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The Social Uses of the Body in Bali
This article is an extract from a classic of ethnolo-gical literature, Balinese Character, a work which may serve as a model for the scientific use of illustrations. In this book, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead study not Balinese customs but rather the body practices and techniques of the Balinese, who, in moving about, eating, sleeping, and dancing give substance to that abstraction called culture. From a technical point of view, the juxtaposition of photographs permits the authors to solve the problems of description that are always encountered in investigating body techniques (hand postures in daily life, in art, and in states of trance ; dance techniques ; table manners, etc.). This juxtaposition also permits them to obtain a better grasp of the more subtle rela-tionships existing between various types of beha-vior codified by a given culture : the «friendly roughness» a father displays towards his son, sibling rivalry, a mother's way of frustrating her baby, and so forth. For these are ail cultural traits which often can be observed in a gesture, in a look, or in a body posture better than they can be con-veyed by a long literary description.