Trance in Bali: By Jane Belo. Preface by Margaret Mead. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960. 283 pp.

For many decades, the history, religion and the mythology of Bali have been the subject of scholarly studies. Any visitor to that beautiful Indonesian island has had opportunity to observe trance performances but no writer has paid more than casual attention to this curious ethnopsychological phenomenon. Miss Jane Belo spent seven years in Bali, two of them in close collaboration with Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. The present volume is a worthy companion piece to Mead and Bateson's well-known study, Balinese Character.1

Miss Belo, who has already given us Bali: Rangda and Barong,2 now provides us with what appears to be the most complete field study of trance as an institutionalized phenomenon. She collected her detailed information in four districts, paying close attention to the personal characteristics of some important trancers, and using the stop-watch method as introduced by Mead and Bateson in their photographic analysis.

Trance in Balinese society is not the specialty of a particular social segment such as mediums or priests, nor does it occur in a single caste, although these people are very rigidly grouped into three castes with a casteless herd of commoners below them. Miss Belo describes trance doctors who have all the marks of the shaman in other societies, showing symptoms of hysteria, uncontrolled movements, crying, and yelling, occasionally talking in an obscure language. Another type are mediumistic ceremonial practitioners who are considered godly representatives and in this trance state even