Images of Power is the companion book to a touring exhibition of the
same title curated by Mildred Geertz from the paintings commissioned
and collected by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead during their period
of fieldwork in Bali between 1936 and 1938.
The collection, consisting
of some 1,288 pictures and associated documentary notes, had been in
storage until Geertz was shown some of the pictures by Mead in 1972,
About two-thirds of the collection consists of works by people from the
village of Batuan in the southern Balinese regency of Gianyar.
Some
seventy-one individuals contributed to the Batuan collection. though
there was a core group of some twenty-two that Geertz identifies as
`serious painters' who contributed most and are included in the book
and exhibition.
Bateson and Mead collected the paintings in order to `study them and
their makers for evidence of their psychological tendencies' (p 1).
Geertz suggests. however, that the significance of the paintings, taken
as a whole, lies in providing an `ethnography of Balinese imagination'
(p 1 ) rather than any insight into `Balinese character'. Between 1936 and 1938 Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead collected more
than 1,200 paintings and sketches made by Balinese peasants. The
products of a new genre of painting introduced and encouraged by two
European artists in 1931, the paintings draw their major themes from
Balinese culture but use Western materials and forms. Strikingly
different from both traditional Balinese art forms and paintings made
in Bali today, these unusual pen-and-ink pictures reveal much about
Bali that has been unknown to Westerners.
CONDITION: Hardcover, unopened, in original cardboard casing from publisher. Mint, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. Pp. ix + 135, Appendix, Notes, Glossary, Index.
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