The Seba library treats Balinese Culture in 9 passages, across 7 authors (including Barrett, Lisa Feldman, Abram, David, Eliade, Mircea).
Many other cultures, however, characterize emotions as interpersonal events that require two or more people. This includes the Ifaluk of Micronesia, the Balinese, the Fula, the Ilongot of the Philippines
Barrett cites the Balinese as paradigmatic evidence that emotion is culturally constructed as an intersubjective rather than intra-individual phenomenon, directly challenging Western psychological universalism.
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis
what if the ants were the very ‘household spirits’ to whom the offerings were being made? I soon began to discern the logic of this.
Abram’s Balinese fieldwork with a balian generates his central argument that animist ritual practice encodes an ecologically coherent logic of reciprocity with non-human presences.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis
the prostitution of the balian is similarly based on the sacred value of the ‘intermediary,’ on the need to abolish polarities.
Eliade reads the Balinese balian’s ritual sexual ambiguity as a structural expression of the shamanic function: the abolition of cosmic opposites through the person of the sacred intermediary.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
a gesture resembling that of the Balinese goddess of maternity and fertility [Figure 244], and reminding one, also, of a kindred posture of the realm of Western art, namely that of the Venus de’ Medici
Campbell uses the Balinese goddess of maternity and fertility as a comparative node in a cross-cultural morphology of the goddess gesture, linking Hindu, Balinese, and Classical iconographic traditions.
, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting
obviously devoid of any such symbolism as prevails in the Hindu and Balinese images — derives somehow from the background of the more archaic attitude
Zimmer, quoted by Campbell, argues that the Western Venus de’ Medici has lost the conscious symbolic register that Balinese and Hindu goddess images preserve intact.
, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting
Circle of gods — Balinese drawing. Courtesy of the Ciba Archives, Basel.
Jung’s visual apparatus in Symbols of Transformation includes a Balinese cosmological drawing as an illustration of the circle-of-gods motif, situating Balinese iconography within the universal symbolic grammar of the mandala.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
Bali provides an even better example; the case against internalization rests on two observations: that the child is
Cairns invokes Balinese child-rearing ethnography as a test case in the cross-cultural debate over whether shame involves genuine moral internalization or merely external behavioral compliance.
, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting
feel lek, the Balinese emotion closest to our ‘shame.’
Konstan references lek, the Balinese analogue of shame, as cross-cultural evidence in a broader argument about the historical and anthropological variability of shame-type emotions.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006aside
the shaman’s ecological function, his or her role as intermediary between human society and the land, is not always obvious at first blush, even to a sensitive observer.
While not naming Bali explicitly, this passage contextualizes Abram’s broader Balinese-derived argument that shamanic ‘other dimensions’ are ecological rather than supernatural in origin.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996aside