CULTURAL DETERMINANTS OF BEHAVIOR 



144< 



cessant, unhurried activity of some sort, 

 seldom acknowledging or showing any fa- 

 tigue. Religious trance was highly devel- 

 oped and appears to provide an alternative 

 form of expression to excellence in one of 

 the arts; individuals or villages specialized 

 in trance or in painting, sculpture, or music. 

 \Mthin an intricate pattern of festival and 

 religious observance, every member of the 

 society was involved in varieties of artistic 

 and ritual experience. 



There is so much variation in Bali be- 

 tween village and village and between caste 

 and caste, that it will be possible only to 

 indicate a few widespread emphases and 

 themes. ^^ The Balinese infant is carried 

 all its waking hours by mother, father, child 

 nurse, amused female relative, or neighbor. 

 Secured high on the hip by a cloth sling 

 or supported by an arm which functions 

 like a sling, the child learns to move with 

 a flexible, relaxed rhythm, adjusting to the 

 activities of its carrier, who may be pound- 

 ing rice, making offerings, or (if the carrier 

 is a child) playing a vigorous running 

 game or having a temper tantrum. Before 

 the child can walk, its hands are manipu- 

 lated into ritual and dance positions; before 

 it can talk, elaborate courtesy phrases are 

 uttered in its name. It is treated as a de- 

 lightful animate toy to be teased, provoked 

 into smiles or tears, frightened into a re- 

 turn from any venture far from its pro- 

 tectors by terrible unreal threats. At 7 

 months the child, although already showing 

 some signs of withdrawal, is a gay little 

 monarch who is spoiled (as are also rajahs 

 and gods) by its attendants, who carry it 

 high where it can see all that goes on, who 

 participates in every audience and who on 

 its own volition leans over to take the full 

 breast of its mother or some other nursing 

 woman, or the dry breast of a young girl, 

 an old grandmother occasionally, or its 

 father. 



As the child reaches 2 or 3, the constant 

 teasing and stimulation, which is never al- 

 lowed to come to a real climax because the 



"I h;i\-p iis-ed the past tonsp for tlios(> practices 

 which were becoming obsolete in 1936-1939 and 

 where changes have occurred, accompanying the 

 establishment of the Republic of Indonesia. 



mother turns away from the child's rage or 

 ardor, is met by increasing unresponsive- 

 ness. The latter, accompanied by tempestu- 

 ous misery at the birth of a new baby, is 

 muted only by the number of times in which 

 sibling rivalry has been theatrically en- 

 acted with borrowed babies. As third child 

 from the bottom, the 5- or 6-year old be- 

 comes a child nurse, watching a new baby, 

 its own charge, dispossess the younger child 

 who disi)ossessed it. Little girls continue on 

 into puberty as child nurses, combining play 

 and work and slightly antagonistic en- 

 counters with the gangs of little boys, who 

 are sent off to the fields, each with a ma- 

 chete and a cow or water buffalo to care for, 

 and who occasionally turn up at ceremonies 

 or theatricals, wild, dirty, and unkempt, un- 

 til one by one, as puberty sets in, they begin 

 to join the older unmarried youtlis and seek 

 out girls for themselves. Children of both 

 sexes have experienced much genital play 

 from adults; little boys conduct contests in 

 urinating in the middle of the village street. 

 In the theatrical performances, children see 

 child-birth, played by male actors, in which 

 the newborn is killed by witches, but chil- 

 dren actually exposed to childbirth go sound 

 asleep out of fear, as do the Balinese in 

 other experiences of strain, such as waiting 

 for a sentence from a court, a decision of a 

 purchaser, etc. 



Young adolescents of both sexes are 

 highly sophisticated about sex, knowing the 

 jokes, the innuendo, the gay plots of the 

 theatre in which the prince in the end is 

 tricked and must marry the ugly sister 

 who looks like a mother or a mother-in-law. 

 Love affairs are conducted by exchanges of 

 glances, and both for adolescents and in 

 later amorous encounters, the moment of 

 highest excitement is the first glance, when 

 "they look at each other like two fighting 

 cocks." The strange is more exciting than 

 the familiar. Weddings are punctuated with 

 elaborate jokes about the expected indiffer- 

 ence and therefore impotence of the bride- 

 groom. 



Among the high c.istes hausp-arranged 

 marriages were occasions of great ceremony ; 

 the bride might be wrapped as a corpse, laid 

 out in an inner room with a group of women 

 around her while she lay for hours as if 



