Trance and Dance in Bali is a short documentary film shot by the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson during their research on Bali in the 1930s. It shows female dancers with sharp kris daggers dancing in trance, eventually stabbing themselves without injury. The film was not released until 1951. It has attracted praise from later anthropologists for its pioneering achievement, and criticism for its focus on the performance, omitting relevant details such as the conversation of the dancers.
In trance, the women dancers enter, holding their kris daggers aloft
The women dance ecstatically, stabbing themselves with their razor-sharp kris daggers, and coming to no harm.
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.
Mead in 1948
Dr Margaret Mead, Australia, September 1951
Margaret Mead (1972)
Mead at New York Academy of Sciences, 1968