What Indonesia - Bali is all about ?

In 1951, Mead wrote, 'Today I can look at pictures of young Karba and wonder, "What will you be when you grow up? How may you not affect the future of the world? The answers to those questions are now known. Karba, respected by his fellow villagers, as a father, priest, and village headman, admirably carries on the traditions of Bayung Gede. Some of his knowledge is incorporated into this book for people of many nationalities to read. Made Kaler is another Balinese whom Mead judged well. He acknowledged Mead's motivational impact on him and made his mark on Bali by establishing an innovative school which germinated into a university.

These two individuals, whose lives touched one another 50 years ago, but who subsequently lived quite different lives in many respects and at some distance apart. are pure Balinese- intelligent, creative, solid citizens, in a land of the gods. Mead would have been impressed with and proud of them both.3. Mead and Ruth Benedict have been credited with tile conceptualization of the relationship between personality and culture termed *personality-is-culture. They rejected the conceptual distinction between culture and personality. 'Both culture and personality refer to configurations of behaviour that are manifested and carried by individuals but are characteristic of a group.'Benedict and Mead were trying to prove that personality patterns not only varied across human populations but were integral parts of pervasive, culturally distinctive configurations that gave them meaning and apart from which they could not be adequately understood. Personality was. in other words, an aspect of culture, the aspect in which the emotional responses and cognitive capacities of tile individual were programmed in accordance with the overall design or configuration of his culture (the 'cultural patterning of personality social relations, religion, politics, art, and recreation were programmed in accordance with the same design

To appraise and reanalyze much of the data of Balinese Character is a challenging and problematic task for persons without expertise in Balinese culture, cultural anthropology, medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. The style of writing is particularly difficult for Balinese scholars and readers. The style is difficult even for anthropologists and it has been read by relatively few because of its forbidding format The method of study was primarily ethnographic as that was the practice at that time, but Bateson and Mead had supplemented this With their special method of photographic analysis. Interpretations of data were generally psychoanalytically oriented.Bateson and Mead appeared to lack insight into their possible bias. One of the chief reasons they selected Bali for study was a preconceived view of the relationship between culture and schizophrenia ). Their study was supported in part by a foundation focused on schizophrenia (dementia praecox). Possibly these-factors entered into he related misinterpretations of data and inappropriate characterization of Balinese personality as schizoid.'

The authors have wondered if Mead had a propensity to fit the data to her theories or preconceived ideas. Freeman asserted that Mead's depictions of Samoan culture, as set forth in her renowned book Coming of Age in Samoa , were motivated, by her desire to substantiate a particular cherished doctrine. Barnouw's critique of Mead's South Seas studies (prior to Bali) cited a pattern of preconceived mental set. Given Bateson and Mead's results for Bali, the authors wondered if a similar process may have been in operation there. For example, Mead's misleading characterization of Bayung Gede as 'ceremonially bare' could have been related to biased assumptions about a base culture of Bayung Gede, one little influenced by the Hindu culture.

Freeman's critique of Mead's work in Samoa stirred up quite a lot of publicity and multiple refutations by American anthropologists (Brady, 1985; Patience and Smith, 1986; Rapp port, 1986; Feinberg, 1988). Freeman supported his critique with his own data on Samoans and attributed Mead's mistakes to a number of methodological errors but most importantly to a motivation to provide the leading anthropologist, her mentor, Franz Boas, with support for his, championed theoretical concept of cultural determinism (i.e., that human behavior is shaped entirely by culture and not by biological factors).2 In that era the academic community was engaged in a fierce argument regarding nature versus nurture in the determination of behavior, personality, and culture, as well as controversy over the issue of eugenics.

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