#balinesecharacter

[craftinganthropologicaltext]

Balinese Character

I would like to focus my exploration on two main emotions: fear and unity. Although they seem to have opposing values, in the Balinese Character explorations, they actually work hand-in-hand.  The author alludes to “the fear of disintegration, epitomized in the shuddering horror at the rotting of the body after death”. He says that, “in the hands, more intensely than in any other part of the body, this disassociation, this independence of each small unit is seen”. Perhaps for this reason, the work’s focus is on hands: sequencing and arranging is an important employed technique, and the sections are “Hand postures in daily life”, “Hand postures in dance”,  “Hand postures in arts and trance”, “The surface of the body” and “Hands skin and mouth”. Hands are certainly the recurring theme, but it is interesting how the author places them in specific contexts to add additional meaning and encourage the viewer to associate them with, for example, “daily life” or “dance”. After all, this also reveals that “dance” is not to be viewed as part of “daily life” – and certainly isn’t as revealing of the Balinese culture as hands are, in the mind of the author. The second significant emotion is unity, and this works together with fear, in the sense that unity of the body shapes – rather than each acting as an individual entity – is seen as a way of overcoming that fear.  Unity is also employed in the sense that this fear of disintegration is shared by everyone – it is a common emotion and shared experience. The photos are not emotional, but rather, show the humanity of the people depicted. In particular, the photo of the community of people – “women lousing at a wedding” as the description reveals – depicts the way their hands and heads move, and how they interact with each other. It captures and “embodies that abstraction which we technically call culture”, and that we all share, and the focus is on the movements. Overall, the photos seem to be open to visual interpretation when just looking at them. But the captions draw our attention to other features of the photo that we didn’t notice earlier. The captions also correct our partial view and draw our attention to our bias and to the actual subject matter. The captions also just give a greater understanding of what is going on. Yet simultaneously, the captions limit our room for interpretation since we are given the right answer. Thus the captions seem to serve three purposes: they enhance our understanding and add meaning, while also reducing the possibilities and room for interpretation, and through this, the captions let the viewer notice his/her own bias.

[craftinganthropologicaltext]

Balinese character discussion

The photographer uses high contrast in addition to leading lines created by people’s bodies to highlight the subjects. In plate 23, for example, the man’s arms tend to lead the viewer’s eyes towards the subject. Leading lines are seen in photo 2, where the hands and arms create two triangles, and in photos 4, 5, and 6, where the hands lead into the statue. Since the paper and statue are fairly light-colored compared to the background and the human subjects for this plate, the photographs tend to place an equal emphasis on individuals and the material objects of their culture. The arrangement of pictures supports this relationship between subject and object. On plate 23, the photographs are arranged so that they start out with the man fully in the frame, looking at his paper, but as you go down, the camera zooms in on what he is making. The object is as important as the artist. This arrangement technique also emphasizes hand postures, which the author finds to be unique to the culture.

Something unique about the photo sets are the focus on individuals, as opposed to Malinowski’s emphasis on groups of people and the community as a whole. At most, the pictures tend to have parent and child, with the exception of plate 24 number 3, which features a picture of women lousing each other. Something else that is unique about the anthropological text is that the photographer juxtaposes the culture’s drawings with the same situation in real life, and this shows a sense of cultural self-awareness and connects the folk art to their traditions. This technique is not used in plate 23, but is seen in plates 22 and 24.

The captions, as they should, provide more detail about the photographs. However, they are different in that they analyze the subject’s hand positions and describe motions instead of always showing them. In plates 1 to 3, for example, the author says that the subject’s “right hand is inactive while his left is in an apparently sensory position.”

[craftinganthropologicaltext]

Discussion

In The text and the captions are so crucial in understanding the meaning of the photos. The photos at first appear to be merely a series of close-up, personal shots taken of the Balinese subjects; we see their interactions with one another (images of the family unit), their work in their careers (the man carving, the Brahman artist drawing, men measuring rattan), and their celebrations (the dancing series), but without the explanations, these photographs could read as “travel photos.”  

The text amplifies the power of the photographs. It gives the authors credit for having so deeply immersed themselves in the culture, for they not only photograph but understand the emotional threads of Balinese Culture. The series of the girl in the audience shows that she is not just intrigued by the performance—she is participating in the Balinese fixation on the perfection of the human form, a fear of bodily disintegration. Her hands transform from a fidgety child’s fingers into “exploratory” objects isolated from her body. She is curious about her mouth, her skin, and her face, and her hands are the tool by which this exploration occurs.

The series contextualizes the behavior by giving it mobile life; what is depicted is a somewhat deliberate process, not an isolated moment of touch. The awareness of custom speaks to the authenticity of the authors and the genuine passion for understanding Balinese Culture.

Likewise, the insertion of paintings and iconography into the series further contextualizes the subjects. These paintings and iconography connect artistic beauty to the reality of Balinese life—the Balinese’s bodies become these paintings (not in a derogatory sense…in a poetic sense), and these paintings are representations of these living, breathing works of art. The book claims to be about the “Balinese--about the way in which they, as living persons, moving, standing, eating, sleeping, dancing, and going into trance, embody that abstraction which (after we have abstracted it) we technically call culture” (xii). The addition of cultural artwork to the plates places pieces of Balinese culture as evidence of that claim; these photographs are not total abstractions--they address deeply held convictions in Balinese culture evident in the Balinese art. 

The composition of these photos demonstrates the commitment of the authors to represent Balinese Culture and ideals. The composition makes body parts the focus, the subject, of the photograph, rather than the whole human. In almost every photo, body parts are of utmost visual importance (Plate 24 and Plate 23, especially). The diagonal lines of arms and legs lead to the focal point, as do manmade or natural shapes (as in Plate 21, photos 1, 3, 5, and 6). The idea that human bodies can be deconstructed and exist in isolation is a Balinese principle, and reflective of their intense fear of disintegration. These photos are not composed in a pejorative way or in a way that aims to cause this separation of body parts from the body. Instead, each photo pays homage to the cultural narrative in its very composition.