The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in history, literature, education, political science, Asian studies, and related subjects.

Among them is the novel Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis by the anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead

The TU Library collection includes several other books of anthropological studies of Indonesia.

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead were not the first anthropologists to use the camera in the field.

In fact, each had taken pictures on earlier trips.

But their Bali work was among the first uses of photography in anthropology as a primary recording device, and not merely as illustration.

They innovated in their use of photography and film as ethnographic media.

In many ways they began the field of visual anthropology.

The authors noted, as posted online:

In this monograph we are attempting a new method of stating the intangible relationships among different types of culturally standardized behavior by placing side by side mutually relevant photographs. Pieces of behavior, spatially and contextually separated—a trance dancer being carried in procession, a man looking up at an aeroplan, a servant greeting his master in a play, the painting of a dream—may all be relevant to a single discussion; the same emotional thread may run through them. To present them together in words, it is necessary either to resort to devices which are inevitably literary, or to dissect the living scenes so that only desiccated items remain.

By the use of photographs, the wholeness of each piece of behavior can be preserved, while the special cross-referencing desired can be obtained by placing the series of photographs on the same page. It is possible to avoid the artificial construction of a scene at which a man, watching a dance, also looks up at an aeroplane and has a dream; it is also possible to avoid diagramming the single element in these scenes which we wish to stress—the importance of levels in Balinese inter-personal relationships—in such a way that the reality of the scenes themselves is destroyed.

This is not a book about Balinese custom, but about the Balinese—about the way in which they, as living persons, moving, standing, eating, sleeping, dancing, and going into trance, embody that abstraction which (after we have abstracted it) we technically call culture.

We are interested in the steps by which workers in a new science solve piecemeal their problems of description and analysis, and in the relationship between what we now say about Balinese culture, with these new techniques, and what we have said with more imperfect means of communication about other cultures. A particular method of presentation has therefore been agreed upon. Margaret Mead has written the introductory description of Balinese character, which is needed to orient the reader so that the plates may be meaningful. She has used here the same order of vocabulary and the same verbal devices which have been made to do service in earlier descriptions of other cultures. Gregory Bateson will apply to the behavior depicted in the photographs the same sort of verbal analysis which he applied to his records of Iatmul transvestitism in “Naven,” and the reader will have the photographic presentation itself to unite and carry further these two partial methods of describing the ethos of Balinese.

Former students of Bali have approached Balinese culture as peripheral to and derivative from the higher cultures of India, China, and Java, carefully identifying in Bali to reduced and residual forms of the heroes of the Ramajana or of the Hindoo pantheon, or of the characters of the Chinese theater. All those items of Balinese culture which could not be assimilated to this picture of Asiatic diffusion have been variously classified as “Polynesian,” “Indonesian,” “animistic,” or “Bali aga” (a term which some Balinese have learned to use in contradistinction to “Bali Hindoe”).

We, however, always approached the material from the opposite point of view; we assumed that Bali had a cultural base upon which various intrusive elements had been progressively grafted over the centuries, and that the more rewarding approach would be to study this base first. We accordingly selected for our primary study a mountain village, Bajoeng Gede, near Kintamani in the District of Bangli, where most of the conspicuous elements of the later, intrusive culture were lacking. In Bajoeng Gede one does not find use of Hindoo names for the Gods, the importance of color in relation to direction in offerings, cremation, caste, the taboo upon eating beef, or any relationship to a Brahman priestly household. Writing there was, but only a half-dozen semi-literate individuals who were barely able to keep records of attendance, fines, etc. The village boasted one calendrical expert who was skilled enough to advise the village officials on the intricacies of the calendar of multiple interlocking weeks and “months.” […]

It is true that every village in Bali differs from every other in many conspicuous respects, and that there are even more striking differences between districts, so that no single concrete statement about Bali is true of all of Bali, and any negative statement about Bali must be made with the greatest caution. But through this diversity there runs a common ethos, whether one is observing the home of the highest caste, the Brahman, or of the simplest mountain peasant.

The Brahman’s greater ease, due to the fact that there are fewer of those who know much more than he, is but another version of the peasant’s unwillingness to commit himself, of his “lest I err, being an illiterate man.” The most conspicuous exceptions to this common ethos are the culture of the ruling caste, the Kesatryas, and the culture of the North Bali which has been exposed to strong foreign influences during the last sixty years. In both of these groups may be found an emphasis upon the individual rather than upon his status, an element of social climbing and an uneasiness of tenure which contrast strongly with the rest of Bali. For this reason, reference to these two groups, except for occasional bits of ceremonial which they hold in common with the rest of Bali, has been excluded from this discussion. […]

This volume is in no sense a complete account of Balinese culture, even in its most general outlines. It is an attempt to present, at this time when scientific presentations are likely to be widely spaced, those aspects of our results and those methods of research which we have judged most likely to be of immediate use to other students.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)