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COMPETITION AND BALANCE OF SEXUALITYBateson’s analysis of Balinese culture is an excellent example of the need to move away from narrow definitions of sexuality and crude measures of it. Bateson’s article can be easily overlooked by sex researchers, as it usually is, because it is not written ostensibly about Balinese sexuality. Rather, it addresses the different construction of the Balinese cultural system, which is in a steady state, as contrasted with the Iatmul (New Guinea) and American cultural systems, geared toward cumulative interaction and climax. Bateson writes of Balinese children who learn to avoid cumulative interactions: “It is possible that some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for climax as the child becomes more fully adjusted to Balinese life”. The resulting Balinese adult is under tension, not in a competitive, climactic sense, but in a never-ending struggle to achieve balance and interpersonal stability: “The individual Balinese is forever picking his way, like a tightrope walker, afraid at any moment lest he make some misstep”. Bateson documents the “lack of climax” in Balinese quarrels, which are not resolved or concluded, but rather are “pegged at a state”, another example of the substitution of plateau for climax. Likewise, during Balinese oratory things happen, but nothing develops. Interruptions which are both tolerated and accepted cause any tension that might be building to break under the stabilizing effect of the irrelevant interaction. Bateson also suggests that both the caste system and the village hierarchical structures remove contexts for competition, again replacing them with contexts that express natural order, stability, and balance. To follow Bateson, we need to realize that social organizations usually contain multidimensional value systems of tremendous complexity and scope. Sexuality, in a system such as this, provides an organizing construct that elevates and identifies one value as governing social interaction on a given occasion. In other words, there are contexts in every social system which define the scope of interaction, by temporarily reducing the multidimensionality of culture to one dimension. In Iatmul, American, and many other societies, sexuality is such an organizing, reductive construct, providing a competitive context by selecting one value system out of many. Bateson contrasts sexuality, as one of many competitive contests in Iatmul and American societies, with stability, the important organizing construct in Balinese social life. The Balinese emphasize performance and balance in their dance and in their appreciation of an activity as a process to be valued for itself, not because it is aimed at some distant goal. The implication is that this value system, with its emphasis on stability and process, will be expressed in the sexual life of Balinese. Sexual activity is a performance rather than a contest. It is not an activity with winners and losers, best represented in American society when one sexual partner can claim superior sexual ability and attractiveness vis-a-vis the other. Rather, it is a balancing activity in which economic and competitive considerations are replaced by ceremonial and artistic expression. In this way Bateson finds Balinese sexual life consistent with the value emphasis and emotional tone (he calls this “ethos”) found throughout the culture. Presumably, the focus of sexual activity remains on the balancing of relationships during an aesthetic experience, itself part of a process without a beginning with foreplay and an end in orgasm. Lovemaking for the Balinese is an aesthetic confirmation of balance as a value in Balinese life. It is not a cumulation of interaction, leading toward climax, definition and conquest, as evident in American (and Iatmul) sexuality. In the American cultural system, sexuality is a value which focuses and assigns behavior; in Balinese culture sexual activity is aesthetic behavior which itself is governed by a larger value of stability and the noncompetitive personhood which accompanies it. Instead of focusing and limiting the parameters of the interaction, as does the imposition of “sexuality” as a value in American life, the Balinese value system addresses the issue of balance during lovemaking, quarreling, and orating. Because the Balinese view sexual intercourse as a station on the continuing plateau of intensity, it is not relegated to self-contained behavior during an artificially restricted occasion. This is the difference between Balinese and American sexual culture according to the general pattern of Bateson’s formulations. This analysis explains findings such as Belo’s, that sexual involvement between an upper-caste Balinese woman and a lower-caste man was treated severely as a case of bestiality. Balance and definition, even on the social level, must be maintained. It is also known that because of the high level of tension in which each Balinese life is lived, Balinese performers expect and receive audience attention and involvement. Balinese performers do not need to work to command the attention of an audience, then, for this attention comes automatically from the audience’s equal concern for balance and continuity. *126/187/5* Related Posts:Tags: Men’s Health Leave OneYou must be logged in to post a comment. |
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