Story of Bali, Indonesia

Bateson and Mead supplemented their observations with in, formation gained from talks with Western, colleagues in Bali, including Walter Spies, an artist and student of Balinese culture, and Jane Belo and Colin McPhee with whom they stayed in the village of Sayan for two months in 1939 when they returned briefly to Bali. Belo had studied trance and McPhee studied music. Hildred Geertz, anthropologist and scholar of Balinese culture-, surmised that these Westerners' prevailing 'myths' about the Balinese may have unduly influenced Mead and Bateson. Made Kaler informed us that they relied more on Westerners, particularly the Dutch, 'than on the Balinese as sources of information; they did not discuss issues with him. Kaler believed that is the reason for their misstatement about his education in Java Possibly a reliance on foreigners accounts for some of their general errors in interpretation and a number of specific errors in data, such as the statement that Nyepi occurs every 400 days (it takes place about every 364 days), the characteristics of the people of north Bali, and customs in Bayung Gede.

Curiously, Bateson and Mead were apparently unaware of Covarrubias' work on Bali, which preceded theirs by only three years. Covarrubias worked closely with Walter Spies and also stayed with him- at his home in Campuan for short periods as did Bateson and Mead. His book Island of Bali contains extensive ethnographic data with many interpretations. Possibly Bateson and Mead ignored his work because he was a musician and not an anthropologist by training.Bateson and Mead's use of psycho logic theories for interpretations is subject to major criticism. Most of their interpretations were stated in terms that were ill-defined, did not fit any theory, were weakly supported by data, or were contradictory. An example is, their interpretation of a child playing with a ball as a symbolical representation of food and the body as a tube. This is gross psychological speculation. In this connection, the text states that the Balinese classify eating with defecation. This was apparently inferred from the observation, that the Balinese seek privacy when eating and during defecation. Similarly, they asserted that the Balinese identify food with faeces, based on their observation of a dog eating the faeces of a baby.

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