What Indonesia - Bali is all about ?

Bateson and Mead's conclusions about the Balinese being schizoid and about certain of their child-rearing patterns being predisposed to schizophrenia could be viewed as fitting the doctrine of cultural determinism, i.e., opposed to the prevailing psychiatric view at the time that schizophrenia was a biological and primarily inherited disorder. Years later Bateson followed a related line of reasoning and study to develop his double-bind theory of schizophrenia, a theory that the cause of schizophrenia lies in a certain type of pathologic communication in a patient's family. Currently the weight of scientific evidence favors the theory that biologic and genetic factors are predominant in the cause of schizophrenia.

It is for anthropologists and historians to assess the possible effects of anthropological concepts and theories of the era and the degree to which Mead was influenced by her mentors, Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas. This assessment of Bateson and Mead's work has focused primarily on pragmatic and psychological issues in relation to their generalizations about Bali.

Possibly the critical impressions Bateson and Mead formed early on in their study stuck with some instiricl6s they further supported and elaborated upon these with selective data. It is not unusual for scientists to develop ideas based on pilot data and then proceed to support or disprove them with formal studies. A problem arises if scientists attend only to those data which support there theories and ideas.

Bateson and Mead did not understand how they were perceived by the Balinese and appeared to lack sensitivity to their roles. Part of the behavior they observed was a function of their impact upon their subjects. Mead described her perceived effect as a personal stimulus on the Balinese: she was puzzled by why she was unable to gain rapport with the people of Bayung Gede for months. She was stymied by a reaction which she interpreted as fear: 'Mothers smiled false anxious smiles, babies screamed, and dogs barked. She had not encountered this problem in her earlier field studies. Though she never ventured a reason, she stated that she overcame it by adopting a theatrical style of interaction with babies; in essence, play-acting. This reaction by the villagers is understandable when one considers Mead as a stimulus for the Balinese. When Made Kaler, her assistant at Bayung Gede, was asked why villagers might be afraid of her. he explained that to them she looked somewhat like Rangda the evil witch with which they were so familiar. This was because of her light skin, light hair, eyes, and strange appearance (to them). Most had never seen a white woman before. Denny Thong, an Indonesian psychiatrist in Bali, came to the same conclusion after meeting her personally in the 1970s.

This major traditional ceremony is one of the most striking examples of climax that Westerners are familiar with. It clearly builds to a definitive consummation point or climax. 'the point of highest dramatic- tension or - major turning point in the action' (Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, 1965). C. Geertz (1980) described the entire process as (1) 'a long crescendo of getting ready, (2) the ceremony of burning, and (3) 'finishing up'. Even Mead appeared to contradict her view of climax in describing cremation: 'the weeks of laborious preparation culminate in three days of ceremony'. At the cremation, the men carrying the tower 'shout, they leap, they lift their arms in threatening gestures, they whirl around and around in a mass of vigorously stamping, kicking and entangled limbs, falling down, trampling upon their fellows, hurling themselves into a pool of mud and splattering each other with howls of glee' (Belo, 1935).

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