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INSULAR SOUTHEAST ASIA
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s we noted in the introduction to part V, “Southeast Asia” is a geopo- litical concept invented during World War II to denote a theatre of war. It never had a civilizational center such as South and East Asia
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have had, although it had a pattern of nagaras, small state centers or sacred cit- ies with a god-king and a ruling ideology based on Hindu-Buddhist notions of legitimacy. These were to be found both in insular and mainland Southeast Asia. Chapter 10 focused on some of the better-known examples, particularly Bali (in Indonesia), Angkor (in Cambodia), and Thailand. Chapter 12 will return to this region as we conclude with a discussion of colonialism and the creation of the modern nation-state across the region.
In this chapter, we take a somewhat different approach to several cultural traditions distributed across much of mainland and insular Southeast Asia out- side the nagara-style systems, among peoples who resisted the reach of these labor-hungry states. Standard histories tend to overlook these peoples and their customs, as we discussed in chapter 4, because they are determined outsiders to the “civilizing mission” of ever-growing states. Their lifestyles, religious prac- tices, life-cycle rites, and kinship systems have often been viewed as baffling and barbarous. In turning to insular Southeast Asia, with its thousands of islands and loosely incorporated ethnic groups, we have selected a few classic studies by anthropologists to illustrate some of these traditions (mortuary rites, head- hunting, child rearing, and cockfighting) beyond state centers. They take us to groups in Borneo (especially the Dayak and Berawan), the largest island in Indonesia and briefly to the Alor on a tiny island in Indonesia. To understand the lingering culture of head-hunting (without actual head-hunting) we turn to a group in Luzon (the Ilongot), the largest island in the Philippines. And finally we turn to villagers in Bali, the most studied place in insular Southeast Asia, for a famous study on character formation and another one on cockfighting.
Haddon in Borneo
At the end of the nineteenth century, a British administrator working in Bor- neo named Charles Hose learned that a respected anthropologist he had met in London was on a scientific expedition to the Torres Straits, a string of islands stretching between New Guinea and Australia. Why not come to Borneo? The two had met in London several years earlier, and Hose understood that Alfred Cort Haddon was pioneering a new approach to scientific research, the “intensive study
Chapter opener photo: Children playing on bamboo raft at Kuching on the Sarawak River.
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of limited areas.” Haddon’s method involved spending significant time encounter- ing people in their own societies rather than chatting up travelers from distant shores when they got back to the comforts of London. “I will do my very utmost to make everything a success for you—I will have all sorts of feasts and native festivi- ties arranged to take place during the time you are here, you will see what others have never seen, and I will undertake to see you will never regret the time spent in Borneo” (Chiarelli and Guntarik 2013). It proved to be an irresistible offer.
© Robert Cribb 2009
Map 11.1 Borneo in 1901. Note that the island is divided into British and Dutch territories (dashed line).
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The above Dutch map depicts Borneo in 1901, the year Haddon published his study of Borneo and the Torres Straits, Head-Hunters: Black, White and Brown. It bears a bit of scrutiny. Note that the island is divided into British and Dutch territories (the dashed line). Before lines could be drawn on maps, Bru- nei controlled much of the surrounding area from an ancient trade port that by 1901 had been reduced to the lines on the map (and is roughly the same area today). Sarawak (which today is a province of Malaysia) was under the control of a British adventurer who was called Raja Charles Brooke, the “White Raja,” until it became a British protectorate in 1888. Today, Sarawak and north Bor- neo (now Sabah) are part of Malaysia, which stretches across from the south- ern part of the Thai Peninsula (except Singapore) with a capital at Kuala Lumpur. The larger part of Borneo, south and east of the dashed line, was con- trolled by Dutch Indonesia, and is now a part of Independent Indonesia. (See also map 12.2.)
Charles Hose worked on the island of Borneo for Raja James Brooke, who had helped the sultan of Brunei put down a rebellion and, in 1841, was made governor of Sarawak in gratitude. The title governor wasn’t enough, and soon he was being called raja, in a process not all that different from the early British adventurers in India like “Clive of Bengal.” The dynasty of the Brooke family reigned over Sarawak for over a century, squeezing Brunei into its present con- figuration. For a thousand years prior to the period of the White Rajas, Brunei, controlling a large inland area that fed tropical goods into the global market, had been a major port city on the southern global trade route that began in Arabia and stretched through Goa, Calicut, Madras, Malaka, Jahor (Singa- pore), Brunei, Manila, and Canton. Both Arab and Chinese ship masters were sure to stop in Brunei for the goods that Brunei merchants collected from the interior tribes, “jungle produce,” much of which was crucial ingredients for Chinese medicines. Brunei ended up as a tiny independent city-state on the northwest coast of the island. (Not to worry: Today, the Sultan of Brunei, one of the few remaining absolute monarchs, is said to be worth $20 billion and was once the richest man in the world.)
Hose was an amateur ethnographer himself, having already established a museum, and collected a library of more than 700 volumes. His offer to host Haddon promised to connect his own amateur work with the foremost ethno- logical endeavors of the day. Haddon had all the latest equipment and hoped to move anthropology forward while bringing knowledge of the remote societies of Southeast Asia and Melanesia to the West. He could make photographs in stereoscope and in color. He could capture sound by wax cylinder. And he could capture moving pictures by cinematograph (Chiarelli and Guntarik 2013). Photography, according to these early ethnographers using these mod- ern recording devices, could capture the real world. Photography accurately reproduced reality in a way never before possible, it was thought; because of “its mechanical nature, and its automatism, [it] produced objective ‘visual evi- dence’ of the ‘real thing,’ averting the danger of any subjectivity of interpreta-
tion” (Daston and Galison 1992). He published his findings from Borneo and the Torres Straits in 1901 in Head-Hunters: Black, White and Brown. The Sarawak material was based on the itinerary Hose had prepared for him, illustrating the mutual support of early anthropology and imperialism:
It included excursions by boat along rivers and into the wilderness, visits to interior villages, religious ceremonies and opportunities to collect artifacts. Hose’s guests also attended a peace-making ceremony that attracted more than 6,000 members of many different ethnic groups. The gathering was organized as a means of pacification and of addressing tensions between the different ethnic groups under the control of the colonial administration. The event was doubtless also staged to serve Hose’s position of authority among local people. (Chiarelli and Guntarik 2013; Haddon 1901)
Some of these photographs have been reproduced by Chiarelli and Gun- tarik (2013), to whom they appear “mediocre” and “unremarkable.” There are shots of rivers from boats and of curious villagers gazing at the photographer. At least the photos appear unstaged, with no attempt at faux “authenticity” by keeping foreigners out of sight, a very common practice later on. White jacketed expeditioners in pith helmets mix with local people in traditional garb. Already at that time there were “best practices” being written up in a scientific publica- tion called Notes and Queries in Anthropology, and Haddon managed the section on photography, but he does not seem to have followed his own advice in Bor- neo (with his “mediocre and unremarkable” shots and foreigners in full view). Perhaps because Borneo was an excursion at the end of his primary work in the Torres Straits, and several of his companions had already departed, Haddon was himself disappointed in the Borneo images (Chiarelli and Guntarik 2013).
Another regret is worth noting. At this time (the end of the nineteenth cen- tury) scientists were attempting to put the identification of “races” and “tribes” and “ethnic groups” on a scientific footing. The hope was that this could be accomplished through biological data, and so fieldworkers like Haddon spent a great deal of time taking anthropometric statistics, identifying skin color, height, and head and face measurements. As Haddon writes in Head-Hunters: Black, White and Brown, “One of our objects in visiting Sarawak was the hope that by measuring a large number of people, and by recording their physical features, we might help towards a solution of the ethnic problems” (Haddon 1901:320; quoted in Chiarelli and Guntarik 2013). A measure called the “cephalic index” was a ratio of head width to height that produced three types: long-headed (dol- ichocephalic), medium-headed (mesocephalic), and short-headed (brachyce- phalic). There was an effort to classify the many inhabitants of Borneo into two original races in another widely read book by Haddon (The Races of Man and Their Distribution, 1909), but this effort was soon abandoned by anthropology. Even the term “tribe” became so laden with controversy and mistaken assump- tions that it has been largely abandoned as a technical term. It continues to be used as a rather generic term for nonstate cultural or ethnic groups of all types throughout much of Asia (as in the “Hill Tribes” of Thailand).
The people of Sarawak, and the dominant population of Borneo, are the Dayak, a term that now refers to all non-Muslim indigenous groups (Postill 2006). However, over a mere two centuries, the terminology and the group(s) indicated by it have undergone confusing shifts. In Raja James Brooke’s time, a distinction was made between Land Dayaks, who were timid, peaceful hill farm- ers, and Sea Dayaks, who were headhunters and pirates. More recently the Land Dayaks were known as Bidayuh and the former Sea Dayaks were known as Iban, a label popularized by Hose and reinforced by anthropologist Derek Free- man in the 1950s. The people themselves opted for “Dayak” in an effort to build political unity among all Sarawak peoples against Malays and Chinese at a time when Malaya was seeking independence from Britain (and then became Malay- sia after Singapore seceded). This brief history should illustrate the difficulties of identifying discrete “ethnic groups,” much less “races” in this part of the world. However, despite the tremendous diversity linguistically and ethnically, there are certain cultural commonalities across much of Borneo. These include residence in distinctive longhouses, bilateral kinship, and a history of head-
hunting. Here is Derek Freeman on Iban (Dayak) longhouses:
Anyone who has travelled in the interior of Borneo is familiar with the con- spicuous shape of a long-house: an attenuated structure supported on innu- merable hard-wood posts, it stretches for a hundred yards or more along the terraced bank of a river, its roof—of thatch, or wooden shingles—forming an unbroken expanse. Superficially viewed the Iban long-house has the appearance of being a single structural unit, and many casual observers have made the facile inference that the long-house is therefore the outcome of some sort of communal or group organization and ownership . . . but the Iban long-house is primarily an aggregation of independently owned family apartments. . . . Indeed the unbroken expanse of roof tends to conceal the fact that the Iban long-house is fundamentally a series of discrete entities— the independent family units of a competitive and egalitarian society. (Free- man 1992:1)
These longhouses and their populations could be enormous. There were longhouses with 40, 50, or 60 “doors” (i.e., apartments), and one was known to be half a mile in length with 100 doors (Metcalf 2010). These were essen- tially villages; apart from temporary huts out in the fields, no one lived in pri- vate single-family dwellings. The long verandah along the river side of the longhouse was a boulevard for sociable interaction; at night “the line of lan- terns, twinkling off into the distance, gave the house the feeling . . . of being enchanted” (Metcalf 2010:41). Voices could always be heard above the parti- tions; little was private. If a door was closed, the next person to come along would open it, perhaps to ask why it had been closed in the first place. Strang- ers coming upriver or downriver could count on hospitality, with trays of food—fish, game, and mountains of rice—being offered.
Of course there were practical reasons for the extravagant work of building these enormous longhouses. They were fortresses in times of warfare, which
Exterior of Sea Dayak longhouse, 1897.
mostly consisted of raids from war parties seeking loot or heads or slaves. The Iban were said to have an insatiable desire for heads (Metcalf 2010:52). Even in non-Iban areas, heads were prominently displayed on the verandas of virtually all longhouses, and most groups participated in head-hunting, which was required at the conclusion of mourning for an important person. Thus, work- ing alone in the fields or coming back along a trail at dusk could put you at risk of capture by head-hunting parties, but once you reached the shelter of the longhouse, you were safe.
Death in Borneo
Charles Hose, the administrator for the White Rajas who invited Haddon to Sarawak, was keen to put a stop to head-hunting. He collected and pub- lished documentation of the widespread practice of head-hunting in his area in the late nineteenth century, such as photographs of Iban women dancing with skulls (Andaya 2004:16). The war parties intent on taking heads disrupted trade and made travel in the interior dangerous; anyone’s head was fair game, and even an old woman gathering firewood was a good enough choice and an easy target. Hose tried to channel these warlike instincts by setting up annual races of the war canoes from all villages. This was apparently a great success, and Peter Metcalf tells us the races are still popular (1991:114). And because the taking of heads was the obligatory conclusion of lengthy funeral rites, Hose began keeping a store of heads that villages could simply borrow as needed (p. 114). These and other efforts by colonial governments proved effective, so that head-hunting has become largely a thing of the past since the end of World
War II, though there are still occasional bizarre instances and sentimental nos- talgia surrounding the topic.
Head-hunting was once extremely widespread across Southeast Asia, from Assam in eastern India to Taiwan off the coast of China and extending through the outer islands of Indonesia, including Borneo, Sulawesi, and the Philippine islands (Andaya 2004). Andaya tells us:
Heads were taken for numerous and often overlapping reasons: to enhance community status, to end a period of mourning, to vitalize a new long- house, to initiate manhood, to assert territorial claims, to affirm a chief’s prestige, to challenge rival tribes, to ensure the fertility of crops, or to gain revenge. (2004:14)
It meant different things in different places. Since there was no single meaning across that vast space, to understand head-hunting, its meaning in particular local cultures has to be understood. And even though it can no longer be observed in practice, head-hunting continues to be part of the social imagina- tion in many types of ceremonies, in mythology and songs, and in attitudes toward vitality and masculinity.
In the 1970s, anthropologist Peter Metcalf settled into a longhouse of 32 doors called Long Teru in northern central Borneo among a people who call themselves Berawan (unrelated to the more famous Dayak). Like the Iban, they live in longhouses and practice swidden agriculture. Other Berawan long- house communities had been converting to Christianity, but Long Teru main- tained its traditional religion.
The focus of Metcalf’s (1991) research was mortuary rites. At the end of lengthy, multiyear ceremonies, the final culmination is (or was) sending out a head-hunting war party to take the head(s) that would release mourners from all remaining food and sex taboos, especially the onerous seclusion of the spouse. These death rites involve everyone living in the longhouse, the most important of all communal rituals. Wakes go on night after night for eight to ten days, and everyone must be involved. They appear to be a lot of fun, with constant drinking, gambling, and hilarity, and in the openness of the long- house, it would hardly be possible to stay away in any case.
The mortuary rite consists of three stages: the initial treatment of the dead body; followed by a period of not less than a year in which the body is stored in a wooden coffin or a large jar in a cemetery at a distance from the village; fol- lowed by recovery of the remains of the dead, hopefully now reduced to dry bones, to be brought home again for final ritual treatment, concluding with the head-hunting events. This latter stage is often called secondary burial, or second- ary treatment of the dead, variations on which are commonly practiced in much of Southeast Asia (see chapter 10 on the death rites of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand). The Berawan do not always go on to the final secondary rites, but frequently do so, especially for persons of high importance in the community.
As soon as the deceased has breathed his or her last, women begin a for- malized wailing, and the deep booms of a gong ring out over the longhouse
and nearby countryside. The body is washed and dressed in the deceased’s fin- est clothes, and the hair is combed and oiled. Men get busy constructing a spe- cial throne on which the finely dressed corpse is seated, surrounded by heirlooms preserved for such special occasions. These often include colorful glass beads of great age and rarity, some having reached central Borneo through trade from Venice via Brunei in previous centuries. There, held in place by thongs on the mortuary throne and honored by all the family’s mem- bers and wealth, the deceased spends the first few days of afterlife.
And what of the soul? This is the great concern of the Berawan. The corpse, which will quickly begin to decay in the tropical heat, is not feared, but the soul, newly dead, presumably dismayed, and possibly angry and vengeful, is of great concern. It must ultimately sever its connections to its human com- munity and make its way to the ancestors, but this must be aided by the ritual actions of the still-living community. The spouse of the dead person is most vulnerable to the soul of the deceased. The spouse is secluded in a tiny room- like space made of mats, too small to lie down in, with only a single aperture through which all that can be seen is the corpse. Thus, while the wake goes on—drinking and gambling and socializing of the entire community—the liv- ing spouse is secluded in a miserable condition intended to evoke pity in the still-hovering soul and is fed small amounts of the worst food and unable to bathe. Meanwhile, other spirits may be lurking, eager to get into the body of a living person, where they could cause havoc. One’s death can cause an acci- dent in the forest or further deaths. Souls can slip out of bodies in illness and in deep sleep, and get stuck outside the body, unable to return. These are the great dangers during the period just after death while the deceased’s soul still hovers dangerously nearby.
Partly to prevent these dangers, and also out of love for a lost member of the community, the corpse is treated as if to deny that it is dead at all. It is talked to, offered food and cigarettes, and occasionally spoon fed (Metcalf 1991:45).
After a day or two, before the body gets “drippy” from decomposition (and smelly, too), it must be stored for the next stage of processing into an ancestor. It is laid in a coffin made by felling and hollowing out a large tree or by fitting it into one of the large jars acquired by trade and generally used to make rice wine. The jar will have to be sliced open at the “shoulders” so the body can be inserted, knees up, head bent down, and then resealed with resin. This “jar burial” has been practiced since ancient times in Southeast Asia (see photo of the Plain of Jars in chapter 10); evidence of jar burials has been found in sites as ancient as the Niah Caves on the Sarawak coast, containing burnt wood and human remains and dated at 1225 B.C.E. (Harrisson 1974).
The use of jars for making rice wine suggests an interesting metaphor con- necting processing of wine and processing of an ancestor. Wine is made by fer- mentation of rice; the liquids produced in the fermentation process are allowed to drip through a hole at the bottom of the jar, and this fluid is the wine that is drunk copiously, especially at wakes. In the past, corpses were allowed to
decompose in the same way, with the fluids dripping through a bamboo tube into a smaller container beneath the coffin. (More recently, encouraged by gov- ernment, the jars have remained sealed.) Still, this fluid is referred to as the “wine of the corpse.” Metcalf argues (1987) that the metaphor of producing wine lies in the process: as the body decomposes and turns into white bones, the soul is simultaneously being processed into an ancestor, who has departed the community and finally joined the ancestors upriver in the origin place of the Berawan. The body is a metaphor for the soul, being transformed from an angry ghost to a pure, benevolent ancestral spirit.
The jar containing the decomposing body (or the wooden coffin) is carried out of the longhouse via a special door and floated upriver to a cemetery, where it must be left for at least a year.
This initial part of the mortuary ritual used to end with head-hunting rites. However, since head-hunting was largely stopped at mid-century, the head- hunting rites are now headless; there are no longer even any old heads to use, as Long Teru lost all theirs in a fire and residents of Christianized longhouses threw theirs away when they converted. Nevertheless, Metcalf writes, “the modal male personality is still that of a warrior: vigorous, alert, stoical, and capable of an incendiary temper if provoked, a kind of berserk for which the Berawan are infamous” (1991:115). So the ceremony proceeds without heads, new or old. A party of young men heads out early in the morning on the third or fourth day after the removal of the corpse to collect a special kind of leaf that is fashioned into a replica of a head and brought back to the longhouse. Young women meet the returning warriors with a hilarious romp in the river edge that ends with capsized boats and everyone covered in mud. The most important of the subsequent rites in the presence of the “heads” is the initiation of young warriors, made bloody by the sacrifice of chickens and a pig, whose blood is spread over each boy and splashed about by adult men. Metcalf describes one such scene: “Waving their bloody swords around recklessly, and running hither and thither in wild-eyed confusion, the men reproduced in a way that I, at least, found convincing, the bloodlust of real hand-to-hand combat” (1991:123).
If the family has decided to conduct a secondary treatment, on an appointed day after a year or two, the bones will be fetched by a party of men and women. Someone has to open the jar and clean the bones, a repulsive job that requires a strong stomach and possibly a state of semidrunkenness. The bones are brought out of the jar, one at a time, washed, stacked on a fine cloth, then wrapped and inserted in another smaller jar brought for the occasion. Back at the longhouse, the small jar is placed in a special lean-to on the veran- dah outside, given tobacco and candy, and surrounded by valuables as before. This is the beginning of even more elaborate ceremonies than the first stage a year or more earlier. Along with customary wake behavior of drinking and horseplay, lengthy songs and chants describe the journey of the soul to the ancestral village, mentioning explicitly every stream and tributary the soul will have to navigate to reach the place where the ancestors will welcome it in.
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Head-Hunting in the Philippines
Head-hunting was once widespread in Southeast Asia. A great deal of evi- dence focuses on Borneo, but important anthropological studies come as well from the Philippines, where “Spanish sources leave little doubt that in the Phil- ippines the taking of heads and body parts in warfare, together with human sacrifice, feasting and mortuary ritual, was intrinsic to the display of male sta- tus” (Andaya 2004:21). As previously pointed out, there is no single meaning to the practice; each local culture incorporates its own cultural meaning sys- tem, yet there were frequent associations with death rites, with masculinity, with initiation of warriors, and with life and vitality.
Many theorists have tried to explain the logic of head-hunting. In 1974 anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, working in an Ilongot community of upland cultivators 90 miles north of Manila, tried out one of these theories on an older Ilongot man. Rosaldo writes:
What did he think, I asked, of the idea that head-hunting resulted from the way that one death (the beheaded victim’s) canceled another (the next of kin). He looked puzzled, so I went on to say that the victim of a beheading was exchanged for the death of one’s own kin, thereby balancing the books, so to speak. Insan reflected a moment and replied that he imagined some- body could think such a thing (a safe bet, since I just had), but that he and other Ilongots did not think any such thing. (Rosaldo 1984:167)
Rather, “rage, born of grief, impels him to kill. . . . He needs a place ‘to carry his anger.’ . . . The act of severing and tossing away the victim’s head enables him, he says, to vent and, he hopes, throw away the anger of his bereavement” (p. 167). Rosaldo describes visiting a father whose six-month-old baby had just died of pneumonia. “He was sobbing and staring through glazed and bloodshot eyes at the cotton blanket covering his baby” (p. 169). This was the seventh child he had lost. His pain was too great to bear. In the old days he could have dealt with this pain through a head-hunting raid, when he could have found a victim by the side of a path, violently cut off his head and then just as violently have tossed it away. That would have brought relief. But now martial law prevented him dealing with his grief in that way. Instead, to Rosaldo’s surprise, the father converted to Evangelical Christianity. The expla- nation given by Ilongot for this conversion was that Christianity provided an alternative way to deal with such terrible grief. Clearly, this motivation for head-hunting is unlike what we’ve seen for the Berawan.
Rosaldo’s initial study of Ilongot head-hunting focused on Ilongot history and
head-hunting as remembered through narratives of the past (1980), a kind of his- torical reconstruction but lacking in emotional empathy. Later, in 1984, he pub- lished a searing account of how he finally came to comprehend the headhunter’s rage. He and his wife, fellow anthropologist Michele Zimbelman Rosaldo, returned to the Philippines in 1981. One day while she was walking along a cliff with two companions she lost her footing and fell to her death into a swollen river
below. Rosaldo describes his tremendous grief upon recovering her body. Although American culture tends to emphasize the sorrow of bereavement, there are many other emotions as well, among them anger. His first responses had been rage:
How could she abandon me? How could she have been so stupid as to fall? . . . I felt like in a nightmare, the whole world around me expanding and contracting, visually and viscerally heaving. . . . I experienced the deep cutting pain of sorrow almost beyond endurance, the cadaverous cold of realizing the finality of death. (1993:9)
Finally, when he could return to the writing of anthropology, he reflected on an aspect of human experience that scholars have tended to overlook, even in the anthropology of death: emotional force rather than symbolic complexity. The analytic emphasis on formal events and the unpacking of complex symbolism in mortuary rites that go on for days, weeks, and years had been the fashion in scholarly writing. But it failed to grasp the intense emotions of the bereaved. He felt he at last understood the emotional depth of Ilongot who have little interest in elaborate symbol systems but will say only, in one-line accounts that leave so much unspoken, that head-hunting allows throwing away unbearable grief.
Romanticized Bali
Trance and Dance in Bali
One of Haddon’s students, Gregory Bateson, married American anthropol- ogist Margaret Mead, who was a student of Franz Boas, the founder of Ameri- can anthropology. They met in New Guinea where they were both doing fieldwork, and in 1936 they married in Singapore on their way to Bali for a three year research trip. Bali in the 1930s was already a privileged enclave of expat Europeans and Americans, a kind of “tropical café society” (Rony 2006:7) for artists and academics. Bali was highly romanticized: the people were beautiful, the culture aesthetic, the landscape luscious. It was the begin- ning of a stream of scholars who would make their reputations and Bali’s fame as one of the most-studied cultures in the world.
Yet it was only 30 years after the puputan (the fight to the death, mass ritual suicide). Following a dispute over who had the right to plunder a sunken Chi- nese ship, Dutch forces had moved into Bali against the southern kingdoms (described in chapter 10), who defiantly resisted Dutch rifles with krisses (knives) and flung jewels. The ultimate resistance occurred when the raja of Denpasar, dressed in white cremation clothes, ordered his high priest to plunge a knife into his chest, and by the end, a thousand Balinese died in a mass sui- cide. Whether the violent end of the old order had any enduring impact on the psyches of surviving Balinese 30 years later was not a question that Mead and Bateson explored. They were deeply interested in ritual violence, however, even while the “representation of Balinese political violence was taboo” (Rony 2006). Years later, their Balinese research assistant, I Made Kaler, said: “I
The puputan, mass ritual suicide. This French poster depicts the resistance that shocked Europe when colonial subjects like the raja of Boeleleng, together with 400 of his subjects, committed suicide rather than submit to Dutch rule. The way in which the suicides were accomplished was drawn from Balinese temple dramas.
never talked about what was invisible, but very much alive in Bali. Talking was too dangerous, regarding the Dutch. Margaret Mead herself never broached a political discourse” (Rony 2006).
But Mead and Bateson in the 1930s were interested in psychological ques- tions. They found Bali photogenic, its people innately theatrical (as even the puputan demonstrated), but what they made an effort to document was a schizo- phrenic quality to the culture. They were funded by the Committee for Research in Dementia Praecox (i.e., schizophrenia), and their most significant research method was extensive visual documentation of Balinese behavior. They took over 25,000 still photographs and 22,000 feet of film. It took years after they returned home to process all this visual data into two books and six films. Their most important ideas were presented in Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942). Here they assembled 759 stills organized into groups illustrat- ing themes of character formation, many of them focusing on mothers and babies, habitual bodily gestures, episodes of trance, and rites of passage. “The Balinese enjoy very much the gay impersonal atmosphere of crowded occa- sions . . . a Balinese crowd will pack almost solid, without any of those spaces which we try to preserve around ourselves,” Mead wrote (Bateson and Mead 1942:64). Six photographs illustrate this point: a thousand people carrying ashes to the sea for the deification of a dead father; women and girls carrying offerings for a temple festival; and so forth. However, the opposite can happen: a trance-like withdrawal they call “awayness” in which individuals surrounded by others become vacant and unresponsive, illustrated by small boys, a mother with her child, a psychopathic vagrant, and a woodcarver.
They explained these psychological patterns in adults through Balinese
child-rearing practices, providing photographic evidence. Mothers tease their children; they make them jealous by coddling other babies; they scare them with shouts of “snake”; they arouse their emotions, sending them into tantrums. Then, rather than enclosing them in warm embraces for reassurance, they go “away.” They emotionally withdraw rather than responding to the child’s fears and emotions. Gradually the child learns alternative emotional strategies like
Photo spread on the following two pages: Photos from Mead and Bateson, Balinese Character, 1942. This work published 759 photos displayed as in these two plates, each a set of nine photos portraying psychological traits instilled in early childhood and projected into adult culture. In the photos on the left, a mother responds to her child’s fretting (1 and 2), but when he responds to her (3) she looks away. In (4) she laughs at some external stimu- lus; then rhythmically pats his head, (7) again looking elsewhere as the child seeks emo- tional connection through frantic nursing. In the photos on the right, we see scenes of men engaged in trance dances. In (1), a Balinese drawing, three men fight a witch with krisses, each in a different stage of falling into trance. The man in (2) is about to attack the witch; in (3) and (7) a trance dancer is in the final state of self-attack. Photo (8) depicts a small boy in a tantrum as his mother laughs at him, perhaps an original emo- tional formation for adult trance dancing with self-attacking krisses. (5) through (9) are additional shots of trance dancers in extreme state.
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withdrawing themselves into emotional remoteness even in intense social situa- tions like crowded temple festivals. Perhaps the most distinctive outcome is the trance state that Balinese culture provides multiple opportunities to exhibit. In temple festivals, dancers go into trance as the mythological Witch, Rangda, or the Dragon Barong, along with their followers, and do battle in the temple grounds. The Witch’s followers are danced by little girls, and Barong’s by young men with krisses. The drama goes on for hours, with performers falling into deep trances, the young warriors turning their krisses onto themselves. At the end, the dancers in deep trance or comas are taken inside the temple to be brought back by incense and holy water. Bateson and Mead hypothesize that the Witch is a projection of the frustrating mother of early childhood, and that the trances and self-stabbing with krisses are the tantrums promoted by the unreachable mother. These connections between early childhood experiences and aspects of the larger culture were of great interest in this period; this area of research began to be called “Culture and Personality Studies.” Psychoanalysts believed that cer- tain configurations of early experience tend to produce certain personality con- figurations in the adult. Transferring these findings to the investigation of societies as wholes, it becomes possible to make tentative predictions as to what sort of people the child-rearing techniques of a particular society would be likely to produce (Craig 1947). The idea was that people in small-scale soci- eties are likely to treat their children in similar ways (i.e., in culturally patterned ways) and that these children as adults will have similar personality outcomes. And since child-rearing practices are different from culture to culture, so might resulting personalities of adults vary from culture to culture (i.e., modal person- ality types). Thus, they believed, it makes sense to speak of a typically Balinese,
Japanese, American, or other personality type.
Another study with these theoretical suppositions was conducted about the same time in Alor by Cora DuBois (The People of Alor, 1944). (Alor is a small volcanic island just down the Indonesian archipelago from Bali at the eastern end, near Timor.) She studied mother–child relations at length, finding that because of mothers’ responsibilities in their fields, children are given too little attention, are not trained systematically, are disciplined with teasing, ridicule, and frustration rather than by praise and encouragement. The mother does not become a dependable object, producing anxieties and inhibitions in the emo- tionally brittle child. As a result, individuals “develop as highly isolated units, with little capacity for satisfying personal relationships, and filled with pent-up hostility; . . . insecure, suspicious, lacking in self-confidence and self-esteem, devoid of enterprise and initiative and helpless in mastering their environment, and . . . with slight development of conscience” (Craig 1947:369).
Eventually this research approach began to lose its momentum. We had learned a great deal about how culture affects personality, but we had to retreat from extreme cultural determinism with the realization that much of human nature is common across cultures. For example, aggression may indeed vary across cultures in terms of the forms that aggressive action may take (i.e., gun
428 Part V: Southeast Asia
Chapter 11 Insular Southeast Asia
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violence versus head-hunting versus cockfighting), but the motivations for aggression are explained by the same set of principles across cultures, including physical and emotional frustration, narcissistic injury, and the thwarting of desires and wishes (Spiro 1999). Research conducted in Insular Southeast Asia contributed greatly both to the initial insights and to recognition of the limita- tions of those insights.
The Balinese Cockfight
“Much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring. For it is only apparently cocks that are fighting there. Actually, it is men” (Geertz 1973).
If that sounds like a double-entendre, it is. The word for cock, sabung, Geertz tells us, works in Balinese just as the term works in English: an unmis- takable pun, “producing the same tired jokes, strained puns, and uninventive obscenities” (p. 418). Balinese men raise, coddle, ruffle, and groom their roost- ers and, as often as possible, fight them in furtive cockfights that are the great passion of Balinese men, though illegal. Raising cocks and fighting them is an obsession among men (not women), and anthropologist Clifford Geertz attempted to get to the bottom of this obsession by attending 57 matches, observing the bloody fights between cocks, recording the bets made and paid, and then studying the social connections among bettors. His analysis in “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (1973) is one of the most widely read of all papers in anthropology.
The argument begins with evidence of masculine identification with cocks and cockfighting through descriptions of men’s emotional behavior with their cocks, excerpts of conversations with men about them, usually of the “I’m
Balinese men raise fighting cocks and identify closely with them; cock- fighting is as popular as ever today.
crazy about cockfighting” sort. He then describes cockfights: razor-sharp four- inch blades are attached to the ends of the bird’s feet, they are ruffled and antagonized or have chilies shoved up their anus, and then are set into the mid- dle of a ring of men, when “cocks fly almost immediately at one another in a wing-beating, head-thrusting, leg-kicking explosion of animal fury so pure, so absolute and in its own way so beautiful, as to be almost abstract, a Platonic concept of hate” (p. 422). It is a scene of bestial rage, of
aroused masculinity and the destructive power of loosened animality fused in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death. It is little wonder that when, as is the invariable rule, the owner of the winning cock takes the carcass of the loser—often torn limb from limb by its enraged owner— home to eat, he does so with a mixture of social embarrassment, moral sat- isfaction, aesthetic disgust, and cannibal joy. (Geertz 1973:421)
Over the top of this intense drama, men are placing bets. In the placing of bets, the social order is expressed and on display. There are the main bets and side bets; the main bets are the official ones, involving owners of the best cocks and the leading men of the village. The side bets are lesser status men whose cocks are not directly involved. The main bets are often so large that they are equivalent to many months’ income for a typical Balinese, and often bettors pool contributions from allies in order to come up with large amounts. These are also always equal bets, even money. On the periphery, smaller bets seek long odds. As soon as the fight is over, all bets are paid immediately.
But whose cock is fighting whose? Who is betting against whom? Here is where the sociology of Balinese communities comes into play. The four stron- gest kinship groups bet with and against each other, and side bettors show their loyalties with their bets. Competitors outside the cock ring bet against each other. A defeat is a humiliation. A win is a triumph that will be long remem- bered. The fights with the strongest social resonance evoke the highest bets; fights with little sociological significance produce smaller bets. If somehow your social loyalties come into conflict with the particular match so that there’s no good place to lay your bet, better to go out for a cup of coffee.
The melding of meanings in the cockfight—combining powerful symbols of masculinity, violent animality, staged aggression, and heavy bets against social competitors—produces a cultural site of great intensity, or “deep play” as Geertz described it. Everyone is in over his head. Every piece of the social drama is overdetermined. Much of it is sublimated. That is what gives the cockfight such enormous emotional power.
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