Human thought is consummately social: social in its origins, social in its
functions, social in its forms, social in its applications. At base, think-
ing is a public activity--its natural habitat is the houseyard, the mar-
ketplace, and the town square. The implications of this fact for the an-
thropological analysis of culture, my concern here, are enormous,
subtle, and insufficiently appreciated.

I want to draw out some of these implications by means of what
might seem at first glance an excessively special, even a somewhat eso-
teric inquiry: an examination of the cultural apparatus in terms of
which the people of Bali define, perceive, and react to--that is, think
about--individual persons. Such an investigation is, however, special
and esoteric only in the descriptive sense. The facts, as facts, are of lit-
tle immediate interest beyond the confines of ethnography, and I shall
summarize them as briefly as I can. But when seen against the back-
ground of a general theoretical aim--to determine what follows for the
analysis of culture from the proposition that human thinking is essen-
tially a social activity--the Balinese data take on a peculiar impor-
tance.

Not only are Balinese ideas in this area unusually well developed, but
they are, from a Western perspective, odd enough to bring to light some

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