• Sociocentric Culture: Community and collective identity prioritized over individualism.

• Crowd Preference: Constant communal activities and celebrations.

• Balinese Calendar: Tied to ritual and community-based activities.

• Child Rearing: Emphasis on community over self.

• Extra Semantic Knowledge (ESK): Imaginal memory capturing unconscious information, seen in premonitory dreams.

What can Mead teach us about what it means to live, act, and feel in a sociocentric culture? Discuss the scene in which Mead is trying to be sincere while the dogs bark and the babies cry. Discuss the Balinese preference for crowds, their calendar versus our U.S. sense of time, Balinese people visiting in street and in village celebrations, not in houses.

The island of Bali, nestled between the Indian and Pacific Oceans north of Australia, described in the film Mystic Land: Island of 1000 Temples as a work of art unto itself.  Its terraced rice fields cover the island, except in the center where majestic volcanoes and rainforest dominate the landscape.  It was here that Margaret Mead, famed anthropologist, engaged in a study of Balinese culture.  Her first encounters were windows into the complex culture she would study.  Distracting events like crying babies and barking dogs during early interviews caught her attention, as the bustle of communities was ever-present.  She termed this ‘crowd preference’.  The Balinese, she discovered, lived their lives entirely as a community, where personal and individual aspects of the ‘self’ emphasized in Western cultures, such as self-reliance and individual achievement, are subordinated in individuals.

The characteristics of this community-based culture are apparent in every aspect of the people and land of Bali.  The Balinese calendar is wrapped up in Hindu and familial customs and tied to ritual and community-based activities.  Terraced rice fields cover the inner island as communities carefully till and tend to the land.  Children are raised among the community, often teased and passed around in an effort to help reinforce in young minds the need to grow out of a self-centered personality.  And in the form of witchcraft-like Hindu plays and vivid ritualized performances, the Balinese come together all year long to celebrate their successes and wash away their doubts, reinforcing their collective sense of ‘self’ in the process.

What is Extra Semantic Knowledge? Give and discuss examples. What does the landslide at Tegallalang have to do with Extra Semantic Knowledge and with the dream?

In describing her theory of a second, imaginal, memory, scholar Michel Stephen describes a more complex mind than many imagine on first thought.  In this framework, the imaginal memory presents to us feelings and thoughts about events that are not represented by the semantical memory, the analytical memory that we use so frequently in our daily lives.  The imaginal memory collects information that our senses do not pick up, and they remain unconsciously known to us.  One way this idea of the human memory system is made aware to us, according to Stephen, is in our dreams, where our the imaginal memories are overlaid onto the semantical memory, producing the deep psychological effects that powerful dreams can have on people.  Additionally, this model of memory and dreams can account for premonition, what Stephen refers to as Extra Semantic Knowledge, a clever pun on ESP.

One way this has been demonstrated for Stephen is in the dream of a survivor of a mudslide at Tegallalalng, Gianyar in Bali, where she was engaged in fieldwork.  Some survivors recounted having dreams some weeks before the deadly mudslide occurred.  In these dreams, people who lived nearby the mudslide site and had friends who collected raw materials there, saw naked children walking up to the site.  In fact, the friends collecting raw materials confirmed they had indeed been shooed away by children, warning them off of the dig site.  But besides putting out some offerings to the Hindu deities, they otherwise shrugged off the omen and continued gathering there.  Here the imaginal mind had picked up on subtle clues about the environment, and had attempted to overlay these clues onto the semantic memories coming through in the dreams, acting as a sort of precognition of events to come.

References

Bateson, Gregory, Mead, Margaret, and Gajdusek, D. Carleton. Balinese Character; a Photographic Analysis. [New York]: [New York Academy of Sciences], 1942. Print. Special Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences ; v. 2.

Duncan, Chip., Olmos, Edward James, and Duncan Group, Inc. Mystic Lands. Disc 3, Bali, Australia, Maya, Jerusalem, Varanasi. Collector's ed. Milwaukee, Wis.: Duncan Group, 2005. Print.

Mageo, J. M. (2003). Dreaming and the Self: New Perspectives on Subjectivity, Identity, and Emotion. Albany: State University of New York Press.