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Part I
Visual research projects
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1 Microcultural incidents in Minangkabau children’s emotion behavior
In my research among the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, most of the data that I analyzed come from Minangkabau talk addressed to me the ethnographer, what Minangkabau said or wrote in response to my interview questions or questionnaires (see Heider 1991a and 2011). But during my first two years of field research, in the 1980s, I also made extensive observations of 16 Minangkabau children. I made notes of what I saw and heard and also shot two hours of video on each child twice for a total of 64 hours of taping. In the days immediately following each tape session, I made a rough transcription of the tape with the aid of my research assistants. This taping turned up some extraordinarily rich interactions. Ray Birdwhistell termed such events as “microcultural incidents” (see his film, Microcultural Incidents in Ten Zoos). This is the sort of behavior that passes so quickly that it is almost impossible to capture by the usual pencil-and-notebook style of recording, but careful sifting through the videotape record allows one to identify these gems of data. We can begin with a particularly telling 60 seconds of interaction that comes from the videotape of Eva, one of the older girls in my sample. (I use pseudonyms for each child.) It was shot in 1983, when she was four years old. In this passage, anger and aggression are expressed and diverted in many different ways.
Here, I begin with an analysis of the brief clip of Eva, offering it as a model of what one can find in such “microcultural incidents.” Then I go on to describe the entire study to demonstrate how analysis of the video record can turn up much more data than one could recognize with ordinary observations.
I was following Eva with my video camera for two hours one afternoon. She was playing with several other children from the neighborhood in and around her aunt’s house. Not much happens: Eva has a minor fight with another girl and the aunt separates them. Here is the transcript, with my analysis on the right:
| | My Comments |
Aunt: Who’s being naughty? (shakes right finger at Eva) | 1. Disingenuous |
Sia nan jahe? | |
Eva: Si Budi! | 2. Lies |
Aunt: (to Eva) Move on over there! | |
Aniak kien! | |
(to other girl): Sit here! | |
Siko duduak! | |
(to Eva): You can’t do that! | |
Indak buliah. | |
It’s naughty, not right. | |
Nakal, ndak cap jempol. | 3. Direct command |
[literally: thumbs up brand] | |
I’ll give you a flick | 4. Threat |
(e.g. with my finger, a mild punishment) | |
Den jentil cie. | |
(to other girl): Sit here. | |
Siko tagak. | |
Eva: Hit her one, Indra (to her little brother) | 5. Agent of a third party enters |
Tinju no cie, Indra | |
Aunt: I’m not going to take you to the ceremony (to Eva) | 6. Empty threat |
Evam indak bau baleh. | |
Eva: Esi can’t go to the ceremony (taunting) | 7. Empty threat passed on |
Esi ndak bau baleh! | |
Aunt: Oh, just great! | 8. Sarcasm, verbal, and nonverbal |
bagus, cap jempol! | |
(to other girl): Stand over there! | |
siko tagak | |
To Eva: Why are you following? | |
ko ka marl je? | |
I’ll hit you. | 9. Empty threat |
‘bu lacui | |
The aunt now leaves the frame. Eva approaches the other girl, raises her right arm, then as the aunt returns to the scene, Eva’s hand moves into a clasped position of innocence. | 10. Nonverbal dissimulation |
Note: the aunt speaks a mixture of Minangkabau and Indonesian, two closely related languages.
There are the following ten significant moves in this interaction.
1. Disingenuousness. The aunt enters, knowing full well that her niece Eva has caused the other little girl to cry, so her question “who’s being naughty?” is an indirect way of declaring “Eva has been being naughty.” Shaking her finger in reproof is a gesture made to the general audience, but especially directed toward Eva.
2. Lie. Eva redirects the accusation in 1, above, blaming the crying on Budi, a boy standing nearby. (In fact, Budi rarely ever gets into fights except, as we shall see later, when he is at school.)
3. Direct command and comment. The aunt tells Eva that she can’t do that, it’s naughty. Here, she first uses a word for naughty, nakal, and follows it up with the verbal label for an emblem as she says that is not “cap jempol,” or “thumbs up brand.”
4. Direct threat. The aunt threatens to give Eva a finger flick to the ear, a mild form of punishment.
5. Third party. Eva enlists her little brother, Indra. She pulls Indra, who is now just two years old, between herself and the other girl and tells him to hit her.
6. Empty threat. One of the aunt’s stock phrases for controlling the children of her neighborhood is to offer to take them or refuse to take them to some unspecified ceremony. But in fact there is no ceremony, and everyone knows that.
7. Empty threat passed on. Eva passes on the empty threat, disingenuously pretending that it is Ela, another girl, who will be deprived of the ceremony.
8. Sarcasm. The aunt says “good,” using again the label for the thumbs up emblem which means good, and actually makes the thumbs up emblem with her right hand. But the words are said with a clearly sarcastic tone which reverses the meaning of both verbal and nonverbal messages.
9. Nonverbal dissimulation. The aunt briefly leaves for another room, Eva raises her hand as if to hit the other girl, but then as the aunt returns, Eva smoothly alters her arm position into a nonthreatening clasp of her hands.
So, here we have it. A 60-second slice of interaction between aunt and niece, with nine different sorts of anger and aggression, most of them quite indirect. This was hardly an atypical moment. Aunt and niece had been practicing this style of interaction for months and continued to hone it as long as I observed them.
Of course, my purpose in following Eva was to observe how she was being acculturated into Minangkabau patterns. But here we see her, at age four, already in masterful control of indirection. And, in fact, even as she is using her two-year-old brother Budi in her script, she is training him in indirection.
The segmentation of behavior in this way has a certain intrinsic logic. We begin as the aunt enters the scene and end when the aunt removes the other little girl from Eva’s grasp. But of course, the other children were also involved in the preceding moments and continued to move about the house afterward. The frame of the video camera creates a somewhat artificial boundary to the event. And of course, long before that afternoon, the main characters had developed their roles as scolding aunt, naughty niece, complicit little brother, innocent bystander, and victim.
Kilek jo bayang—the Minangkabau pattern of indirection
The main impression of this interchange is the intensity of ploys used by the girl and her aunt, and the variations which they play on indirection. I chose it to examine because it is such an elegantly condensed summary of typical Minangkabau interaction. The redirection of emotion, especially such a dangerous emotion as anger, is accomplished in a variety of ways through a variety of channels, verbal as well as nonverbal. There is a Minangkabau phrase, kilek jo bayang, which describes this indirection even as it itself is illusory. Literally, kilek (Indonesian: kilat) refers to the flash of lightning. And bayang refers to a reflection (which is an image arriving indirectly). The late Dr Khaidir Anwar, the leading Minangkabau linguist, once suggested to me that kilek jo bayang was like the strategy in billiards where, in order to get a ball to one destination, one banks it off the side in another direction. (He had lived in England.)
In fact, the interaction during this same two-hour period includes other examples of both direct and indirect statements:
Direct: | Aunt to Eva: “don’t be naughty” |
| “you can’t be naughty” |
Indirect: | Older girl: “Budi will break the glass (if he doesn’t watch out)” |
| Aunt to children: “you’ll fall” |
| “you’ll break your foot” |
| Older girl to younger girl: “you’ll fall down if you run like this” |
| Older girl to Budi: “I’ll be angry with you” |
Engagement
It is especially noteworthy that each of the statements got no answer. They were not part of a dialogue. In fact, the passage describing the interaction between the aunt and niece is unusual because it does not represent a sustained give and take, however momentary.
Videotaping versus pencil and notebook records
The brief example of interaction with which I opened this chapter gives an idea of the sorts of data that can be retrieved through a video record that would have been hardly noticeable, not to say accessible, with pencil and notebook. Now, I shall expand on the video project, culling from the many hours of video that I made of a few other Minangkabau children.
The ethnographic study of the role of culture in shaping emotion behavior invites a variety of approaches, each of which brings out aspects of emotion which slip past other approaches. In addition to the other more formal experiments and elicitations, in some of which I collaborated with psychologists (in particular Paul Ekman and Robert Levenson) to explore the more cognitive aspects of Minangkabau emotion (Heider 1991a; Ekman et al. 1987; Ekman and Heider 1988; Levenson et al. 1992; Heider 2011), I carried out these systematic observations of 16 Minangkabau children for two years over a period of three years. This was a longitudinal study designed to explore the ways in which the children acquired appropriate adult Minangkabau emotional behavior. These observations included as well the 130-minute videotape records of each child in the first and third years of the study. Now, I shall draw on five more of these videotapes.
The task was designed to combine the broad holism of naturalistic ethnographic observations with the systematic rigor of a more experimental approach. In my previous ethnographic research, on the Dani of Irian Jaya (Papua), Indonesia, I lived adjacent to a settlement with a population fluctuating around 50 people. I observed what happened in that area as I visited homes and strolled around the neighborhood. Over the years, I built up an overall idea of Dani life and behavior, which I formalized into two ethnographies (Heider 1970, 1997). Although I did some focused interviewing and systematic collecting of data, most of my time was spent wandering around watching, listening, and talking, following the flow of Dani life.
I designed this Minangkabau project very differently. Since so much had already been written about Minangkabau over the last century by foreigners, as well as Minangkabau themselve...
