Sally Ann Ness has focused her research in Southeast Asia most recently on the work of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali during the 1930s. Her writings on Bateson and Mead include a study of Bateson's "template" theory of Balinese character, translated into the semeiotic framework of Charles S. Peirce (appearing in the edited volume, "Migrations of Gesture," 2008, University of Minnesota Press, Noland and Ness, eds.) and an essay on the place of Bali, phenomenologically conceived, in Mead and Bateson's pathbreaking analysis of Balinese performance (Journal of Asian Studies, 67(4)).