ABSTRACT
My focus for this chapter is a single period of the anthropologist and cybernetic theorist Gregory Bateson’s work, what might be called his “Balinese period.” The period lasted from around 1936 until 1942, during which time Bateson was first working in, and then writing on Balinese ritual.1 The period ended with the publication of a now-classic text, co-published with Margaret Mead, Balinese Character: a Photographic Analysis. Bateson’s work with Mead, which was ongoing throughout this period and also definitive of it, centered around the project of developing a non-linguistic means (via film and photography) of representing culturally patterned behavior – culture “embodied” as Bateson and Mead termed it (Bateson and Mead 1942, xii). Bateson shot 25,000 still photographs during the course of this work, and shot more than 22,000 feet of 16-millimeter film as well.2
