What Indonesia - Bali is all about ?

In efforts to understand what Mead might conceivably have had in mind regarding libido, the authors considered another possibility. The use of this Western concept implies a view of the individual as separate from society. This is less true in Bali where the individual is an integral part of family, society, and ancestors. They are bound together in this larger system. If Mead conceived of libido (the energy-driving instincts of aggression and sexuality-) as bound up in this system (though she did not speak of it as such), she might have thought there was none available for individual expression. Instead, it would be expressed in ceremonies, ritual, trance, dance, etc.,, leaving none free for the individual. Given this novel and somewhat tortuous theoretical excursion, the authors would still disagree that the individual lacks libido, free or otherwise. The Balinese express aggressive and sexual energy in a variety of types of social interaction. The authors question whether libido theory is at all appropriate for application to the Balinese and have not chosen to utilize the theory for understanding Balinese character.Somehow Bateson and Mead formed and presented a rather negative image of the Balinese. This is reflected, for example, by their interpretations about mothers and wives being witches, their characterizations of mothers as lacking thoughtfulness and not cherishing their children, and their representation of the people as generally having schizoid maladjusted- personalities, to mention a few. Mead's statement that all the last-grade children and all the teachers in Bayung Gede were massacred in the political uprising in 1965 is another example of careless reporting of data and negative implications. The statement is a gross error of fact: no schoolchildren were killed, and only three of the seven teachers died.

BATESON and Mead 'assumed that Bali had a cultural base upon which various intrusive elements have been progressively grafted over the centuries, and that a more rewarding approach would be to study this base firs. They stated that they selected Bayung Gede as the village for their primary study because it lacked most of the conspicuous elements of 'intrusive cultures'. They stated that Bayung Gede was ceremonially bare, even when compared with other mountain Villages, and that it had a minimum of the 'over-elaboration of art and ceremonialism which is such a marked characteristic of Balinese culture. They assumed that it represented the cultural base of Bali.

In addition, because they noted that goitre was common in Bayung Gede, they assumed that thyroid deficiency was the cause of the entire population being 'markedly slow in both intellectual response and in speed of bodily movement. They felt that this factor and the 'schematically simplified' cultural emphasis enabled them to understand the base of Balinese culture, which in turn would help them understand the more complex forms of culture which they had encountered in the plains villages (i.e., the non-mountainous areas).

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