Margaret Meade

Anthropologists use ethnography to study how another culture is organized and what cultural markers they operate on.  There is an issue of to what extent should Margaret Meade and Bateson just show the footage and culture as it is? Must they include some conclusions and comparisons of what they saw in their work?  Would these conclusions be their own opinion or objective fact? 

I do think something is lost when Meade would only film the interesting parts of culture.  Maybe something can be learn from the body language and specific patterns of everyday interactions. 

Their reasoning that they should shoot spontaneously is sound but participants should have been asked afterwards if their photo could be used.  However, Meade still did good fieldwork within the limits of technology of that time.  She was also working in a different time when there was a drive to find a correct method of child development. The line between Anthropology and Psychology was perhaps blurred.  Her work also was influenced not only by psychological questions but the ideas of cultural types and a reason to find these missing types.

Why Meade would try to illicit reactions from children and stage certain actions when she is an Anthropologist does not make sense to me. 

As far as the films, Meade shortened the trance film to 20 minutes.  The article said "it is easy to slip into the belief that the film is the ritual."  I wonder if her decision was due in part to how much film she had available.  If the video went on for longer than 20 minutes what else would we gather?  Shooting the film during the day might have been her best option with the technology that she had. 
Why would she interfere and use women in the dances when they were traditionally not allowed.

Overall Meade was influenced by the ideas of her time.  She did work to gather a large amount of information about the Balinese. She reasoned through her methods and stated that they were there for future researchers to critique.  There were some incongruencies in her work.  She, unlike her husband wanted to acquire information and not order and summarize it however she did include her own thoughts (non-objective) in her objective work and interfered with the culture she was objectively studing.