Author: Paul Henley

12 mins., b&w, silent with English voice-over narration by Margaret Mead

Source : this film may be viewed on-line here.

This is one of seven films that Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead shot in Bali and New Guinea during their fieldwork there in the years 1936-39. All but one of these films, Learning to Dance in Bali, formed part of a series entitled Character Formation in Different Cultures, and focused particularly on parent-child relations.

By the time that these films were edited, mostly in the early 1950s, Mead and Bateson had gone their separate ways both professionally and personally, and the editing was supervised exclusively by Mead, assisted by the editor Josef Bohmer. However, even though Bateson was not involved in the editing, Mead insisted that his name should appear in the credits, and even be put first in accordance with alphabetical principles.

This is one of two comparative films in the Character Formation series (the other being Childhood Rivalry). This film compares that the way in which mothers bathe their babies in three different cultural settings: in a bowl in the open air in a highland village in Bali, at the edge of the Sepik River in New Guinea, and in two different North American bathrooms in two different decades (the 1930s baby being a boy, the 1940s baby being a girl).

Text : Henley 2013a

 

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16 mins., b&w, silent but with English voice-over performed by Margaret Mead

Source :  this film may be viewed on-line here.

This one of the seven films that Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead shot in Bali and New Guinea during their fieldwork there in the years 1936-39. All but one of these films, Learning to Dance in Bali, formed part of a series entitled Character Formation in Different Cultures, and focused particularly on parent-child relations.

By the time that these films were edited, mostly in the early 1950s, Mead and Bateson had gone their separate ways both professionally and personally, and the editing was supervised exclusively by Mead, assisted by the editor Josef Bohmer. However, even though Bateson was not involved in the editing, Mead insisted that his name should appear in the credits, and even be put first in accordance with alphabetical principles.

This is  one of two films in the Character Formation series that were comparative (the other being Bathing Babies in Three Cultures). It shows children of the same age in two cultures responding differently to their mother attending to another baby, to the ear-piercing of a younger sibling, and to the experimental presentation of a doll. Where the Balinese mother handles sibling rivalry by theatrical teasing of her own child and conspicuous attention to other babies, the mother from the  New Guinea people known as the Iatmul, makes every effort to keep her own child from feeling jealous, even when nursing a new born infant.