Story of Bali, Indonesia

It would not be objectionable to use the term character trait to denote hypnotizability as it is manifest in Balinese individuals or in the culture as a whole. Trance phenomena are functions of personality factors and traits, as well as of cultural beliefs and attitudes (e.g., expectations and rules). Since there is clinical value in thinking in general terms of the ways most people in a culture typically behave and the psychosocial reasons why they do so, the tern 'character' is favored with regard to culture.

Culture and character or personality may be easily confused and differentiation is important. Culture, or behavior which is customarily done by the people (e.g., ceremonies, prayer, cremation, traditional healing, dance, cock-fights, offerings, rice planting, and clubs) is not assumed to be imbedded in personalities. Rather, personality or character traits, are psychological or emotional mechanisms which perform such customary behaviours. The people express personality traits in all customs of the culture.

Character traits are not considered as the same as behaviour conforming to cultural expectations or what the people in the society regard as proper behaviour. For example, if a Balinese were to leave his culture and live in a foreign culture, he would not leave his Balinese character behind nor could he shed his personality traits and assume traits entirely like the people in the foreign culture no matter how much he might wish to or try to live by the cultural norms of that culture. The psychological explanation is that some aspects of the Balinese culture with its attendant behaviour patterns, rules, and values become internalized as part of an individual's personality, presumably as a result of child-rearing and lifelong experiences and manifest themselves as character traits.

Balinese character, as defined in this book, is a collection or constellation of character traits that are manifested by a majority of the people of Bali.11 This meaning and use of the term 'character in this chapter is close to that of Bateson and Mead Balinese scholars use the term karakter, (a derivative of the Western word) with a meaning similar to the one adopted in this book.

The concept of probability is relevant to the use of the term 'character'. It is not necessary for every Village or every individual to show each trait or all the traits; it need only involve most. Technically, quantitative data, statistically treated, would seem desirable but is not usually feasible to obtain; 12 judgments must be used and estimates of probability must be relied upon.

In the use of the concept of character traits, one has to guard against the mistakes of earlier anthropologists and psychiatrists who oversimplified the trait profile of a culture or misrepresented the distribution of traits in a culture. In addition, the authors recognize the hazards of attempting to attribute the development of national character as a whole to certain styles of childhood rearing behaviour patterns such as those associated with toilet training, swaddling, or weaning, as was sometimes done a number of years ago.

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