| Between March 1936 and March 1938 and again briefly in 1939, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead examined, under Mead's lead, analogic patterning within Balinese childrearing practices, the character of adult Balinese and the tenor of Balinese society. Funded in large measure by the Committee for Research in Dementia Praecox, Bateson and Mead argued that the developmental sources of emotional unresponsiveness they held typified Balinese life could illuminate the genesis of the affective disengagement often observed in western schizophrenics. Unlike the liberal west, however, Balinese culture provided a sufficiently rigid protocol to ameliorate any social difficulties arising from this purported unresponsiveness.;Bateson and Mead were not the only scholars of Baliana during the 1920s and 1930s. Jane Belo, Katharane Mershon, Paul Wirz, I. D. P. Boekian, Tj. G. R. Sukawati, V. E. Korn, Roelof Goris, C. J. Grader and Miguel Covarrubias, among others, wrote important works. Wolfgang Weck's study of Balinese medical-cum-cosmological texts is particularly salient.;Weck shows how the processes of continuous cosmogony arranges the living bodies which are the Cosmos, Human Body and Region (Desa) so that they not only have the same corporal structure but also are each inside the other two. The physics arising from this arrangement undergirds the epistemological possibilities and the emotional sensibilities attending upon human living within a cosmos so ordered. Within this morphology of experience, Balinese motives for Balinese acts, including emotional restraint, obtain their specific densities and ambivalences, their variations and unities.;This thesis examines a possible but then unrealized synthesis of Bateson and Mead's work and that of Weck. It thereby compares Liberalism's culture, the assumptions of which shape Bateson and Mead's discussion, and that of Bali, the patterns for which I draw from Weck and materials in Bateson and Mead's fieldnotes.;Bateson and Mead's Balinese work--proposals, fieldnotes and publications--treats Balinese worlds as fantasies, remembrances as achronic patterns for living, rituals as meaningless survivals and social structure as separate from emotional lives. Their work, while significant for the emergence of a morphological anthropology, therefore elides Balinese motives for Balinese acts. |
