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ConnectingCultures:BalineseCharacterand
theComputer
We were compelled to economize on motion-picture
film, and disregarding the future difficulties of
exposition, we assumed that the still photography and
the motion-picture film together would constitute our
record of behavior. [Notes to the Photographs, in
Bateson and Mead, 1942 (italics Batesons)]
If inventions are made that transform numbers,
images and texts from all over the world into the same
binary code inside computers, then indeed the
handling, the combination, the mobility, the
conservation and the display of the traces will all be
fantastically facilitated. When you hear someone say
that he or she masters a question better, meaning that
his or her mind had enlarged, look first for inventions
bearing on the mobility, immutability or versatility of
the traces; and it is only later, if by some extraordinary
chance, something is still unaccounted for, that you
may turn towards the mind. (Latour, 1986 (italics
Latours)).
TheBaliResearch
Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead arrived in Bali in
March of 1936 to study the relationship between forms
of social organization and types of temperament or
character structure. They had developed a complex
theory about the way societies emphasized one or
another of the temperamental types available in the
human organism, and a typology of such types (divided
by gender) and the situations that went with them.

What if human beings, innately different

at birth, could be shown to fit into
systematically defined temperamental
types, and what if there were male and
female versions of each of these
temperamental types? And what if a
societyby the way in which children
were reared, by the kinds of behavior that
were rewarded or punished, and its
traditional depiction of heroes, heroines,
and villains, witches, sorcerers, and
supernaturals could place its major
emphasis on one type of temperament, as
among the Arapesh and the
Mundugumor, or could, instead,
emphasize a special complementarity
between the sexes, as the Iatmul and the
Tchambuli did? And what if the
expectations about male-female
differences, so characteristic of EuroAmerican cultures, could be reversed, as
they seemed to be in Tchambuli . . .
(Mead, 1972, p. 216)

Having placed the societies they already knew in that

typology, they could now choose cases to fill in its
missing cells.

We had chosen Bali with knowledge and

forethought as the culture we wanted to
study next in order to obtain material on
one temperamental emphasis we had only
hypothesized must exist. We had seen just
enough material in films and still
photographs, had heard just enough of
the music studied by Colin McPhee, and
had read just enough in Jane Belos
careful records of the ceremonies with
which the Balinese greeted the terrible
disaster of the birth of twins to assure us
that this was the culture we wanted to
work on. (ibid., p. 224)

During their two years of fieldwork they made 25,000

still photographs and shot 20,000 feet of 16mm
motion picture film. They usually worked together:
Mead made verbal notes and Bateson photographed
moving pictures and stills.[1] Their Balinese secretary,
Made Kaler, kept a record in Balinese. The time and
date were written on each role of film when it was
placed in the camera and again when it was removed.
In this way the images could be matched with the
verbal records whose time was also recorded. They did
not make sound recordings, relying instead on musical
recordings made by others. (Bateson and Mead, 1942,
p.49 and Mead, 1972, p. 231)
BalineseCharacter:APhotographicAnalysis, the
book Bateson and Mead published in 1942, contains
759 of the still photographs, reproduced in one
hundred Plates. Each Plate consisted of two facing
pages. One page contains from four to thirteen
photographs, and its facing page a general statement of
theory, a description of the context in which the
photographs in the plate were made, and detailed
captions for the individual photographs. Bateson and
Mead never solved the problem of incorporating the
motion picture film[2], or of making it convenient for
readers to follow the multiple paths through the data
their careful cross-referencing made possible.
Because the technical apparatus they needed to use
motion picture film and still photographs together is
now available, it is useful to examine their methods
and their reasons for adopting them, and to examine
the implications of their methods of analyzing and
presenting ethnographic work.
WhyTheyMadePhotographsintheFirstPlace
In the introduction to the book, Mead says the
methods she and Bateson had used separately in
previous work seemed inadequate to describe the
aspects of culture and behavior they were studying: . .
. from 1928 to 1936 we were separately engaged in
efforts to translate aspects of culture never successfully
recorded by the scientist, although often caught by the
artists, into some form of communication sufficiently

clear and sufficiently unequivocal to satisfy the

requirements of scientific enquiry. (Bateson and
Mead, 1942, p. xi)
Using their own past work as examples, Mead outlines
the specific dissatisfactions she and Bateson had with
conventional methods of describing phenomena,
conventional ways of doing and presenting fieldwork.
Of her three previous books, she says:

As no precise scientific vocabulary was

available, the ordinary English words
were used, with all their weight of
culturally limited connotations, in an
attempt to describe the way in which the
emotional life of these various South Sea
peoples was organized in culturally
standardized forms. This method had
many serious limitations: it transgressed
the canons of precise and operational
scientific exposition proper to science; it
was far too dependent upon idiosyncratic
factors of style and literary skill; it was
difficult to duplicate; and it was difficult
to evaluate.
Most serious of all, we know this about
the relationship between culture and
verbal conceptsthat the words which
one culture has invested with meaning are
by the very accuracy of their cultural fit,
singularly inappropriate as vehicles for
precise comment upon another culture.
(Ibid.)
Of Batesons work:

Parallel with these attempts to rely upon

ordinary English as a vehicle, the
approach discussed in Naven was being
developedan approach which sought to
take the problem one step further by
demonstrating how such categories as
ethos, there defined as a culturally
standardized system of organization of
the instincts and emotions of individuals,
were not classifications of items of
behavior but were abstractions which
could be applied systematically to all
items of behavior.
The first method has been criticized as
journalisticas an arbitrary selection of
highly colored cases to illustrate types of
behavior so alien to the reader that he
continues to regard them as incredible.
The second method was branded as too
analyticalas neglecting the phenomena
of a culture in order to intellectualize and
schematize it. The first method was
accused of being so synthetic that it
became fiction, the second of being so
analytic that it became disembodied
methodological discussion.
In this monograph we are attempting a
new method of stating the intangible
relationships among different types of
culturally standardized behavior by
placing side by side mutually relevant
photographs. Pieces of behavior, spatially
and contextually separated . . . may all be
relevant to a single discussion . . . the
same emotional thread may run through
them. To present them together in words,
it is necessary either to resort to devices
which are inevitably literary, or to dissect
the living scenes so that only desiccated
items remain. (Ibid., pp. xixii)

They settled on photographs and motion-picture film

as ways to expand their descriptive vocabulary, not as a
replacement for other tools, but as an additional tool.
They saw different media as different ways of getting at
the same thing, enabling different kinds of describing,
expressing, and knowing.
Additional forms would allow them to describe
behavior more precisely, to use the word Mead repeats
three times in two paragraphs of the Introduction to
define the kind of language proper science requires.
What qualities, for their purposes, make a description
more precise?
A more precise description requires a form that
conveys an interconnected sense of the wholeness of
experience, preserves a kind of simultaneity, presents
simultaneously events that had occurred
simultaneously, not isolating elements but making the
view more systemic. It requires a form that records
finedetail, the images being detailed and complex
enough that many more connections and greater
understanding can be extracted from them than
written notes can itemize.
They valued the potential of images for describing,
simultaneously, specific and minute details of surface,
gesture, and spatial relationships, and their alterations
over time, because, for their purposes and according to
their theory of knowledge, stringing these aspects of
events out linearly in text would be a distortion, .
Plate 16, Visual and Kinaesthetic Learning II
(Bateson and Mead, 1942, p. 86-7), for example,
contains a sequence of eight photographs of a dance
lesson: teacher and students surrounded by the
orchestra. The master guides the student visually and
kinesthetically, not verbally. The plate helps Bateson
and Mead establish two important points about
Balinese character formation. From his dancing
lesson, the pupil learns passivity, and he acquires a
separate awareness in the different parts of the body.
Each image in the plate establishes relative spatial and
size relations rapidly. The images give us detailed
nuances of facial expression, body tension and

position, and often the physical location and larger

context of other people, the musicians, the
instruments, simultaneously frozen at a particular
moment.[3] Its all there at once, eight images
combined on the flat surface of the page for the viewer
to study individually and compare with one another.
The emphasis on portraying relationships
simultaneously also determines, in part, the
composition of the individual images. Bateson
composed many of the photographs, we can see, so as
to preserve the wholeness of each piece of behavior.
Particular aspects of a scene that interest him are
seldom isolated in the frame by such compositional
devices as selective focus. On the contrary, he
apparently made no attempt to exclude background
detail, or the heads, arms, legs, and other body parts of
anyone who happened to walk by from the frame. In
fact, the notes sometimes say whose head or foot it is.
These accidents only enhanced the value of the image
as data.
PuttingPhotographsandFilmTogether
After returning to the United States for further
analyses of the material and arrangement of it into a
presentable form, the difficulties of expositon could
no longer be disregarded as Bateson and Mead
confronted the impossibility of presenting the two
formats together. They had hoped to use the film and
the still images together, both in their analysis and in
its later presentation. In the 1930s, when the work was
produced, they couldnt do it. The technology at the
time being what it was, no common format existed in
which the two media could be combined. In his Notes
to the Photographs in the book, Bateson expresses
disappointment that some plates are, in his view,
inadequate because they lack particular images that
were recorded on motion-picture film. The present
book is illustrated solely by photographs taken with the
latter [still camera], and as a result, the book contains
no photograph of a father suckling his child at the
nipple, and the series of kris dancers (Pls. 57 and 58)
leaves much to be desired. (Bateson and Mead, 1942,
p. 51)

Vaguely aware of this problem while in the field, they

had conducted their research as if todays computer
imaging technologywhich makes it possible to
digitize photographs and film (still images and moving
images) and present them together, along with sound
and extensive text, in the same piece of work (together
on one flat surface)was available to them in 1936,
which it was not.
It might seem odd, or even naive, for Bateson and
Mead to have ignored these problems, until you
consider the degree to which they invented their
photographic methods of record and description in the
course of doing the research.

When we planned our field work, we

decided that we would make extensive use
of movie film and stills. Gregory had
bought seventy-five rolls of Leica film to
carry us through the two years. Then one
afternoon when we had observed parents
and children for an ordinary forty-five
minute period, we found that Gregory had
taken three whole rolls. We looked at each
other, we looked at the notes, and we
looked at the pictures that Gregory had
taken so far and that had been developed
and printed by a Chinese in the town and
were carefully mounted and catalogued
on large pieces of cardboard. Clearly we
had come to a thresholdto cross it
would be a momentous commitment in
money, of which we did not have much,
and in work as well. But we made the
decision. Gregory wrote home for the
newly invented rapid winder, which made
it possible to take pictures in very rapid
succession. He also ordered bulk film,
which he would have to cut and put in
cassettes himself as we could not possibly
afford to buy commercially the amount of
film we now proposed to use. As a further
economizing measure we bought a
developing tank that would hold ten rolls
at once and, in the end, we were able to
develop some 1600 exposures in an
evening.
The decision we made does not sound
very momentous today. Daylight loaders
have been available for years, amateur
photographers have long since adopted
sequence photography, and field budgets
for work with film have enormously
increased. But it was momentous then.
Whereas we had planned to take 2,000
photographs, we took 25,000. It meant
that the notes I took were similarly
multipled by a factor of ten, and when

Mades notes also were added in, the

volume of our work was changed in
tremendously significant ways. (Mead,
1972, p. 234)

They had very specific reasons for using visual

materials and anticipated they would be significant to
their work. But the details of the subject matter,
compositon, and other particulars of making and using
the images were worked out in the field: one afternoon
Bateson used the camera in a way they didnt
anticipate. They were innovating and experimenting,
and they knew it.
PhotographsasDescriptiveRecordsFrom
WhichtoFormHypotheses
We treated the cameras in the field as recording
instruments, not as devices for illustrating our theses.
(Bateson and Mead, 1942,ibid., p. 49)
Bateson and Mead saw still photographs and motionpicture film as forms of description. As descriptions,
photographic images have all the limitations of
viewpoint, selectivity, and contextualization of other
kinds of description: verbal accounts, tape recordings,
drawings. Images are finely detailed maps of selected
3D space at a particular place and instant in time or, in
the case of film, over a specific period of time, mapped
point for point onto a 2D surface. These maps can be
carried to distant places and studied at later times, an
activity that necessarily attaches a more complex
notion of time to the image.
But what images describetheir meaning, what they
showis an interpretation. Bateson and Mead did
not take that meaning to be self-evident. Rather, they
considered the connections, explanations, and
interpretations the photographs suggested as
hypotheses to be explored further, as they directed the
photographing more specifically to the new ideas and
connections suggested by earlier images.
Plate 54, Girls Tantrums (Bateson and Mead, 1942,
p. 162-3), contains thirteen photographs, the first two
of the same incident, a tantrum in the road,

photographed early in the fieldwork. In the first

photograph, a young girl is shown screaming, with her
hands raised to her head in a posture closely related to
those of the boy in PL. 53. In the caption to the second
photograph, Bateson points out that this particular
image gave us the first clue for the formulation that
the Balinese mother avoids adequate response to the
climaxes of her childs anger and love. The
photograph shows the young girl clinging to her
mothers legs. The mothers response is negligent and
relaxed . . . her arm scarcely in contact with the girls
sling cloth.
Bateson and Mead didnt look at this photograph and
state a theory, citing the photograph as evidence. For
them, photographs dont prove a hypothesis, they
provoke further tests of it. The distinction is important.
They used the image as data rather than as a selfevident proof. The details of the photographs suggest a
general theory or principle. If the principle is in fact
general, I will find other versions of it when I return to
the field. If I dont, further details will suggest a
reformulation.[4]
This method of using photographs required them to
study and compare images in the field. Plate 23, Hand
Postures In Arts And Trance (Bateson and Mead,
1942, p.100-01), for example, contains eight
photographs. The photographs show Balinese artists,
unlike Occidental artists, accentuating the sensory
function in their left hand. Bateson writes that,
because this point was not noticed in the field, where
they could have checked it further, it therefore cannot
be stated definitely or backed up by native statements.
To test their hypotheses about temperament and
culture, where did they point the camera? Their
practice was initially guided by such assumptions as
these:

. . . that parent-child relationships and

relationships between siblings are likely
to be more rewarding than agricultural
techniques. We therefore selected
especially contexts and sequences of this
sort. We recorded as fully as possible what
happened while we were in the houseyard,
and it is so hard to predict behavior that it
was scarcely possible to select particular
postures or gestures for photographic
recording. In general, we found that any
attempt to select for special details was
fatal, and that the best results were
obtained when the photography was most
rapid and almost random. Pls. 71 and 72
illustrate this; the photographer assumed
that the context was interesting and
photographed as far as possible every
move that the subjects made, without
wondering which moves might be most
significant. (Bateson and Mead, 1942, p.
50)[5]

But within these broad outlines, the question

remained: where do you point the camera? Though
Bateson and Mead continued to have differing
opinions about that, in BalineseCharacter they did it
Batesons way. He believed in pointing the camera at
what he thought was important, and he used the
camera to help reformulate what he and Mead thought
important or relevant.[6]
Eventually, they pointed the camera at sequences of
behavior as a way to closely describe such unfolding
interactions as exchanges of glance and gesture. They
compared sequences of images from similar events,
(e.g., mothers teasing older child with a younger
sibling or borrowed baby) with each other, and
sequences from one area of social life with sequences
from other areas (e.g., mother teasing older child,
cremation towers being carried to the cemetery, young
girls dancing in trance, and artists paintings of their
dreams). From these diverse areas of cultural activity

and behavior, they arrived at more general

relationships (e.g., the Balinese systems of hierarchy
and respect).

. . . because of the density of the

population and the richness of the
ceremonial life, we were able to put
together many new kinds of samples. We
had not one birth feast but twenty; fifteen
occasions, all carefully recorded, when the
same little girls went into trance; six
hundred small carved kitchen gods from
one village to compare with five hundred
from another village; and one mans
paintings of forty of his dreams to place in
the context of paintings by a hundred
other artists. (Mead, 1972, p. 235)

In all, then, they worked at four levels: the individual

photograph; the individual interaction described in a
sequence of photographs or a segment of motion
picture film; the comparison of a collection of
sequences, each made of a similar exchange, but at
different times and places, involving the same
individuals or not; and comparison of collections of
sequences, describing different aspects of the culture
which might seem superficially separate.
SomeLogisticalProblemsBatesonandMead
WorkedWith,andHowThoseProblemsHave
BeenAlteredbyTechnologicalDevelopments
Logistical and practical problems arose in connection
with three separate activities: making and analyzing
the images in the field; moving the materials to New
York where they are analyzed again, and shown to
other people, though the researchers can no longer
return to the original site to check up a point, as with
Plate 23; finally, editing, summarizing, and combining
(recontextualizing) images for a final presentation.
Each kind of problem could be solved differently and
more efficiently today through the use of digital
technology.

Bateson and Mead cut and developed their film in the

field, then had their negatives printed and
enlargements made and returned to them. Today,
skipping the step of printing entirely, one can scan
negatives directly into the computer so that they are
quickly accessible for study and comparison. Going
further, one could use a digital still camera and avoid
the use of film altogether. Motion picture film, and
video (which was not available to Bateson and Mead),
can also be digitized directly into a computer. Digital
video cameras, when they are available, will cut out the
conversion step.
Bateson complained about the problems of sorting
through all the materials when they got back to the
United States, and the difficulties of sizing and laying
out such a large collection of images for a final printed
product.

Selection by size was more distressing.

Each plate was to be reproduced as a unit
and therefore we had the task of
preparing prints which would fit together
in laying out the plate. Working with this
large collection of negatives, it was not
possible to plan the lay-out in advance,
and therefore, in the case of the more
important photographs, two prints of
different sizes were prepared. Even with
this precaution, the purely physical
problems of space and composition on the
plate have eliminated a few photographs
which we would have liked to include.
(Bateson and Mead, ibid., p.51)

Computers would have solved many of these problems.

Providing a flat surface on which the various media
Bateson used could be viewed together, stored
electronically so that specific pieces can be rapidly
located, all this contributing to a more efficient sifting
of material, and facilitating the analytical process of
comparing and combining images.

A simple example of a computer solution is the size of

images. Bateson regretted the small size of the
photographic reproductions (the consequences of the
economics of book reproduction). But size became a
constraint because the readability of an image at a
small size became a criterion by which they chose
images. So reading in the computer, by allowing
viewers to increase the size of a particular image at
their discretion, would be an advantage.
Back in the United States, Bateson and Mead asked
other researchers from other disciplines to view and
comment on the material, after the field work was over
but before publication. Mead talks about researchers
picking details out of the filmed sequences (When we
showed that Balinese stuff that first summer there
were different things that people identifiedthe
limpness that Marian Stranahan identified, the place
on the chest and its point in child development that
Erik Erikson identified.) (Bateson and Mead, 1976, p.
40). Today, such collaboration and consultation might
well take place (if not now, soon) while they were still
in the field by sending visual materials via Internet to
New York (or any other part of the world) for other
researchers and collaborators to examine.
Bateson and Mead analyzed their field materials, and
presented the photographs and text as a rich, layered
work. Mead describes the form of the book as an
experimental innovation (as it certainly was). Readers
then make the connections and relationships the text
points out, or follow other paths of association, of
potential interest but not pursued by the authors, such
as tracing one person through a series of plates (the
readers thus making their own paths). Bateson and
Mead expected readers to use their formal innovations.
They wanted readers to explore the plates for
themselves. They cross-referenced images and
provided additional information so that readers could
create their own combinations of the materials.
Cross references from one photograph to another and
from one plate to another have been inserted often,
and such insertions often carry implicit generalizations
like those implicit in the juxtapositions. To enable the

reader to explore the plates for himself, a random

supply of cross references is given in the Glossary and
Index of Native Words and Persons. As far as possible,
native words have been kept within parentheses. They
are provided for the use of readers already familiar
with Balinese language and custom, and the ordinary
reader need pay no attention to them unless he wishes
to set side-by-side the various photographs connected
with one ceremony or native concept. . . . Similarly, it is
possible from the names of identified persons to obtain
an over-all view of some of the most photographed
individuals, such as I Karba, I Karsa, I Gata, and their
respective parents. (Bateson and Mead, 1942, p. 53)
What Bateson and Mead wanted to accomplish by
combining stills and film can be done today in
hypertext. A basic characteristic of hypertext is crossreferencing (as in an encyclopedia, where the end of an
entry directs you to see related items). Hypertext can
be created without a computer, but a computer makes
it easier to write and to read. The integration of a
variety of media (film, stills, sound) in one document,
however, is tied to the computer.
What would a hypertext BalineseCharacter look like?
How would it work? In a straightforward translation
you would select a cross-reference Bateson and Mead
had designated, not by turning to the indicated page,
but by clicking on the reference with your mouse. The
designated image(s) would appear for comparison and
study. What appeared might be another photograph, a
text, motion-picture film, or a recordings of a gamelan
orchestra (such as Bateson and Mead used in the film
Trance and Dance in Bali.)
Bateson and Mead often divided the recording of data,
as mentioned above, between film and still
photographs. This created problems when they wanted
to discuss materials recorded in the two different ways.
For example, Plate 42, A Bird on a String, (Bateson
and Mead, 1942, p.138-9) contains twelve photographs
of a boy playing with a tiny living bird on a bark string.
But the still photographs represent only about half of
the entire sequence: The whole sequence, as recorded
in M.M.s notes, lasted about 15 minutes, but of this

period only about 7 minutes was recorded with the

camera. At this point the film in the still camera
finished, and the remainder of the sequence was
recorded with the motion-picture camera. The second
half, on motion-picture film, is thus unavailable in the
book, but would be available in a computerized
hypertext.
Latour:Immutable,CombinableMobiles
Two of Bruno Latours ideas about knowledge,
representations, and power have implications for our
understanding of BalineseCharacter, and for creating
and presenting work using electronic imaging
technologies, 1) A shift in thinking occurs when
people put knowledge into the form of immutable and
combinable mobiles; and 2) experts [unlike novices]
assemble materials in such a way as to make
relationships apparent.[7]
For Latour, representations (inscriptions) become
sources of greater power when they are mobile (can be
moved from place to place), immutable (do not change
when they are moved), and combinable with one
another (when their size can be averaged, their
internal relationships remaining consistent) in order to
make comparisons.

Such representations become inanimate

allies in agonistic encounters in which it
is not the antagonists abilities that matter
but the new understanding the
juxtaposition of represenations allows: an
average mind . . . will generate totally
different output depending on if it is
attending to the confusing world or to
inscriptions. . . . It is because all these
inscriptions can be superimposed,
reshuffled, recombined, and summarized,
that totally new phenomena emerge,
hiddenfromtheotherpeoplefromwhom
alltheseinscriptionshavebeenexacted.
(Latour, 1986 p.11, my emphasis)

To put what we have been discussing in Latours terms,

the computer screen becomes a small laboratory in
which previously uncombinable forms or media, such
as film and still photographs, may be combined and
recombined. This creates the potential for an analytic
result which is more than a sum of the parts,
identifying relationships (patterns or contrasts) which
are visible only because you have combined immutable
mobiles. The newly visible relationships drawn from
these materials result in a shift in conceptualization, a
reformulation of the structure of what youre looking
at. This is the totally different output Latour speaks
of, which occurs as a result of the manipulation of the
laboratory setting.
New knowledge, a new way of seeing the world, results
from having an efficient pictorial language and being
able to recombine inscriptions gathered from different
times and places. Anything that improves this
combinability is favored historically because it creates
this advantage in power and knowledge. For the same
reason, anything that accelerates the mobility of traces
without transformation will be favored too.
But inscriptions by themselves are not enough. Latour
describes Darwin and other naturalists (using them to
exemplify the problems of everyone who gathers data)
as being swamped in specimens (like Bateson
complaining about wading through all the Bali
materials once he got back to New York). Having
turned things into paper (including photographic
images), the analyst now must reduce the amount of
paper. A deflating strategy is needed. Latour
emphasizes what he calls the construction of
cascades, in which people working with information
turn more paper into less paper.
For Latour, good theories, unlike bad ones or mere
collections of empirical facts, provide easy access to
theory by assembling materials in one place where
relations between them and hence the answer [the
analysis] could essentially be read off from it. Experts
[unlike novices] assemble materials to make
relationships apparent. BalineseCharacters
presentational strategy makes the relationships

between temperament and culture apparent: the

photographs, the words, and their arrangement are the
analysis, in the sense that their theoretical import can
be read off the pages. The analysis embodies the
theory in just the way that Mead says the Balinese
embody that abstraction which (after we have
abstracted it) we technically call culture. (Bateson and
Mead, 1942, p. xii).
Mead and Batesons purpose was agonistic in the
Latourien sense. They wanted to make an argument
about how character is formed from early childhood
to harmonize with values implicit in culture (Bateson,
1972 p.123) and convince others they were right, thus
enrolling them as allies. As Bateson said about the
research in Bali, we assumed that the still
photography and the motion-picture film together
would constitute our record of behavior. The
combined media would have allowed stronger support
(in the form of inanimate allies) for their theories,
making a more expert arrangement of allies
possible.
For Latour, the study of signs by themselves obscures
the understanding of power. You must study the
process that enabled those signs to be where they are,
how they are, doing the work theyre doing. The scale
of an actor is not an absolute term but a relative one
that varies with the ability to produce, capture, sum up
and interpret information about other places and
times. How to dominate on a large scale? The name
of the game is to accumulate enough allies in one place
to modify the belief and behavior of all the others.
(Latour, 1986, p. 29 and 31) If visual representations
can define a culture (for instance, define what kind of
people the Balinese are), then a nationwide magazine
such as NationalGeorgraphic is a large-scale actor
and an ethnography in hypermedia can become a
bigger actor than a book.
Latour points out that, in the case of natural science
laboratories, increasing research costs mean that very
few scientists can engage in the proof race. The social
science proof race is quite different. Increasingly,
though of course not universally, the new imaging

technologies, which make using combined media and

hypertext structures less of a tsimmes for
anthropologists, are available to the other people from
whom all these inscriptions have been exacted and
from whom they were hidden. This makes it possible,
at least in principle, for the people social scientists
study to construct a counterargument, should at least
some of them have access to the appropriate tools and
so desire.[8]
Furthermore, the relative inexpensiveness and
ubiquity of electronic media and instruments (e.g. the
expense of buying a camcorder and making a video
compared to the expense of making a motion picture
film) takes visual media out of the hands of
professionals or specialists (and their conventional
ways of picturing and deciding whats worthy of
picturing) and increases the number of people who
control of them.
Conclusion
Bateson and Mead believed that visual materials were
necessary to the full investigation of such subtle
relationships as that between temperament and
culture. Still photographs and motion-picture film gave
them a vocabulary with which to identify and describe
those relationships. They intended, though they didnt
have the language Latour later provided, to combine
the variety of materials they had gathered
(combinable, immutable mobiles) in such a way as to
provide a compelling demonstration of their analysis,
one in which the conclusions could be read off the
presentation. They displayed photographs and text
together, but could not incorporate the motion picture
film, so integral a part of their evidence, with those
other materials on one flat surface. In that sense, the
construction of what Latour calls the nth+1 cascade,
the combination that reduces the bulk of what is to be
handled, was impossible for them. Digital imaging and
computer based hypertext today make their vision
attainable in ways they did not foresee but probably
would have appreciated. My guess is that Gregorys
response to these new developments would have been,
Yes, now I can really get busy. And Margarets would
have been, Its about time, for gods sake.