1448 



HORMONAL REGULATION OF BEHAVIOR 



dead. Once her noble husband, as he cut 

 open the white cloth, gave her a present 

 of land or jewels, as he saw each part cf her 

 body for the first time. The courts were 

 organized elaborately with many wives, the 

 newest and most beautiful just pubescent 

 little girl dancers, and with a variety of 

 homoerotic and substitutive practices. Court 

 and theatre alike provided spectacles of 

 great secondary elaboration of sex. In the 

 villages the young people eluded their elders, 

 who were divided into two groups, the seri- 

 ous and the naughty, vicariously permis- 

 sive; parents attempted to plan the ap- 

 propriate marriage, between the children of 

 brothers, so that property was kept in the 

 family; all but the most submissive usually 

 arranged their own marriages, the girls 

 concealing menstruation as long as possible 

 for fear of being married off. Many mar- 

 riages followed pregnancies, ritualized by 

 postconsummation ceremonies, the most 

 complicated of which might be postponed 

 for years. 



After marriage, husband and wife lived 

 lives of graceful avoidance, one attending a 

 feast or ceremony, the other staying at 

 home, one on the farm, one in the village. 

 Eating together is not extensively practiced 

 except at large feasts in which everyone is 

 very embarrassed; the streets of even small 

 villages are filled with vendors' stalls where 

 old and young go for snacks. The people en- 

 joy groups, the crowded streets, the audience 

 at a play, the great crowds at a cremation 

 where ceremonies which take months to pre- 

 pare, attempt, always in vain, finally to get 

 rid of the earthly body, itself merely a tem- 

 porary dwelling for a reincarnated spirit. 

 Burial and cremation ceremonies stress the 

 preoccupation with the body, as do trance 

 and the high development of the plastic arts. 



Bali may be regarded as a society in 

 which individuals' responses to their own 

 bodies have been highly developed whereas 

 their relationships to others have been 

 muted during childhood, so that the theatri- 

 cal enactment is preferred to actuality ; both 

 old bachelors and old maids are found, and 

 all sorts of social and religious penalties 

 are directed against the unmarried, the bar- 

 ren, and the parents of girls only. It was a 

 culture in which excessive early sexual pre- 

 occupation was met by a series of symbolic 



forms of expression which seemed adequate 

 enough to preserve most of the population 

 in a balanced contentment, gay, impersonal, 

 artistically creative. 



The worst oath was the word leprosy 

 which was terribly feared, particularly be- 

 cause young girls in the first stages were re- 

 garded as having particularly beautiful skin ; 

 the worst ceremonial crimes ( for there is no 

 sin in our sense of the word) were zoolagnia, 

 incest ( widely interpreted ) , bearing twins of 

 opposite sex, and sex relations with a woman 

 of higher caste. From such events the com- 

 munity had to be purified by prolonged cer- 

 emonial, and the offenders were banished 

 to lands of punishment, with ceremonial 

 and without expressions of anger. The very 

 infrequent crimes were either theft — and a 

 thief caught red-handed was killed at once, 

 after the entire political community was 

 summoned — or murder, usually committed 

 after running amok or without any pre- 

 meditation at all. An existence of mutual 

 nonresponsiveness, dependence on ritual 

 and calendrical rhythm, was thus occa- 

 sionally punctuated by sudden unexplained 

 small acts of violence. When the Dutch 

 troops came to take over the southern part of 

 the island, the rajah and his entire court 

 went out to be shot down by the Dutch guns, 

 and when the Dutch soldier's hands paused 

 before the carnage, they turned their krisses 

 against themselves. In groups, where they 

 can sleep in close contact or sit leaning 

 against each other, the Balinese can go great 

 distances from their villages, or even from 

 Bali, but an individual taken away alone be- 

 comes frightened and ill. Individuals when 

 tested showed many schizoid elements, yet 

 they functioned as members of their com- 

 munities, planting their rice fields, painting, 

 carving, acting, officiating, within a view of 

 life in which virgin children and old people 

 are closest to heaven, those of reproductive 

 age farthest away. 



E. THE LEPCHAS OF SIKKIM^" 



The Lepchas are a Mongoloid people who 

 once inhabited the greater part of Sikkim 

 and are now limited in any pure form to a 

 few small communities on very rough and 

 precipitous land reserved and governed by 



" Based on field work done in 1937 by Geoffrey 

 Gorer (1938). Present tense as of 1937, present con- 

 ditions unknown. 



