Trance and Dance in Bali (1951). On the Musical Selections of Mead and Bateson’s Film
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses the soundtrack used for the ethnographic film Trance and Dance in Bali made by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in 1951. The soundtrack consists of a selection of Balinese gamelan and voice pieces, recorded by the labels Odeon and Beka in 1928, and chosen and arranged by Colin McPhee to fit the on-screen action. The film depicts a reenactment of a calonarang ceremony, a ritual which takes place in villages in Bali during the night, consisting in a sacred dance-drama that is highly regionally specific in its execution. However, for the purposes of Mead and Bateson, this calonarang was performed outside its ritual context in order to provide footage for the ethnographers. The aim of this article is to determine the original source of the soundtrack, discuss what is presented visually in the film, assess the adequacy (or inadequacy) of the choices of music in relation to the image, and in the case of inadequacy, to provide suggestions for musical alternatives. The musical and ritual regionalisms inherent to Balinese musical and ritual practice render some of the soundtrack choices inadequate. We argue that the chosen pieces do not all appropriately support the calonarang performance and ceremony depicted, due to inaccurate musical and ritual regionalisms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".