an appreciation of the critical value of methodology

in producing valuable fieldwork. The main purpose of this section is to identify the subtle

differences between Mead and Bateson’s beliefs concerning methodological integrity and

show how those differences are manifested in the structure of their collaborative work,

Balinese Character.

Conclusions - Description

Bateson

What is form, pattern, purpose, organization and so on…? Those were my questions when I started and are still my questions. There have been advances, Cybernetics has helped, and Whitehead-Russell have helped, and “Laws of Form” and Information Theory and Ross Ashby. But mysteries remain The world looks more elegant than it did.25

In his 1998 article Heredity as an Open System: Gregory Bateson as Descendant and Ancestor,

John Tresch explains that Bateson’s “case is unique and important, as his theoretical systems

stand at the point of intersection of at least four major lines of intellectual genealogy”

(Tresch 1998:3). He goes on to identify the four lines in chronological order; “the tradition

of natural history that his father for a time embodied”, “the combination of experimental

psychology and physical and social anthropology”, “Boasian culture and personality studies”,

“and finally, cybernetics”(Tresch 1998:3). The composite perspective Bateson interpolated

between these genealogies pivoted (both temporally and conceptually) around his work in

Bali. Balinese Character can be accurately summarized as the last of a series of empirical

investigations into field methods, which extended back to Bateson’s first expedition under

Haddon at Cambridge. The sum effect of these investigations was to disentangle what

concepts of value he could from among the antiquated descriptive tools of early

anthropological enquiry. The Bali project was Bateson’s last significant work ‘in the field’ in

the ethnographic sense. Although his later epistemological and theoretical works were

equally grounded in empirical observation, he gathered a variety of data from many disparate

sources, which he often discarded once the pattern in question had been fully investigated.

25 Bateson 1991: 308.

77

Conclusions - Description

The post-war phase of Bateson’s academic career was marked by an ever more vocal

support of interdisciplinary studies. These studies focused on the problems facing a world

visibly destabilized in the wake of two massively destructive wars, and (as Bateson suggested)

the multitude of invisible ecological and social disruptions occurring on less obvious levels.

In 1941 he published a paper of critical significance to the current discussion, entitled

Experiments in Thinking About Observed Ethnological Material. Bateson used this paper to express

his understanding of his influences to date, moving in the later part of his account to an

abstract consideration of the social scientist’s employment of various modes of thought. His

concluding passages provide an implicit defense of what he concludes is a necessary

dichotomy in methodological considerations of all kinds: Bateson defines “strict and loose

thinking” (Bateson 1941:55) as two complementary processes that must be carefully

balanced to produce work that is at once acceptable to the standards of its field, and yet also

sufficiently innovative as to allow the development of those standards. Bateson wrote:

We ought to accept and enjoy this dual nature of scientific thought and be willing to value the way in which the two processes work together to give us advances in understanding the world. We ought not to frown too much on either process, or at least to frown equally on either process when it is unsupplemented by the other (Bateson 1941:67).

Although he praised the benefits granted by an active consideration of this duality, Bateson

was also aware of the risks inherent in engaging in simultaneous strict and loose thinking:

His statement expresses appropriate doubt in the wake of the advances made in the Bali

project, reminding the reader that “whenever we rebel against the rigidity of formal thought

and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose” (Bateson 1941:55).

Bateson’s unusually definition of the ‘appropriate scientific method’ is a tribute to

the combined primary influences of his father William and his Cambridge mentor A. C.

Haddon. Earlier in his essay, Bateson considers the effects of being raised in part by a

revolutionary geneticist and “dynamic reformer of St. John’s College” (Tresch 1998:3). He

78

Conclusions - Description

recalls time spent with his father during his childhood as imbuing him with a “vague mystical

feeling that we must look for the same sort of processes in all fields of natural phenomena”

(Bateson 1941:54). He suggests that it was the expectation of universally recursive patterning

he learned from his father which allowed him to respond correctly to the initially crude

formulations of functionalism. In spite of his youth and inexperience, Bateson was able to

accept the controversial implications of the basic form, and move directly onto a closer

criticism of its limitations and inherent methodological influences.

His theoretical confidence clearly impressed Haddon who, when they first met in

1925, recognized Bateson’s naturally reflexive inclinations as potentially beneficial in

anthropology. Haddon himself possessed a distinctively reflexive perspective, which had

been solidified during his work on the Torres Straits expedition of 1899. Tresch suggests

that the reflexivity increasingly present as Bateson’s work progressed was influenced greatly

by “the emphasis on holism, reflexivity and emotions” (Tresch 1998:4) evident in the Torres

Straits material. Bateson’s contribution is differentiated from its diffusionist counterparts,

beginning with Naven, by what Tresch calls his consideration of “temporality” (Tresch 1998:4).

In his account of the Iatmul, in addition to defining the theoretical terms ‘ethos’ and ‘eidos’

(a scheme based on Radcliffe-Brown’s idea of social structure), Bateson first used the terms

‘schismogenesis’ and ‘zygogenesis’. These concepts proved central to much of his later work

considering the processes governing systems of all scales and they are the first concrete sign

of a major difference between Bateson and his predecessors. Whilst Haddon and his

contemporaries realized that the historically based accounts provided by their own

predecessors had failed to acknowledge the dynamic aspects of cultural phenomenon,

Bateson developed in an academic environment that stimulated his appreciation for holistic

cultural enquiry from the start. Thus he was able to develop a collection of theoretical tools

79

Conclusions - Description

that together equipped him to examine specific aspects of cultural change, often through the

lens of personal interaction and development.

Bateson was amongst the group of individuals who first acknowledged the

importance of change in an ethnographic context. It was his interest in documenting aspects

of behavior that led him to consider the potential value of the camera in ethnographic

observation. For Bateson, the camera was an obvious addition to the basic equipment of the

self-aware ethnographer; ultimately the most flexible piece of ‘scientific’ recording

equipment imaginable. It allowed a shift in process, separating analytical work from the

patchwork of fragmented insights available to the worker in the field and associating it

instead with the post-hoc comparative operation employed by Bateson and Mead after

completing their work in Bali.

Bateson’s commitment to social science methods derived from those of the pure

sciences is exemplary of the differences between the emerging British and American schools,

which respectively advocated the strict methods of functionalism and the more interpretive

Boasian methods of cultural comparison. Tresch contrasts Benedict’s conception of cultural

‘pattern’ with Bateson, who “did not treat ‘pattern’ as a fixed, homogenous or encompassing

‘configuration’” (Tresch 1998:4). The reflexivity of Bateson’s theoretical voice remained its

defining feature throughout his academic career; indeed it provided one of a few consistent

themes pervading an otherwise extremely diverse collection of transcribed thought. Both

Mead and Bateson were members of the generation whose academic experience bridged the

unified roots of anthropology in the early part of the twentieth century, and the fragmented

discipline that reemerged after WWII.

By the time of Bateson’s work in Bali, his theoretical stance (and its characteristic

reflexive bent) already represented a significant deviation from the specifics of British

80

Conclusions - Description

functionalism and his interdisciplinary work in the later part of the century is evidence of his

natural talent to find a niche between the work of others, acting as the critical comparative

conduit in a system of mutual refinement. However, it is hard to ignore the continuing

influences of his early exposure to the critical perspectives of his father and A. C. Haddon as

they re-emerge throughout his later work.

81

Conclusions - Description

Mead

What is there for the young Anthropologist to do? In one sense, everything. The best possible work has not yet been done. If I were twenty-one today, I would elect to join the communicating network of those young people, the world over, who recognize the urgency of a life supporting change-as an anthropologist.26

Richard Handler summarizes why Mead felt reflexive anthropology was necessary in

his 1990 Article entitled Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture:

Mead invokes a reflexive social science as antidote to the mechanical manipulation of human beings. Though she does not develop her argument, it draws on one version of the Boasian understanding of the limits of rationality: social science is human thought and, therefore, is part of the human world that it studies. Objectivity, then, is impossible. What is necessary is a social science that takes account of itself as a part of the phenomena under study (Handler 1990:269).

Mead entered anthropology from a grounding in English (via psychology) during her time at

Barnard, when she realized that her analytical skills (which were underappreciated in her

English studies) could offer her the opportunity to coerce change as a social scientist. Mead

and Benedict’s rise to fame marked the emergence of the female voice in anthropology (and

in science as a whole), offering a new methodological emphasis with accompanying

theoretical advances. It is perhaps appropriate that Mead, in many ways the mother of

modern American anthropology, maintained such a consistent focus on the intimately

related topics of child development, individual growth and the holistic process of

inculturation that is parenthood.

Mead’s academic grounding in English clearly contributed to her eventual relativist

stance. Her analogy between finding one of many possible formulations of grammar for a

language, and finding one of many possible ethnographic explanations to match a culture,

accurately identifies this conceptual connection. Mead’s training in imaginative writing can

26 Mead 1972:296.

82

Conclusions - Description

also be seen in the stylistic properties of her ethnographic work. Balinese Character is the

clearest example of her understanding of the opposing tensions of fieldwork, which are

expressed implicitly throughout her previous work and explicitly in her response to criticism.

Beginning with Coming of Age and Sex and Temperament, her work displays an awareness of the

potentially conflicting aspects of any ethnography. This tension is rendered explicit in the

structure of Balinese Character, which separates Bateson’s ‘objective’ observations and

commentary from Mead’s more interpretive conclusions.

Mead’s concept of her underlying responsibility as ethnographer can be effectively

understood as combining Bateson’s dichotomy between strict and loose thinking with his

theoretical dissection of the process of empirical investigation. Whilst working with Bateson

in Bali, she was still receiving new critical feedback from earlier written work27, and the

pressure of the situation led her to adopt an almost obsessive precision in the recording of

observations. Bateson himself recalls her “enormous visual and auditory greed for data”

(1976) in the field. However, upon returning to the U.S. and confronting what had become

enormous collection of data, Mead realized that although her strict thinking during

observation would allow precise description, it would also require an equivalently ‘loose’

interpretive aspect to accommodate the complexity of her explanatory conclusions.

Mead’s explanatory stance was based around her belief that anthropological

conclusions were ultimately of value to the (American) individual, and so should not baffle

the reader with too high a degree of abstraction or complexity. Her commitment to

maintaining relevance to a wider audience contrasts sharply with Bateson’s own style, which

was tuned to a more select audience. His and Mead’s roles continued to diverge in later life,

27 Mead later described Sex and Temperament as her “most misunderstood work”(Mead 1950: first preface).

83

Conclusions - Description

gradually accentuating their respective tendencies toward skepticism and optimism.28 Mary

Catherine characterized Bateson’s attitude towards change, post WWII: “he was as dubious

of active intervention in therapy as about politics or economics” (Bateson 1984:176).

However, Mead and Bateson covered much of the same theoretical ground in their

consideration of the possibilities open to an ethnographer struggling to balance lofty

theoretical ambitions with the inconsistencies of fieldwork. Mead’s early reflexive

experiments, including collecting thousands of drawings from children and showing films to

subjects in Bali, are evidence of this aspect of her awareness.

Mead’s development of a more literary style of ethnographic narrative was clearly

influenced and reinforced by her ongoing personal and intellectual relationship with

Benedict, whose poetic writing took an even more extreme position on the artistic-scientific

spectrum. Boas’ advice to Mead to concentrate on her studies of adolescence and Benedict’s

exploration of the subtleties of inter-cultural comparison (particularly her contribution to

Mead’s squares), can be seen as offering the inspiration and motivation for Mead’s early

theoretical interests, culminating in the unfulfilled hopes of the Bali project. For both Mead

and Bateson, the Bali project was the end of their individual ethnographic pursuits. The

interruption of WWII marked their simultaneous shifts towards work conducted in

interdisciplinary context, taking their places between the rapidly segmenting sub-disciplines of

the social sciences. Bateson planned and hosted a theoretical conference in Gloggnitz in

1968, enlisting Mary Catherine’s help as a transcriber and author. Mary Catherine writes: “we

designed a structure that would function on two levels, gathering a group of people to work

together on particular themes, and always at the same time having a discussion of the

28 Care should be taken at this point to avoid the implication that Mead lacked appreciation for the flexibility of ethnographic data, indeed her own tendency to take interpretive liberties was partially derived from this understanding.

84

Conclusions - Description

process” (Bateson 1984:179). The diverse group of minds gathered and coordinated by

Bateson considered the wide range of problems facing the modern world, providing

theoretical fuel for many of his later empirical investigations.

For Mead, her later work was a continuation of the themes she investigated in Bali,

motivated by the events of WWII, in the form of various group studies of national character.

As Romanucci-Roma explains in her account “Anthropological Field Research: Margaret

Mead, Muse of the Clinical Experience”, Mead created “a floating center for the study of

culture and personality with the assumption that all minds are for the ‘minding’ of data in a

continual seminar” (Romanucci-Roma 1980:305). This is an example of Mead’s continuing

experiments into an ethnographic ‘division of labor’, relying on the research and data of

individuals from a wide variety of fields to support her complex theoretical models.

In her 1977 essay, “End Linkage: a Tool for Cross-Cultural Analysis”, Mead traces

the roots of the universal theoretical tools Bateson developed in his later work. She

summarizes her view of the Bali project:

Although Bali proved useful, our interests were highly theoretical; Bateson’s were expressed later in “Bali, The Value System of a Steady State” (Bateson 1949), and mine were concentrated on the intensive study of the processes by which a particular cultural character-compound of temperament, cultural child rearing practices and idiosyncratic ingredients - was developed (Bateson and Mead 1942) (Mead 1977: 178).

It is interesting to note that Mead viewed the theoretical investigation in Balinese Character as

her own, ostracizing Bateson’s ideas to his later essay. Mead’s distinctively self-centered

retrospective voice is only part of the equation however: a close reading of Mead’s words at

the level of implication further reinforces the idea that she and Bateson were both aware of

the schizophrenic (or schismogenic) nature of Balinese Character, and that Mead chose to refer

to this discrepancy in her own idiosyncratic (and optimistic) style. The next section will

summarize Mead and Bateson’s views of Balinese Character, providing the final details

necessary to evaluate the significance of the entire project.

85

Conclusions - Description

Balinese Character

This is not a book about Balinese custom, but about the Balinese – about the way in which they, as living persons, moving, standing, eating, sleeping, dancing, and going into a trance, embody that abstraction which (after we have abstracted) we technically call culture.29

As previously suggested in the form of a thought experiment, the relationship

between Mead and Bateson’s formally distinct contributions to Balinese Character (textual

explanation and photographic description), can be seen as essentially schismogenic. Whilst

the narrative achieved by simultaneous apprehension of textual and image-based information

within the book is coherent and self-contained, the style and structure of the book’s

components discourage and hinder the reader’s attempt to achieve this synthesis. The

substantive statements made by Bateson’s photography and Mead’s text are as fundamentally

separate as their segregated arrangement suggests, whilst the connections they weave are as

sparse and specific as the annotations that are their literal embodiments.

The previous observations should not be taken as a statement of Mead and

Bateson’s overall failure (although it is a symptom of the fragmented nature of the project as

a whole), but rather of their twofold commitment - individually, to their specific

(complementary) methods, and together, to their decision to present an explicit account of

their own methodological processes. In an appendixes to Continuities in Cultural Evolution,

Mead considers the various developments made during her work on “Seven Pacific

Cultures”(Mead 1964:336-357). She identifies the dual textual-photographic method

employed in Bali as a “[move] from the kind of record which could be worked up the by the

field worker on a ratio of two years of desk work to one year in the field to a record, based

29 Bateson and Mead 1942:xii.

86

Conclusions - Description

on rapid accumulation of materials, which made possible a ratio of some twenty years of

analysis to one year in the field” (Mead 1964:353). Her tendency towards hyperbole

notwithstanding, this description of the scale of Mead and Bateson’s Balinese material is

valuable in understanding the nature of the problems they faced during writing. By this ratio,

the material they gathered during two years work in Bali could have taken forty years to

analyze fully, a project that would have taken both Mead and Bateson’s almost to the ends of

their lives in the eighties to complete. For Bateson however, the working balance inherent to

photographic observation suited his preference for analysis separated from the field,

allowing the easy comparison of well printed (albeit numerous) photographs from the

relative comfort of the editing table.

As previously mentioned, Mead and Bateson viewed Balinese Character as an

incomplete account; however, the cause of its relative shortcomings seems to lie in the

astronomical scale of their original descriptive undertaking, rather than a deficiency in their

subsequent theoretical efforts. Therefore the schismogenesis evident in the books eventual

form can be taken as symptom of the projects own internal distortion (under the pressures

of WWII), rather than as an inherent characteristic of its methodological configuration. In

the introduction to Balinese Character, Mead and Bateson provide an introspective evaluation

of their respective previous work as potentially too artistic and scientific. Their inclusion of

this characterization implies that they believe it to be of relevance to Balinese Character. It

seems that even by 1942, Bateson and Mead were beginning to appreciate that although they

had made some progress in addressing the issues raised during the Bali project, Balinese

Character was woefully insufficient as an explanation of the subtleties of their experience. For

both Mead and Bateson, Bali had demonstrated the freedom that could be achieved by

placing their perspectives in mutual opposition, but it had also shown them the intimidating

87

Conclusions - Description

scale of any analysis sufficient to do justice to such intensive fieldwork. Balinese Character

therefore represents a uniquely compromised aspect of Mead and Bateson’s respective

careers; produced during a time of massive change in the field of anthropology as a whole,

the problems it uncovered can be seen as responsible for many of the pair’s later lines (and

modes) of enquiry.

88

Explanation

The following analysis offers a resolution of the overarching inconsistencies

summarized and contextualized in the preceding section. The eventual purpose of this

conclusion is to reconcile Mead and Bateson’s understanding of Balinese Character’s

contribution to ethnographic methodology, with the subsequent treatment of the publication

as embodied in the anthropological criticism it received. To clearly express the descriptive

and explanatory aspects of this analysis, it will be split into three parts.

The first will provide a theoretical map of the changing shape of anthropology since

1942, in terms of the homogeneity of the field. This section will address the processes of

mutual self-definition active in the emergence of visual anthropology as an autonomous sub-

discipline, as well as in the fragmentation of anthropological research as a whole. The next

section will explain the conspicuous lack of subsequent work comparable to Balinese

Character, by situating the book’s formal implications within the aforementioned map of

recent anthropological enquiry. The final section will use this explanation to suggest why

(and how) a worthwhile reconsideration of Balinese Character should be undertaken in the

contemporary situation.

The method of evaluation employed in this conclusion mirrors that of the account as

a whole; seeking to accurately describe the relevant historical features of significance, in

order to create independent hypotheses explaining the systematic relationships formed

between them.

Conclusions - Explanation

Schismogenesis in a Discipline of Words

In Blackberry Winter Mead recalls a situation in the early thirties when she learned in a

letter from Ruth Benedict that Radcliffe-Brown had offered Boas a “million dollars for

anthropological research” (Mead 1995:200). The situation was resolved by Boas

unwillingness to compromise his research ideals to conform to the ideas of Radcliffe-Brown,

who Mead describes as “for all his brilliance, arrogant, dogmatic and dictatorial” (Mead

1995:200). The occurrence is of peripheral interest, but it did cause Mead to observe:

By the time the money was again available, in the late 1940’s, each of the social sciences had gone its own way and social scientists – cultural and social anthropologists, social psychologists, and sociologists were working in a kind of crazy tandem in which the traces had been cut. Where they attacked the same problems, each worked with different units and different conceptual schemes (Mead 1995:200).

Mead’s comment is significant to this account in a variety of ways; both in the pattern it

identifies, and in the further implications of its observations. It clearly expresses one

significant factor in the problematic reception of Balinese Character, describing a field that by

the late 1940’s exhibited a significant disconnection from its form in the previous decade. It

is no surprise that Balinese Character was treated as even more of an exception to the academic

status quo than it might have been, given how unimaginable the scale and holistic aspirations

of the project had become.30

On a deeper level, Mead’s words can be read as indicative of further schismogenesis

within the disciplines she mentions. Her description of multiple conceptual schemes and ‘cut

traces’ are of particular interest: Balinese Character was originally conceived to remedy barriers

of a similar form. As Tresch notes, “Bateson continued the [Torres Straits] expedition’s

interest in descent and adaptation, in their biological, sociological and psychological

30 As Larson notes: “maybe there was still a fear that there is too much information in visual images-information which might expose and challenge what is behind our words” (Larson 1993:21).

90

Conclusions - Explanation

dimensions, a holism that separated him from his contemporaries who accepted more

willingly the new splintering, or schismogenesis, of the interests of the Torres Straits

researchers” (Tresch 1998:3). During the forties, anthropologist began to separate

themselves along the internal divisions that were already implicit in the ‘schools’ emerging

before the war. Even disregarding the individual idiosyncrasies of Mead and Bateson’s work,

it is hard to imagine a fieldworker trained after WWII possessing the varied theoretical

background of either of them, or having the opportunity to conduct work similar in nature,

or comparable in scale to Balinese Character.

The lack of other material comparable to that contained in Balinese Character is

eminently significant in considering its ongoing underdeveloped status. As Larson observes

this situation “has created somewhat of a “catch 22,” in the sense that without a growing

body of work to compare to and to learn from, more work has not been inspired” (Larson

1993:17). In this context, the innovative form that was eventually necessary to communicate

the subtleties of the Bali project can be seen retrospectively in a somewhat negative light. By

separating Balinese Character so distinctly from its contemporary methodology, Mead and

Bateson unknowingly crossed the soon-to-be redefined norms of strict and loose thinking. It

seems that the uninspired reception of Balinese Character may be an ironic product of its own

reflexivity. By adhering to the tenants of their ‘new method’, even in the face of the various

limitations inherent to their circumstance, Mead and Bateson unknowingly pushed their

publication into the backwaters of critical anthropological attention.

The processes of schismogenesis identified so far within the social sciences as a

whole, as well as within anthropology as a field, can also be seen during the emergence of

the sub-discipline of visual anthropology. This separation causes various problems, as

addressed by Mead in A Discipline of Words, where she criticized anthropology’s failure to

91

Conclusions - Explanation

integrate full visual records into ethnographic work as standard. This account will later

consider the more in depth implications of this effect, at this point it is sufficient to notice,

as Larson suggests, that Balinese Character was effectively stranded between the mutually self-

defining fields of visual and written anthropology, and thus was treated with equal caution by

members of both sub-disciplines:

The discipline of “visual anthropology,” in the meanwhile, did not build on Mead and Bateson’s work with stills, but instead evolved a focus on film and video, with little attention to still photography. The attention which visual anthropologists give to still photography is primarily to study historic and indigenous photography rather than to look at developing methods (Larson 1993:16).

Larson further complicates the post-war treatment of Balinese Character, by suggesting

that Mead and Bateson’s work in Bali corresponds most closely to subsequent investigations

carried out in the field of “visual sociology” (Larson 1993:16). In his notes on the “Selection

of Photographs”, Bateson attributes the relative lack of film accompanying their

photographic work to the combined effects of economizing during fieldwork and the

“difficulties of exposition” (Bateson and Mead 1942:50). This information offers further

insight into the compromised position of Balinese Character, revealing the discrepancy

between its conception as an exemplary piece of anthropology, and its eventual fate

alongside the photographically inclined attempts of visual sociologists.

Original Intents…

The most significant conclusion of the account thus far is that there is a clear and

multifaceted disconnection between ‘The Bali project’, conceived of as an ahistorical

undertaking (as it was imagined by Mead and Bateson, circa 1936), and Balinese Character, read

in its historical situation (as it was subsequently received). The aim of this final section is to

fully investigate the aforementioned disconnection, by summarizing Balinese Character as

primarily a response to previous anthropological employments of the camera (thus, the

92

Conclusions - Explanation

extreme form of Balinese Character embodies the tone of its response). This understanding in

turn allows a new perspective on the contributions Balinese Character has been able (and

perhaps more significantly, is still able) to make to ethnographic procedure, through careful

reconsideration of the sparse criticism it has received.

As previously mentioned, there has been considerable thought devoted to the

connection between the Torres Straits expedition made by Haddon and his Cambridge

contemporaries in 1899, and Bateson’s subsequent understanding of the possibilities of a

photographically saturated investigation. When considered in this light, certain aspects of

Bateson’s technique reinforce the conception of Balinese Character as a reaction to its own

formative methodological context. His awareness of the strict conventions of Haddon’s

documentary photographs (which in turn borrowed its ‘objective’ conventions from

preceding ‘biological type’ photography) and the limitations associated with this sort of

comparative perspective was indubitably a significant factor in Bateson’s development of his

own formal photographic style. As Jablonko notes in her evaluation of Balinese Character’s

photographic achievements:

Bateson and Mead did not present us with a window onto ‘one objective reality’, but rather offered what could be called an ‘operational description’. They supported words with physical artifacts, in this case photographs, thus radically shifting the whole communication into a new arena (Jablonko 1993:43).

The characterization of Balinese Character as an ‘operational description’ indicates the essential

difference between Bateson’s photographic experimentation and earlier derivatives of ‘type’

photography attempted by Haddon and his collaborators. Until the publication of Balinese

Character, photography had been used only to document what were understood as the most

objective descriptive data possible (biological information was particularly emphasized). In

her article considering Haddon’s photographs, Bromhead describes the perspective they

inspire as that of “the cold turn-of-the century scientist” (Bromhead 1993:10). Considering

93

Conclusions - Explanation

the contents of the photographs, she notes: “all expression of passion or spontaneity is

painfully missing” (Bromhead 1993:10). Bateson’s photographic techniques granted him

access to a more advanced photographic vocabulary, able to describe the subtleties of

animated individual behavior, not limited to recording posed arrangements of visual

significance. He depicted individuals as they appeared to him; animated and expressive, by

shooting from a wide range of dynamic perspectives.

Unfortunately for Bateson, his experimental photographic ethnography coincided

with the origins of a new understanding of the possibilities of photography throughout the

western world. Photographic images brimming with dynamic content soon flooded the

marketplace, desensitizing the population to the finely-tuned communicational possibilities

available to the self-aware photographic researcher. Bateson’s choices as a photographer in

Bali now seem to obey many of the conventions modern documentary techniques31:

however, our awareness and understanding of these techniques is itself evidence of a greater

visual revolution that also occurred during the interwar period. Although Bateson’s

innovations were clearly the result of his own understanding and not merely part of the

greater trend, by the time they were given due consideration in the late forties, his work

already appeared superficially mundane. Jablonko highlights Mead’s observation that

Americans possessed “a tendency to think in either-or terms” (Mead and MacGregor

1951:14), as in this case, when Balinese Character was taken as either a complete success

(unlikely considering its historical context), or a failure unworthy of detailed consideration.

In this sense, the reflexive awareness embodied in Balinese Character may in fact have limited

31 See National Geographic.

94

Conclusions - Explanation

the degree to which the book was regarded as a ‘success’ and ultimately contributed to its

omission from future anthropological lines of enquiry.32

One of the most useful distinctions in evaluating this aspect of Balinese Character’s

reception is the aforementioned conceptual dichotomy implicit in its format between textual

explanation and visual description. These two components, specifically due to the

disconnected way in which they are presented in the book, allow an evaluation of Balinese

Character’s separate (but interrelated) theoretical and methodological contributions. It is only

through a consideration of the book in these terms, that a coherent understanding of the

potential and actual contributions it represents may be reached.

In their 1992 Study The Balinese people: a reinvestigation of character, Jensen and Suryani

address various issues raised by the reception of Balinese Character since its publication. Their

analysis assesses the accuracy of Mead and Bateson’s descriptive work in Bali in the light of

subsequent theoretical progress in the work of others. Jensen begins by characterizing the

Bali project as “virtually unknown by native anthropologists” (Jensen and Suryani 1992:1).

He then attributes the overall lack of appreciation of Balinese Character to its unusual form:

“Those who have heard of it have either not read it, or cannot understand it because of the

writing style and format” (Jensen and Suryani 1992:1). Jensen continues by considering the

various shortcomings of the work, and isolating their causes as inherent to either the

historical circumstances, or the conceptual form of the project.

The analysis provided considers the aspects of the theoretical framework associated

with Balinese Character that have become outdated since its publication, as well as the false

methodological assumptions that are revealed by a close retrospective reading of the book.

32 As Jablonko notes: “The meager use of their model for the first fifty years after its presentation, and the difficulties which faced researchers interested in using the model during that period, may have been the result of the mismatch between Bateson’s and Mead’s original vision and the accepted scientific paradigms of that era” (Jablonko 1993:45).

95

Conclusions - Explanation

Jensen describes one overarching aspect of the project’s assumptions that rapidly became

obsolete as “the relatively primitive state of psychology and psychiatry at that time …

including some fundamental aspects that are now archaic” (Jensen and Suryani 1992:55),

these include the theories of Erikson, which whilst seminal, shared a similarly obscure fate to

Balinese Character. The same primitive psychology was of course all that was available to the

more successful (or influential) studies among Balinese Character’s contemporaries, but the

book’s unique combination of outdated background material and unusual presentation of

the derived results, may have be a critical factor in its relative obscurity. A similar

shortcoming of the Balinese project appears to have originated in Mead and Bateson’s

aforementioned choice of Bajoeng Gede as a location for their extended research.

Comparing Balinese Character with more recent anthropological work, as well as the

contemporary artistic work of Spies and his collaborators, reveals the probable fallacy

committed by Mead and Bateson when they identified the effects of hypothyroidism among

their subjects as producing a “schematically simplified” (Mead and Bateson 1942:xiii) cultural

configuration. Jensen’s comparative research reveals that the children of Bajoeng Gede

probably suffered from a multitude of health related issues; he suggests “Bateson and Mead’s

lack of medical knowledge [as] account[ing] for their failure to recognize the chronic illness

in children and misinterpret[ing] the consequences of the goitre” (Jensen and Suryani

1992:36). The cause of this mistake is clearly related to Mead and Bateson’s understanding of

psychology, as previously mentioned. However, it seems strange given Bateson’s extensive

biological knowledge and Mead’s appreciation of the biological aspects of culture (received

from Boas), that the problems Jensen identifies in their work in Bajoeng Gede were not

more obvious at the time. Again the discussion returns to issues of disciplined subjectivity,

96

Conclusions - Explanation

and it is beneficial to note which particular aspects of their findings were the results of these

opposing modes.

As previously mentioned, a significant motive in Mead and Bateson’s decision to

travel to Bali for their research was Mead’s quest for the fourth and final configuration

needed to complete her cross-cultural temperamental square, and this idea may have

influenced the conclusions of their work in Bali. Jensen proposes that “Bateson and Mead

did not understand how they were perceived by the Balinese and appeared to lack sensitivity

to their roles” (Jensen and Suryani 1992:47). This allowed the pair to maintain the

impression that they brought with them to the field, namely that the Balinese were a

primarily passive people and therefore treat the behavior they observed as ‘natural’, rather

than a response to their presence.

Jensen’s commentary suggests that the account in Balinese Character creates an

impression of Balinese character that was unintentionally skewed by Mead and Bateson’s

understanding of the concept prior to 1936. He describes their presence as inspiring

“feelings of embarrassment or shame, what is called lek by the Balinese” (Jensen 1992:48),

linking this effect to the couple’s initial impression that the Balinese were a nervous, passive

people. It is certainly true that both Mead and Bateson brought significant theoretical

baggage to Bali, but the degree to which their preconceptions influenced their eventual

findings remains hard to ascertain. They explicitly regarded the book as an experimental

sampling and intended it as the first in an ongoing series of investigations. The failure of the

book in this sense may be attributed to the ways in which Mead and Bateson appear to have

confused the descriptive and explanatory aspects of their work.

97

Conclusions - Explanation

… and Eventual Understandings

To fully understand the stylistic incongruity implicit in the relative obscurity of

Balinese Character, it is now necessary to examine the nature of Mead and Bateson’s

understanding of their work as an objective-subjective duality circa 1942. This will provide

an opportunity to identify the various corresponding ‘understandings’ of Balinese Character

that were subsequently available to the critical perspectives of the emergent schools of visual

and written anthropology. The previously mentioned dichotomy that has emerged between

these fields since 1942 is particularly relevant to the current discourse. Written anthropology

regarded the textual recounting of evidence as, in itself, a process of authorship; visual

anthropology, whose emphasis on film-based recording techniques regarded the

documentary act in a similar fashion to Mead and Bateson, has more recently treated

photographic information as secondary to motion film due to the benefits of motion in

establishing objectivity and holistic clarity. Therefore, when read in a post-war context

Balinese Character offers a unique challenge to the would-be benefactors of Mead and

Bateson’s experimentation.

Since the book’s publication, the research methods of visual and written

anthropology have diverged radically. This mutual self-definition ostensibly occurred along

the internal fault lines of Mead and Bateson’s revolutionary synthesis. By the end of WWII,

the generations of social scientists that Mead and Bateson imagined would further investigate

their methods were separated and unwilling to compromise their newly defined positions. As

May notes in his 1976 essay Some Discussion of Ethnography, Theory and Method, “the past

twenty-five years have seen a growing separation from of theory from methods of research

presentation” (May 1976:105). The effects of this division allowed anthropologists in the

latter half of the twentieth century to play a game of implicit hot-potato with the complex

98

Conclusions - Explanation

and intimidating legacy of Balinese Character. In general, written anthropologists were

discouraged by the book’s complex form and exploratory use of photography; whereas

visual anthropologists were reluctant to consider photographic work in any context in which

it could appear dependant on extended written explanation. Both groups were additionally

ostracized from the underlying implications of Balinese Character by the book’s rapidly aging

theoretical devices.

As May suggests, the root of this aspect of Balinese Character’s ongoing anomalous

status can be traced to the specific modes of training offered to anthropologists during their

formative years. A brief survey of contemporary university course catalogs led May to notice

a clear separation between specifically ‘methodological’ and ‘theoretical’ classes, concluding

“that for some, not only is method separable from theory, but seldom are method and

theory allowed to meet” (May 1976:105) Schismogenesis returns to the discussion in this

context, as a long-term manifestation of the internally divisive nature of a course catalogue

conception of academic training. This gradual tendency for method and theory to become

separated by the processes inherent to the institutional reproduction of knowledge was

accompanied by a dramatic reduction in the economic freedom of the prospective

fieldworker. May observes that one effect of post-war socio-economic readjustment was a

significant reduction in scholarship funding opportunities available to students of the social

sciences. This effect in turn caused an overall decrease in the viability of work that was both

innovative and substantial; rendering any document as revolutionary as Balinese Character into

a unique historical relic. This treatment of the book, as essentially an oddity, started its

downwards spiral into obscurity. As Larson notes: “The obstacle seems to be the lack of an

accepted methodology in anthropology on how to use a camera as a research tool” (Larson

1993:15).

99

Conclusions - Explanation

Both Mead and Bateson continued to place value on the camera as a research tool

throughout their later careers, Mead in particular was a vocal supporter of the integration of

photographic research techniques into ethnographic methods. However, as their subsequent

work indicates, neither Mead nor Bateson again experienced the intersection of motives and

means that facilitated the original Bali project. Balinese Character remains the sole reference

point in an uncharted field of potential methodological enquiry.

As this section has shown, the methodology employed by Mead and Bateson has yet

to be significantly reconsidered, and for the various reason’s suggested is likely to remain so.

Given the explicit statement by Mead and Bateson that Balinese Character was of use primarily

as a working example, it seems strange that neither character chose to continue the line of

investigation that was marked by their work. However, as previously mentioned, the factors

that allowed their original work to take place were unique, either to the time period or the

individual actors involved. The fragmentary development the field of anthropology since

1942 has left the methodological developments documented in Balinese Character largely

unconsidered, and the book’s theoretical shortcomings have only served to emphasize its

status.

Balinese Character remains (to borrow a Batesonian analogy) a knot in the scientists

handkerchief: it is the physical embodiment of a thought process frozen in time, an

exemplary bastion of strict thinking, tied tight in the theoretical fabric of the time. The

valuable methodological contributions of the book are woven into the fabric of the

handkerchief; the subtle details of Bateson’s photographic technique, as they complement

Mead’s written work, remain bound by the knot, inseparable from the more confusing

elements of the project.

100

Conclusions - Explanation

It is the conclusion of this account that the knot in the handkerchief representing

Balinese Character deserves further consideration. Despite the book’s theoretical shortcomings,

its methodological premise that photography can (and should) be employed simultaneously

as a research tool and a presentational device remains to be thoroughly investigated. If the

idiosyncratic format of Balinese Character is taken as an intentional manifestation of Mead and

Bateson’s reflexive concerns, then the book may be read as it appears. The theoretical and

methodological contributions of the book are separated physically by its own internal

hierarchy, allowing the book to be read as two separate, interrelated components.

Such a divisive reading of the book would still honor the integrity of the original

ethnography, due to Mead and Bateson’s specific intent that their combined work be read

(and thus, un-written) as an illustrative example. In the proposed analysis, their intention is

used to justify separate treatment of the book’s methodological and theoretical components,

regarded respectively as form and content. This dichotomy allows an appreciation of the

methodological advances as evidenced in the plates themselves, without undue concern over

the theoretical incongruities now raised by the books extended explanations.

There remains one final issue which may explain why no such attempt has been

performed. Any anthropologist addressing such an exercise in disciplined subjectivity, which

would require the isolation and critical evaluation of Bateson’s technique from the scattered

remnants of the project, would be taking a serious risk. For by returning to Mead and

Bateson’s idealized world of truly separable text and image, he would simultaneously be

entering the vacuum his analysis was originally conceived to bridge. Future work based upon

Bateson’s strict philosophy of science, in attempting to revise the system of fieldwork

methods orchestrated by Mead and Bateson in Bali, could implicitly place itself alongside

Balinese Character, as an additional obscure knot in the handkerchief. Here the true fate of the

101

Conclusions - Explanation

book is revealed. Balinese Character is stranded, invisible between disciplines; containing the

critical concerns of a perspective whose militantly reflexive methods were its own eventual

downfall.

A thorough reconsideration of Balinese Character is apparently long overdue.

However, there are many legitimate reasons why this task has been neglected to date, as this

account has gone some way towards illustrating. What is needed therefore, is an occurrence

in some ways comparable to Mead and Bateson’s original moment of serendipity on the

Sepik in 1932. Even considering the many unique problems that would need to be

addressed, it seems that combination of sufficiently skilled and motivated individuals finding

themselves in similarly fortunate shared circumstances to those that allowed the Bali project,

could reasonably attempt a practical reconsideration of the fundamental methodological

statements expressed in Balinese Character. Here the comparative isolation of the book is

potentially useful in as much as it continues to represent a paradigmatically unique definition

of methodological integrity, contrasting with (and therefore potentially critical of) the

assumptions of contemporary methods. Such a bold experiment would indubitably yield

much profitable material, and could easily produce advances in hitherto unforeseen

directions.

Turning finally to the possible nature of future work based on the precepts

established in Balinese Character, Bateson’s own words provide a glimpse of the rewards of

such rigorously conceived critical attention: “It is certain that most of the old fabric of

analysis will be left standing after the new underpinning has been inserted. And when the

concepts, postulates, and premises have been straightened out, analysts will be able to

embark upon a new and still more fruitful orgy of loose thinking, until they reach again a

stage at which the results of their thinking must be strictly conceptualized” (Bateson

102

Conclusions - Explanation

1941:68) Any student who remains intimidated by the prospect of such a project, despite

these promised joys of apt loose thinking, need only to ponder Bateson’s gripping

description of the unexplored intellectual terrain within sight, in order to begin to appreciate

the true potential of his unique philosophy of science:

Further than this, besides simply not hindering progress, I think we might do something to hasten matters and I have suggested two ways in which this might be done. One is to train scientists to look among their own material, so that their wild hunches about their own problems will land them among the strict formulations. The second method is to train them to tie knots in their handkerchiefs whenever they leave some matter unformulated – to be willing to leave the matter so for years, but still leave a warning sign in the very terminology they use, such that these terms will forever stand, not as fences hiding the unknown from future investigators, but rather as a sign posts which read: “UNEXPLORED BEYOND THIS POINT” (Bateson 1941:68).

103

Appendix

104

105

106

Bibliography Banner Lois

2003 Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Bateson, Gregory

1941 Experiments in Thinking about Observed Ethnological Material. In Philosophy of Science, 8(1):53-68.

1949 Bali: The Value System of a Steady State. In Social Structure, Studies Presented to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Meyer Fortes ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pp. 35-53.

1958 Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a composite picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View. 2nd edition. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books. 1976 Margaret Mead; Fifty Years of Anthropology. Presentation given at the 142nd Annual

National Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Taped).

1991 A SACRED UNITY: Further steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: HarperCollins. 2002 Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. 2nd edition. Cresskill: Hampton Press.

Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead

1942 Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. New York: The Academy of Sciences. Bateson, Mary Catherine

1984 With a Daughter’s Eye, a memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. New York: Morrow.

Bateson, William

1894 Materials for the study of Variation Treated with Especial Regard to DISCONTINUITY in the Origins of Species. London: Macmillan

Belo, Jane

1960 Trance in Bali. New York: Columbia University Press. Birdwhistell, Ray L.

1977 Some Discussion of Ethnography, Theory and Method. In About Bateson. John Brockman, ed. Pp.103-144. New York: Dutton.

Boon, James

1990 Affinities and Extremes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bromhead, Toni de

1993 The Haddon Rushes: the first anthropologist behind a camera. In 1942-1992: Fifty Years after “Balinese Character”. In Yearbook of Visual Anthropology 1:7-12.

107

Fleure, H. J.

1941 A. C. Haddon. Obituary Notices of the Fellows of the Royal Society 3(9):448-465.

Handler, Richard 1990 Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture. In American Quarterly.

42(2):252-273. Hitchcock, Michael and Lucy Norris.

1995 Bali, the imaginary museum: the photographs of Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jablonko, Allison and Marek.

1993 As We Understand It. In Yearbook of Visual Anthropology. 1942-1992: Fifty Years after “Balinese Character” 1:39-78.

Jacknis, Ira

1988 Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film. In Cultural Anthropology 3(2):160-77.

Jensen, Gordon and Luh Ketut Suryani

1992 The Balinese people: a reinvestigation of character. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kardiner, Abram 1961 They Studied Man. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company.

Kohn, Richard

1993 Trance Dancers and Aeroplanes: Montage and Metaphor in Ethnographic Film. In 1942-1992: Fifty Years after “Balinese Character”. In Yearbook of Visual Anthropology 1:27-38.

Larson, Heidi

1993 Anthropology Exposed: Photography and Anthropology Since Balinese Character. In Yearbook of Visual Anthropology. 1942-1992: Fifty Years after “Balinese Character” 1:13-26.

Lipset, David

1980 Gregory Bateson: Legacy of a Scientist. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Malinowski, Bronislaw

1922 The Argonauts of Western Pacific. New York: Dutton. Mead, Margaret

1930 Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education. New York: William Morrow.

1935 Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Morrow Quill.

1964 Continuities in Cultural Evolution. New Haven: Yale University Press.

108

1972 Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: Morrow. 1975 Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words. In Principles of Visual Anthropology.

The Hague: Mouton Publishers. 1977 End Linkage: A Tool for Cross-Cultural Analysis. In About Bateson. John

Brockman, ed. Pp.171-234. New York: Dutton. Mead, Margaret, and Frances Cooke Macgregor

1951 Growth and Culture, a Photographic study of Balinese Childhood. New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons.

Romanucci-Ross, Lola

1980 Anthropological Field Research: Margaret Mead, Muse of the Clinical Experience. In “In Memoriam Margaret Mead” American Anthropologist New series 82(2):303-317.

Sullivan, Gerald

1999 Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and Highland Bali. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tresch, John

1998 Heredity is an Open System: Gregory Bateson as Descendant and Ancestor. In Anthropology Today 14(6):3-6.

109

I pledge my honor that this thesis represents my own work in accordance with Princeton University regulations. Jason Brooks.