Story of Bali, Indonesia

Concepts from the field of cognitive anthropology hold that, in essence, 'cognition is culture', and that the behavior and feelings of a Culture are explicable only when placed, within the belief system and cognitive insights of the culture. Balinese cognitive insights are very different from Western insights and it is difficult, if not impossible in many instances, for Westerners to acquire them Mead recognized that she was treated and responded to in a peculiar way by the Balinese but she was insensitive to the reasons for this. In addition to presenting a Balinese perspective, this work represents collaboration between a native Balinese scientist and a Western scientist, both of whom received training in Western medicine and psychiatry. This enabled joint study of the Western concepts expressed in English by Bateson and Mead. The intricacies, translations, theoretical advantages, and possibilities offered by such a collaboration were proposed by LeVine. For this he used the term 'bi-cultural research method and stated:.

The difficulty is that if the translation problem is taken seriously, solving A car, become an end in itself, as indeed it is for those anthropologists who aim only to understand the rules and beliefs that constitute another culture and translate them into a language of scientific observation. In studying the personality system, however ' we have to go beyond deciphering the cultural code, an essential step, to understand the subjective meanings encoded in the individual's organization of behavior. The job demands so much of an outside investigator that it may never be carried out in more than a few cultures. The solution propose is for collaboration between two behavioral scientists, one from the culture being studied and one from outside, in translating the psychological data collected by the indigenous behavioral scientist into a comparable data language, by explicating the contexts that give the individual's behavior its

One of the most typical and frequent ceremonies of Bali is the food offering at temples by household women. Tourist brochures commonly picture colorfully dressed women carrying even more colorful aesthetically arranged stacks of food, up to one meter high, balanced on their heads as they walk on paths through rice paddies and down the streets to the temple. They bring the offerings to the temple, place them on the altar, and then wait as a group near by, where they either talk with friends or sit on the ground or road in a way that is comparable to the way that Christians sit in pews waiting for church services to begin. Finally, they pray together, led by the priest who purifies the offerings with holy water and blesses the women. 'They then file into the temple to retrieve their stacks of food and carry them home where they are consumed by family members. Since this ceremony is rather quiet, one might wonder if there is a climax. Following the definition of climax as 'a major turning point in the action', the turning-point appears to be the holy water blessing, followed by the women abruptly becoming active as they claim their offering. At this culmination, the women involved ,-experience feelings of inner peace

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