Villas a window into Mead's Bali sojourn

Mehru Jaffer, Contributor, Ubud, Bali

Finally parked outside the sign pointing to Taman Bebek Villas, the driver could not believe that he had been forced to detour all the way around the Sayan Monkey Forest just to get to this place with a wide, wooden roof that looked like a relic from another world.

Are you sure you are not looking for Hotel Campuan or the Amandari? The young driver wanted to take me to at least one of the designer hotels, like Chedi Ubud or Begawan Giri, that are as popular with tourists as the sacred sites of Bali.

Why had he had to keep on driving down the Sayan road in search of the Bebek Villas? This was something that he could not understand. If the Bebek Villas were so special he would be the first to know the place, instead of having to endure the embarrassment of stopping to ask for directions.

I warned the driver that he would have to wait a bit longer while I finished coffee in the front office here instead of fulfilling the desire of being seen at Naughty Nuri's or at the much more popular Lotus Cafe.

He gave me a funny look but waited. He did not look impressed when he was later told that Bebek Villas was once the home of Colin McPhee, author of Music in Bali and then Margaret Mead, perhaps one of the world's most influential anthropologists. Just below the breathtaking view, the Woolworth's heiress Barbara Hutton had her home here in the 1930s.

After working in Samoa and New Guinea, Mead came to Bali in 1936 to become part of that charmed expatriate circle in Ubud whose leading light was Walter Spies, an artistic and musical child of a prosperous German. Together this group challenged Bali's vulgar tourist image abroad to present a version of the real Bali as a rich culture based on authentic folk traditions.

Although a recluse, his deep feelings for matters cultural made Spies popular with the expatriate community and the Balinese alike.

The famous, from Celemenceau to HG Wells, all visited Bali in their time. Hutton, Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward and numerous others, rich, titled or simply curious, all came to the home of Spies in the hills of Ubud, writes Adrian Vickers in Bali A Paradise Created.

Bali was built up as a romantic refuge by those Europeans who could get away from the depression of World War I and from preparations being made in Europe to wage yet another war.

Here art was seen as the soul of the Balinese community and the people as universally artistic, enabling them to make painting, music, dance part of the rhythm of daily life, along with working in the fields, feeding pigs, bearing children or cooking. Art seemed like a prayer to the holiness of life, a deep spirituality in the community. This is the image of Bali created by war weary Europeans and the island's first tourists that has survived to this day.

The idea of the noble peasantry as embodying the real spirit of Bali was spread around this time. While musician Colin McPhee sought the best examples of cultural refinement from the courts, Mead concentrated on the culture of ordinary people.

Mead sometimes felt that art was overdone in Bali and that the island teemed with excessive rituals. She ventured to find out what impact this excessiveness of culture had on the community.

This was the third of five field trips to eight different societies that Mead made in a span of 14 years. She lived in Bali with Gregory Bateson, her third husband and also a world-renowned anthropologist, and together they experimented with still photography and film as a first serious attempt to use visual anthropology for documenting culture.

Along with vivacious cinematographer Jane Belo, she produced classic titles like Trance and Dance in Bali, Learning to Dance in Bali and Karba's First Years. Mead met Bateson in New Guinea where he had already completed a study of ritual and play that has gone to revolutionize the way culture is studied. The two married on the slow boat ride from New Guinea to Bali, and their visit to the island coincided with the arrival here of Charlie Chaplin and poet Noel Coward.

Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis by Mead and Bateson is the first extensive publication based upon their research in Bali. The 277-page book contains approximately 700 black and white photographs of their days in Bali and continues to contribute to the understanding of people around the world. A crucial moment is captured in a photograph of a mother teasing her little son by playing with his penis.

The magic of wandering around the Bebek Villas lies in wondering on which chair Mead may have sat as she studied the photograph of a Balinese mother teasing her little son in such a provocative way. Did she sit with a tray of tea on the open porch perched on a ridge to draw conclusions about the deep implications of the genital play? The couple was surely familiar with the works of Sigmund Freud.

The question is which view of the breathtaking landscape did the two face as they argued how cultural repression splits the personality of the Balinese into calm, harmonious and almost too restrained people but who also go through culturally controlled outbursts that express hidden aspects of their personality?

Mead and Bateson saw the witch and the kris as examples of these outbursts. With a definite taste for the bizarre, Mead was fascinated with the Rangda witch. Combined with the kris dance, the Rangda witch seemed to complete the image of Bali as a tropical paradise where people love harmony but lurking behind the placidity is also the wild force ready to reel into trance and frenzy in self stabbing.

I like to imagine that this is the place, overlooking the Ayung River and surrounded by emerald green garlands of rice fields where Mead and Bateson, along with the Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet, tried to figure out the violent content of Gusti Nyoman Lempad's paintings. They must have argued for hours how a man who made such very obscene drawings was himself so shy and modest.

To visit Bebek Villas today is also to get a feel for the environment that inspired Mead's writings that have in return been so important in developing ideas of liberation from a boringly puritanical view of the world. I do not know whether the Bebek Villas is kept so casual and rustic due to a lack of funds or as an example of an alternative lifestyle closer to Bali's romantic idea of the last paradise.