On the Concept of Plot in Culture: Margaret Mead. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences. Section on Anthropology. November, 1939, pp. 24–31.

Using Roheim's views on the ontogenetic origins of culture (this is what is meant by 'plot in culture') Margaret Mead gives us a foretaste of the results of her excellent field work in Bali. She describes a basic mother-child situation in which the mother overstimulates the 'young child by setting up jealousy and coquetry situations, borrowing younger babies and suckling them to arouse jealousy, placing younger babies on their own children's heads, stimulating their children sexually and at the same time offering no emotional rapport in return. The mother teases and flirts with the child until she produces either a state of hysterical delight or of violent weeping and then refusing to become involved herself, she turns casually to something else. By the time the Balinese child is one year old it learns not to respond to this situation, it withdraws more and more into itself and the basis is formed for the insulated type of personality which is typically Balinese.' In their dramatic ritual, human beings attack a superhuman masked representative of the witch. 'The witch does not fight against her attackers. She merely looks at them and they fall to the ground to rise and attack again when she takes her eye off them.' Finally the attackers turn their krises against themselves and collapse in a trance.