Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.
Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist.
Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979).
Kecak, known in Indonesian as tari kecak, is a form of Balinese Hindu dance and music drama that was developed in the 1930s in Bali, Indonesia. Since its creation, it has been performed primarily by men, with the first women's kecak group having started in 2006. The dance is based on the story of the Ramayana and is traditionally performed in temples and villages across Bali.
Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Visual anthropology is a subfield of social anthropology that is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media. More recently it has been used by historians of science and visual culture. Although sometimes wrongly conflated with ethnographic film, visual anthropology encompasses much more, including the anthropological study of all visual representations such as dance and other kinds of performance, museums and archiving, all visual arts, and the production and reception of mass media. Histories and analyses of representations from many cultures are part of visual anthropology: research topics include sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs. Also within the province of the subfield are studies of human vision, properties of media, the relationship of visual form and function, and applied, collaborative uses of visual representations.
The Margaret Mead Film Festival is an annual film festival held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It is the longest-running, premiere showcase for international documentaries in the United States, encompassing a broad spectrum of work, from indigenous community media to experimental nonfiction. The Festival is distinguished by its outstanding selection of titles, which tackle diverse and challenging subjects, representing a range of issues and perspectives, and by the forums for discussion with filmmakers and speakers.
Timeline of anthropology, 1980–1989
Balinese dance is an ancient dance tradition that is part of the religious and artistic expression among the Balinese people of Bali island, Indonesia. Balinese dance is dynamic, angular and intensely expressive. Balinese dancers express the stories of dance-drama through the bodily gestures including gestures of fingers, hands, head and eyes.
Ecstatic dance is a form of dance in which the dancers, sometimes without the need to follow specific steps, abandon themselves to the rhythm and move freely as the music takes them, leading to trance and a feeling of ecstasy. The effects of ecstatic dance begin with ecstasy itself, which may be experienced in differing degrees. Dancers are described as feeling connected to others, and to their own emotions. The dance serves as a form of meditation, helping people to cope with stress and to attain serenity.
Balinese art is art of Hindu-Javanese origin that grew from the work of artisans of the Majapahit Kingdom, with their expansion to Bali in the late 14th century. From the sixteenth until the twentieth centuries, the village of Kamasan, Klungkung, was the centre of classical Balinese art. During the first part of the twentieth century, new varieties of Balinese art developed. Since the late twentieth century, Ubud and its neighboring villages established a reputation as the center of Balinese art.
An ethnographic film is a non-fiction film, often similar to a documentary film, historically shot by Western filmmakers and dealing with non-Western people, and sometimes associated with anthropology. Definitions of the term are not definitive. Some academics claim it is more documentary, less anthropology, while others think it rests somewhere between the fields of anthropology and documentary films.
I Nyoman Ngendon (1906-1946). I Nyoman Ngendon was among the first Batuan painters who embraced the modernization of Balinese art that took place around the beginning of the 1930s. Ngendon first learned the Wayang-style painting from I Dewa Nyoman Mura, a well-known painter in Batuan. Walter Spies' influence can be seen in their early works . His works can be found in several museums throughout the world. In Bali, his works can be viewed at the Museum Puri Lukisan and the Agung Rai Museum of Art (ARMA). In the Netherlands, his works can be found at the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden and the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.
Ida Bagus Made Togog (1913–1989) was born into a noble Brahmana clan in the center of Batuan. Together with I Ngendon, he was one of the foremost painters from Batuan. Unlike Ngendon, Togog was not particularly interested in Western ideas. He was comfortable with the Balinese way of life and adhered closely to the Balinese belief system. As a member of the high priest family, Togog was very familiar with Balinese lontar and Balinese myths and folklore. His works were primarily drawn from religion and local myths from an insider's view point and he narrates them through his drawings, just like in the Wayang tradition. The strength of his drawings was neither his draftsmanship nor composition, but his narration of complex religious beliefs and the united life in Bali as a balance between the macrocosm and microcosm, between the benevolent and good spirits. According to Wim Bakker, it was the Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet, who inspired him to translate images in Balinese lontars into drawings. During 1936 to 1938, he was befriended by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead and produced 83 paintings for them. As Bateson and Mead went to Bali to do research on Balinese character, they requested Togog to give an expression of his dreams. He produced a large number of drawings on dreams and his own interpretation in the context of Balinese beliefs as he understood it.
Batuan is a village in Bali, Indonesia. It is noted for its artwork and style of painting which originated in the village in the 1930s and has since emerged into a major Balinese artistic style, known as a Batuan painting. It is a major painting center and contains a number of art galleries and cooperative art societies which have played a key role in promoting the art of Batuan. The village is also known for its performance of the ancient Gambuh dance, performed every Full Moon day.
In political anthropology, a theatre state is a political state directed towards the performance of drama and ritual rather than towards more conventional ends such as warfare and welfare. Power in a theatre state is exercised through spectacle. The term, coined by Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) in 1980 in reference to political practice in the nineteenth-century Balinese Negara, has since expanded in usage. Hunik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung, for example, regard contemporary North Korea as a theatre state. In Geertz's original usage, the concept of the theatre state contests the notion that precolonial society can be analysed in the conventional discourse of Oriental despotism.
Robert Bush Lemelson is an American cultural anthropologist and film producer. He received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Lemelson's area of specialty is transcultural psychiatry; Southeast Asian Studies, particularly Indonesia; and psychological and medical anthropology. He is a research anthropologist in the Semel Institute of Neuroscience UCLA, and an adjunct professor of Anthropology at UCLA. His scholarly work has appeared in journals and books. Lemelson founded Elemental Productions in 2008, a documentary production company, and has directed and produced numerous ethnographic films.
Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali is a 1980 book written by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Geertz argues that the pre-colonial Balinese state was not a "hydraulic bureaucracy" nor an oriental despotism, but rather, an organized spectacle. The noble rulers of the island were less interested in administering the lives of the Balinese than in dramatizing their rank and hence political superiority through large public rituals and ceremonies. These cultural processes did not support the state, he argues, but were the state.
It is perhaps most clear in what was, after all, the master image of political life: kingship. The whole of the negara - court life, the traditions that organized it, the extractions that supported it, the privileges that accompanied it - was essentially directed toward defining what power was; and what power was what kings were. Particular kings came and went, 'poor passing facts' anonymized in titles, immobilized in ritual, and annihilated in bonfires. But what they represented, the model-and-copy conception of order, remained unaltered, at least over the period we know much about. The driving aim of higher politics was to construct a state by constructing a king. The more consummate the king, the more exemplary the centre. The more exemplary the centre, the more actual the realm.
Kebyar Duduk is a traditional Balinese dance created by a Balinese man I Ketut Marya and first performed publicly in 1925. Inspired by the development of the quick-paced gamelan gong kebyar, kebyar duduk is named for the seated and half-seated positions taken by the dancers. It does not convey a story, but is interpretative.
Hildred Storey Geertz was an American anthropologist who studied Balinese and Javanese kinship practices and Balinese art in Indonesia.
