The Photogenic Cannot Be Tamed: Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson's Trance and Dance in Bali

Abstract

I watch the bodies in trance in Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead's ethnographic film Trance and Dance in Bali projected on a screen in a dormitory at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. It is 1982. The film is a vision of extreme otherness: young bare-breasted women with rippling black hair and slim young men in loincloths gyrate as they stab themselves in trance with the jagged swords of the Balinese kris. Astonishingly no blood is drawn. Funded by the Committee for Dementia Praecox (or schizophrenia) , the film was shot in 1936-39 in the town of Pagoetan, on the island of Bali, in what is now Indonesia.1 The Balinese are represented as pathological, creatures of an erotic, exotic past, presented by the camera and the voiceover from a geographical and temporal distance. There is an odd tension between the comforting but dry, matter-of-fact nature of Margaret Mead's voiceover and the ritual violence shown in the film.

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