Villas a window into Mead's Bali sojourn

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.