Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. Clifford Geertz. The Raid. Early in April of , my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” is one of Clifford Geertz’s most influential articles which illustrates not only the meaning of a given. clifford geertz: “deep play: notes on the balinese cockfight” summary and review to start form the bottom line, clifford geertz’s essential notion expressed in.
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Having come together in search of pleasure they have entered into a relationship which will bring the participants, considered collectively, net pain rather than net pleasure.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” — summary and review. The corner boys consider playing for money the real pkay of skill and, unless a man performs well when money is at stake, he is not considered a good competitor.
Anthro Classics Online: Geertz’s Notes on the Balinese Cockfight | Savage Minds
But as a rule he will feel he must support it and, desp deep games, nearly always does. Though the markets themselves have never been very highly developed, small morning affairs in a village square, it is the microregion such rotation rather generally marks out–ten or twenty square miles, seven or eight neighboring villages which in contemporary Bali is usually going to mean anywhere from five to ten or eleven thousand people from which the core of any cockfight audience, indeed virtually all of it, will come.
Belo New York, balunese published inpp. There are two other Balinese values and disvalues which, connected with punctuate temporality on the one hand and balinesd aggressiveness on the other, reinforce the sense that the cockfight is at once continuous with ordinary social life and a direct negation of it: On this, see J.
Cockfighting men would be ashamed to go anywhere near them. In genuine deep play, this is the case for both parties. The whole passage, as it takes us back to Aristotle though to the Poetics rather than the Hermeneuticsis worth quotation: Chicago,p.
The man who wants the underdog cock shouts the short-side number indicating the odds he wants to be given. The taker tries to shout the giver into longer odds, the giver to shout the taker into shorter ones. Incest, though hardly approved, is a much less horrifying crime than bestiality.
Actually, it dwep men. In the case of the Balinese cockfight, a deep fight is one in which results are unpredictable, the odds are more even and the bets are more balanced.
William Roseberry thinks so. In any case, the attempt to deprovincialize the concept of art is but part of the general anthropological conspiracy to deprovincialize all important social concepts–marriage, religion. Occasionally, if the cocks are clearly mismatched, there may be no upward movement at all, or even movement down the scale to four-to-three, three-to-two, very, very rarely to two-to-one, a shift which is accompanied by a declining number of bets as a shift upward is accompanied by an increasing number.
It seems important to remember that Geertz was himself formed under Talcott Parsons, and that Interpretation of Culture was the big break with that tradition Religion of Java being pretty different. We ran down the main village street, northward, away from where we were living, for we were on that side of the ring. This article needs additional citations for verification. We had cockfihht perfect right to be there, he said, looking the Javanese upstart in the eye.
The first is pplay, involving coalitions of bettors clustering around the owner; the second is individual, man to man. But for the Balinese, for whom nothing is more pleasurable than an affront obliquely delivered or more painful than one obliquely received–particularly when mutual acquaintances, undeceived by surfaces, are watching–such appraisive drama is deep indeed.
The old man turns out to be Siva and, thus, to live in a great palace in the sky, though the hero does not know this. Despite being illegal, cockfighting is a widespread and highly popular phenomenon in Bali, at least at the time “Deep Play: Motion picture recording plus multiple observers would probably bailnese necessary to deal with it effectively.
Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight by Clifford Geertz
As odds-takers backers of the underdog and odds-givers backers of the favorite sweep the crowd with their shouts, they begin to focus in on one another as potential betting pairs, often from far across the ring. And, as with those other embarrassments -opium smoking, begging, or uncovered breasts-it seeks, rather unsystematically, to put a stop to it. The Balinese cockfight is, as Geertz puts it, a way of playing with fire without getting burned.
Koentjaraningrat, Villages in Indonesia Ithaca,pp. A goddess descends from heaven and takes the girl up to the skies with her. But it is a momentary gain or lost, the statues is only gained or lost momentarily following the fight but is maintained in the long run, with cockfights assisting in making sure of that.
The cocks die from the food given them, the owner’s sanity is restored, the goddess brings the girl back to the father, who reunites him with his wife. Set not in the matrix of the kinetic emotionality of animals, but in that of the static passionlessness of divine mentality, it expresses tranquillity not disquiet.
Our impressions of human life are picked up one by one, and remain for most of us loose and disorganized. The extremes to which this madness is conceived on occasion to go–and the fact that it is considered madness–is demonstrated by the Balinese folk tale I Tuhung Kuning.
You cannot ascend the status ladder by winning cockfights; you cannot, as an individual, really ascend it at all. Actually, the typing of cocks, which is extremely elaborate I have collected more than twenty classes, certainly not a complete listis not based on color alone, but on a series of independent, interacting, dimensions, which include-besides color–size, bone thickness, plumage, and temperament.
One can stay, as I have here, within a single, more or less bounded form, and circle steadily within it. But whatever the level at which one operates, and however intricately, the guiding principle is the same: It is a society’s manner of speaking to itself about itself, and is therefore of prime interest for the anthropologist.
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baliense But it is only an apparent one, for, rather than taking myths, totem rites, marriage rules, or whatever as texts to interpret. Cockfights were generally illegal in Indonesia when Geertz was doing his fieldwork there in the s. This apparent amusement and seeming sport is, to take another phrase from Erving Goffman, “a status bloodbath.
A cockfight is what, searching for a name for something not vertebrate enough to be called a group and not structureless enough to be called cockight crowd, Erving Goffman has called a “focused gathering”–a set of persons engrossed in a common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that flow. Even in contexts where women do not in fact play much of a role–music, painting, certain agricultural activities–their absence, which is only relative in any case, is more a mere matter of fact than socially enforced.
Social tensions are represented through the cockfight, but after all, it’s just a cockfight.