Geertz, Clifford. Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight. Selections

Geertz, Clifford. Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight. Selections

Of cocks and men

Balinese men identify with their fighting cocks to a great extent. Their cocks represent their masculine identity and they take immaculate care of them, spend much time grooming them and training them, etc. The cock symbolizes maleness, the penis, as well as being a hated animal (the Balinese find all animals repugnant) and an object of fascination.

The fight

The rules of the cock fight are passed form generation to generation as part of the general legal and cultural tradition of the villages. The cock fight can be viewed as a sociological entity. The people who watch cock fights are not a ''group'' or a ''crowd,'' but a ''focused gathering'' of people -- persons engrossed in a common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that flow. There is a connection between Balinese collective life and this sport.

Odds and even money

It is the formal asymmetry between balanced center bets (bets central to the game) and unbalanced side ones (bets made on the side lines of the game and not between players) that poses the critical analytical problem for a theory which sees cock fight wagering as the link connecting the fight to the wider world of Balinese culture. It also suggests the way to go about demonstrating the link. The center bet, with so much riding on it, makes the ''depth'' of the game (Jeremy Bentham). The Balinese attempt to create an interesting, ''deep'' match by making the center bet as large as possible so that the cocks matched will be as equal and as fine as possible, and the outcome as unpredictable as possible.

The question of why such matches are interesting takes us out of the realm of formal concerns into more broadly sociological and social psychological ones, and to a less purely economic idea of what ''depth'' amounts to.

Playing with Fire

Bentham's concept of ''deep play'' is play in which the stakes are so high that, from a utilitarian stand point, to play is irrational. Nonetheless, men do engage in such play both passionately and often, even in the face of the law (it is against the law in Bali to engage in cock fights). In deep Balinese cock fights, much more is at stake than material gain : status. The more money one risks, the more status one risks.

The big players are the focusing element in these focused gatherings. These men generally dominate and define the sport as they dominate and define the society. What makes the Balinese CF deep is thus not the money itself, but what the money causes to happen: the migration of the Balinese status hierarchy into the body of the cock fight.

The CF is a representation of the complex fields of tension set up by the controlled, ceremonial, deeply felt interaction of male (narcissistic) selves in the context of every day life. The CF is deliberately made to be a simulation of the social matrix, the involved system of cross-cutting, overlapping, highly corporate groups - - villages, kin, etc. -- in which its devotees live.

There is a pattern of tiered hierarchy of status rivalries between highly corporate but variously - based groupings. The cockfight is fundamentally a dramatization of status claims. for instance:

Men never bet against a cock owned by a member of their own kin group Men involved in highly institutionalized hostility relations will bet against each other Men avoid betting when loyalties are split Men involved in the center bet are typically leading members of their group (village, kin group)

The Balinese are fully aware of the symbolism in their cock fights. The more a match is between near-status individuals, the deeper the match. The deeper the match, the closer the identification of cock and man. the greater emotion and absorption in the match, the higher the betting, the less an economic and more a status view, and the ''solider'' the citizens will be who will be gaming.

Feathers, blood, crowds and money

Like any art form, the cock fight renders ordinary experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and reduced to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated. The CF puts a construction on death, masculinity, rage, pride, chance, etc. the function of the CF is a means of expression neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them, but to display them.

The importance of the CF is not, as functionalist sociology would have it, that it reinforces status discriminations, but that it provides a methodological social commentary upon the whole matter of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks and then organizing the major part of collective existence around that assortment. Its function is interpretive.

Saying something of something

Reading cultural practice as text: the Balinese, by attending a CF, learns what his cultures ethos and his private sensibility look like when spelled out externally in a collective text; that the two are near enough alike to be articulated in the symbolics of such a text; and -- the disquieting part -- that the text in which this revelation is accomplished consists of a chicken hacking another mindlessly to bits. Not only does the CF bring the assorted experiences of everyday life into focus, but it creates the paradigmatic human event -- one that tells us less what happens than the kind of thing that would happen if life were art and could be freely shaped by styles of feeling. Yet art regenerates the very subjectivity it pretends to display. CF's are positive agents in the maintenance of such a sensibility.

Anyhow, one way to look at the symbolic forms of the culture of a people is as an ensemble of texts. To ''say something of something'' to someone is at least to open up the paths of analysis which attend to their substance.