Connecting Cultures: Balinese Character and the Computer.

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead arrived in Bali in March of 1936 to study the relationship between forms of social organization and types of temperament or character structure. They had developed a complex theory about the way societies emphasized one or another of the temperamental types available in the human organism, and a typology of such types (divided by gender) and the situations that went with them.

During their two years of fieldwork they made 25,000 still photographs and shot 20,000 feet of 16mm motion picture film. They usually worked together: Mead made verbal notes and Bateson photographed moving pictures and stills. Their Balinese secretary, Made Kaler, kept a record in Balinese. The time and date were written on each role of film when it was placed in the camera and again when it was removed. In this way the images could be matched with the verbal records whose time was also recorded. They did not make sound recordings, relying instead on musical recordings made by others.

Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, the book Bateson and Mead published in 1942, contains 759 of the still photographs, reproduced in one hundred Plates. Each Plate consisted of two facing pages. One page contains from four to thirteen photographs, and its facing page a general statement of theory, a description of the context in which the photographs in the plate were made, and detailed captions for the individual photographs. Bateson and Mead never solved the problem of incorporating the motion picture film, or of making it convenient for readers to follow the multiple paths through the data their careful cross-referencing made possible.

Because the technical apparatus they needed to use motion picture film and still photographs together is now available, it is useful to examine their methods and their reasons for adopting them, and to examine the implications of their methods of analyzing and presenting ethnographic work.