Images of Power is the companion book to a touring exhibition of the same title curated by Mildred Geertz from the paintings commissioned and collected by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead during their period of fieldwork in Bali between 1936 and 1938. The collection, consisting of some 1,288 pictures and associated documentary notes, had been in storage until Geertz was shown some of the pictures by Mead in 1972. About two-thirds of the collection consists of works by people from the village of Batuan in the southern Balinese regency of Gianyar. Some seventy-one individuals contributed to the Batuan collection, though there was a core group of some twenty-two that Geertz identifies as 'serious painters' who contributed most and are included in the book and exhibition.

Bateson and Mead collected the paintings in order to 'study them and their makers for evidence of their psychological tendencies' (p 1). Geertz suggests, however, that the significance of the paintings, taken as a whole, lies in providing an 'ethnography of Balinese imagination' (p 1) rather than any insight into 'Balinese character'.

One of the significant features of the pictures is the media used to produce them. While paper, pen and brush are widely used in Bali today, in the 1930s they represented new media, most likely introduced into Bali by the few expatriate European artists resident in Bali during that time. The pictures are done in black ink and wash, to the blackness of which, Geertz suggests, the painters seem to have responded in their choice of subject matter. 'The choice of dark and violent themes may have been suggested to them by the ink's blackness, which evokes night and all the evil things that happen then' (p13).

Not only were the media new to the painters but also many of the images portrayed. Up until the 1930s most Balinese paintings were made for ritual purposes, constrained both in content and form. What is novel about these paintings is that the painters were free to draw upon other themes and concerns, such as folktales, scenes from daily life, and the ongoing interaction between the spiritual and mundane worlds - particularly the activities...