1446 



HORMONAL REGULATION OF BEHAVIOR 



tinged with aggression interspersed with 

 grooming. Mothers groom their children, 

 hunt for ticks, phick out thorns; lovers 

 spend hours together in mutual grooming 

 combined with scratching and pinching, 

 poking fingers into each others' eyes, gluing 

 feathers on each others' hair, and painting 

 each other with red paint. This pattern of 

 aggression runs all through. Children are 

 allowed to strike and abuse their parents; 

 older children poke at the eyes and pinch 

 the genitals of younger children, and this 

 practice is repeated with the dying to ascer- 

 tain whether they are really dead. In the 

 small boys' play groups, in which they are 

 practicing hunting skills, severe wounds are 

 sometimes dealt each other. 



The whole pattern of life is very much 

 what one might expect if a society were 

 constructed by a group of hungry, neglected, 

 undisciplined, just-adolescent children. The 

 alliances which do exist are based on neces- 

 sity; reciprocity must always be enforced; 

 all members of the group not immediately 

 concerned in an event act as unhelpful, 

 greedy, and jeering spectators. These atti- 

 tudes are exemplified in the drinking party 

 at which the uninvited cluster about the 

 edges waiting until the participants get so 

 drunk that a drink can be stolen, while the 

 women squat about waiting for the inevita- 

 ble wounds, meanwhile gloating over the 

 brawling, or in the plight of an unmarried 

 man lost near camp at nightfall for whom 

 no one would venture out. Yet, like the refu- 

 gee children who have grown up in concen- 

 tration camps, they are capable of forming 

 alliances, of observing minimal ties of loy- 

 alty to sex partner and child, and of pro- 

 tecting and even indulging young children. 

 Considering their desperately depriving en- 

 vironment, their poor technology and low 

 elaboration of life, and their early demands 

 on adolescent children, the rules governing 

 sex behavior are such as to preserve the 

 cohesion of the group and yet allow a 

 large amount of permitted gratification, 

 which Holmberg believes serves as a cushion 

 against the frustration involved in their 

 precarious food situation. Satisfactory and 

 easy sex relations may also account for 

 durability of the ties between parents and 

 children and between siblings, who in adult- 



hood share spouses with relative lack of con- 

 flict. The extremely early access to women 

 may account in part for the lack of respon- 

 sible effort and the fact that they have fled 

 from neighboring tribes rather than learned 

 from them. 



D. THE BALINESE^*^ 



Bali is not a primitive society, but a com- 

 plex traditional culture, with courts and 

 kings, writing, money, and iron tools, the 

 potter's wheel, and animal-drawn plows. 

 Before the conquest of Bali by the Nether- 

 lands, a conquest which lasted until Bali 

 became part of Indonesia, the Balinese 

 numbered less than a million people. The 

 economy was based on rice agriculture, and 

 the rice diet was supplemented by fish, 

 vegetables, and a limited amount of meat as 

 garnish. Successive waves of religious in- 

 fluence from Hinduism and Buddhism, eco- 

 nomic influence from China, and political 

 conquest by Java had swept over an island 

 with a basically Indonesian population 

 speaking a Malay language. A caste sys- 

 tem derivative from India was superimposed 

 on the great bulk of the population who' 

 were regarded as casteless rather than out- 

 cast people. The society was highly or- 

 ganized in villages with traditional law, pe- 

 culiar to each village and centuries old. The 

 court of the rajahs and the religious palace 

 and judicial courts connected with the ra- 

 jahs exacted various forms of tribute from 

 l^easants who were regarded as related to 

 them, but on the whole each village main- 

 tained its own equilibrium within a continu- 

 ous impersonal contact, organized around 

 large markets, traveling theatrical com- 

 panies and religious officiants of all types, 

 and intervillage gambling centering around 

 cockfighting. The arts, especially orchestral 

 music, the dance, and the theatre, were 

 highly developed; religious ceremonial in- 

 volved the construction of thousands of 

 beautiful perishable objects from flour, 

 leaves, and flowers. The people moved with 

 a relaxed, dream-like quality most of the 

 time and filled their hours with almost in- 



"' Based on fi(>ld work by Grcgoiy Batc.^on, Jano 

 Belo, Colin McPhee, and myself, done prineipally 

 in the 1930's. For a comprehensive bibliography, 

 see Mead (1949b), p. 427 ei seq. 



