CHAPTER 1

      Preamble

      Lived experience is always simultaneously present to itself and absent from itself.

      —Jean-Paul Sartre

      In the late 1930s, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead did pioneering ethnographic fieldwork in a Balinese village, using still and movie cameras to capture some of the “intangible aspects” of Balinese culture and everyday life, including trance, eating, gesture, mourning, family interactions, children's play, art, and shadow-play puppets. In her introductory essay to their 1942 monograph, Mead speaks of a Balinese passion for being part of a noisy, festive crowd. Whether a marketplace, temple court, theatrical event, elaborate carving, or close-packed array of offerings on an altar, “the crowd preference is seen everywhere in Balinese life.”¹ Women are said to love crowds and crowdedness even more than men, “and to be less able to stand the silence of empty fields.”² However, every four hundred days, Bali falls silent for the new year. At this time, the roads are deserted, families withdraw to their houses, markets are closed, and no music is heard. This change from convivial boisterousness (rame) to silence and calm (njepi) echoes another change that Bateson and Mead document in compelling photographic detail—the Balinese “habit of withdrawal into vacancy—letting themselves suddenly slip into a state of mind where they are, for the moment, no longer subject to the impact of inter-personal relations.”³ One photo shows a carver who, having completed a difficult piece of work, sits staring into space, “utterly empty and spent.” Other photos show children, with dreamy and absentminded expressions on their faces, sitting or standing close to a parent. Entitled Awayness, this page of photographs also includes a “psychopathic vagrant” sitting incommunicado in the anthropologists' compound.

      When I first encountered this innovative ethnographic work in the early 1970s, I failed to see what was singularly Balinese in these images. As Herman Melville observes in Moby Dick, this oscillation between moments of association and dissociation is as true of whale calves as of human infants. “As human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the same time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; —even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born sight.”⁴ Active one minute, an infant will grow still the next, as if taking stock of one experience before seeking another. Crying will give way to calm, and a bout of vigorous kicking, grasping, or smiling will be followed by a period of passivity, the infant seemingly absorbed by something far off or deep within. Recent