Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight

Daedalus

Volumn 134, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 56-86

  Geertz, Clifford ^a,b  

^a American Academy   (United States)

^b INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY   (United States)

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EID: 33750166239     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/001152605774431563     Document Type: Review

References (65)

1. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character : A Photographic Analysis (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1942), 68.
2. Jane Belo, "The Balinese Temper," in Jane Belo, ed., Traditional Balinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970; originally published in 1935), 85 -110.
3. The best discussion of cockfighting is again Bateson and Mead's (Balinese Character, 24-25, 140), but it, too, is general and abbreviated.
4. Balinese Character Ibid., 25-26. The cockfight is unusual within Balinese culture in being a single sex public activity from which the other sex is totally and expressly excluded. Sexual differentiation is culturally extremely played down in Bali and most activities, formal and informal, involve the participation of men and women on equal ground, commonly as linked couples. From religion, to politics, to economics, to kinship, to dress, Bali is a rather "unisex" society, a fact both its customs and its symbolism clearly express. 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. To this general pattern, the cockfight, entirely of, by, and for men (women - at least Balinese women - do not even watch), is the most striking exception.
5. Christiaan Hooykaas, The Lay of the Jaya Prana (London: Luzac, 1958), 39. The lay has a stanza (no. 17) with the reluctant bridegroom use. Jaya Prana, the subject of a Balinese Uriah myth, responds to the lord who has offered him the loveliest of six hundred servant girls : "Godly King, my Lord and Master / I beg you, give me leave to go / such things are not yet in my mind; / like a fighting cock encaged / indeed I am on my mettle / I am alone / as yet the flame has not been fanned."
6. For these, see V. E. Korn, Het Adatrecht van Bali, 2d ed. (s'Gravenhage : G. Naeff, 1932), index under toh.
7. There is indeed a legend to the effect that the separation of Java and Bali is due to the action of a powerful Javanese religious figure who wished to protect himself against a Balinese culture hero (the ancestor of two Ksatria castes) who was a passionate cockfighting gambler. See Christiaan Hooykaas, Agama Tirtha (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche, 1964), 184.
8. An incestuous couple is forced to wear pig yokes over their necks and crawl to a pig trough and eat with their mouths there. On this, see Jane Belo, "Customs Pertaining to Twins in Bali," in Belo, ed., Traditional Balinese Culture, 49;
9. on the abhorrence of animality generally, Bateson and Mead, Balinese Character, 22.
10. Except for unimportant, small-bet fights (on the question, of fight "importance," see below) spur affixing is usually done by someone other than the owner. Whether the owner handles his own cock or not more or less depends on how skilled he is at it, a consideration whose importance is again relative to the importance of the fight. When spur affixers and cock handlers are someone other than the owner, they are almost always a quite close relative - a brother or cousin - or a very intimate friend of his. They are thus almost extensions of his personality, as the fact that all three will refer to the cock as "mine," say "I" fought So-and-So, and so on, demonstrates. Also, owner-handler-affixer tri-ads tend to be fairly fixed, though individuals may participate in several and often exchange roles within a given one.
11. Erving Goffman, Encounters : Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 9-10.
12. This word, which literally means an indelible stain or mark, as in a birthmark or a vein in a stone, is used as well for a deposit in a court case, for a pawn, for security offered in a loan, for a stand-in for someone else in a legal or ceremonial context, for an earnest advanced in a business deal, for a sign placed in a field to indicate its ownership is in dispute, and for the status of an unfaithful wife from whose lover her husband must gain satisfaction or surrender her to him. See Korn, Het Adatrecht van Bali;
13. Theodoor Pigeaud, Javaans-Nederlands Handwoordanboek (Groningen : Wolters, 1938);
14. H. H. Juynboll, Oudjavaansche-Nederlandsche Woordenlijst (Leiden: Brill, 1923).
15. The center bet must be advanced in cash by both parties prior to the actual fight. The umpire holds the stakes until the decision is rendered and then awards them to the winner, avoiding, among other things, the intense embarrassment both winner and loser would feel if the latter had to pay off personally following his defeat. About 10 percent of the winner's receipts are subtracted for the umpire's share and that of the fight sponsors.
16. Actually, the typing of cocks, which is extremely elaborate (I have collected more than twenty classes, certainly not a complete list), is not based on color alone, but on a series of independent, interacting, dimensions, which include, beside color, size, bone thickness, plumage, and temperament. (But not pedigree. The Balinese do not breed cocks to any significant extent, nor, so far as I have been able to discover, have they ever done so. The asil, or jungle cock, which is the basic fighting strain everywhere the sport is found, is native to southern Asia, and one can buy a good example in the chicken section of almost any Balinese market for anywhere from 4 or 5 ringgits up to 50 or more.) The color element is merely the one normally used as the type name, except when the two cocks of different types - as on principle they must be - have the same color, in which case a secondary indication from one of the other dimensions ("large speckled" v. "small speckled," etc.) is added. The types are coordinated with various cosmological ideas which help shape the making of matches, so that, for example, you fight a small, headstrong, speckled brown-on-white cock with flat-lying feathers and thin legs from the east side of the ring on a certain day of the complex Balinese calendar, and a large, cautious, all-black cock with tufted feathers and stubby legs from the north side on another day, and so on. All this is again recorded in palm-leaf manuscripts and endlessly discussed by the Balinese (who do not all have identical systems), and full-scale componential-cum-symbolic analysis of cock classifications would be extremely valuable both as an adjunct to the description of the cockfight and in itself. But my data on the subject, though extensive and varied, do not seem to be complete and systematic enough to attempt such an analysis here. For Balinese cosmological ideas more generally see Belo, ed., Traditional Balinese Culture, and J. L. Swellengrebel, ed., Bali: Studies in Life, Thought, and Ritual (The Hague : W. van Hoeve, 1960);
17. for calendrical ones, Clifford Geertz, Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali : An Essay in Cultural Analysis (New Haven, Conn.: Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, 1966), 45-53.
18. For purposes of ethnographic completeness, it should be noted that it is possible for the man backing the favorite - the odds-giver - to make a bet in which he wins if his cock wins or there is a tie, a slight shortening of the odds (I do not have enough cases to be exact, but ties seem to occur about once every fifteen or twenty matches). He indicates his wish to do this by shouting sapih ("tie") rather than the cock-type, but such bets are in fact infrequent.
19. The precise dynamics of the movement of the betting is one of the most intriguing, most complicated, and, given the hectic conditions under which it occurs, most difficult to study, aspects of the fight. Motion picture recording plus multiple observers would probably be necessary to deal with it effectively. Even impressionistically - the only approach open to a lone ethnographer caught in the middle of all this - it is clear that certain men lead both in determining the favorite (that is, making the opening cock-type calls which always initiate the process) and in directing the movement of the odds, these "opinion leaders" being the more accomplished cockfighters-cum-solid- citizens to be discussed below. If these men begin to change their calls, others follow; if they begin to make bets, so do others and - though there is always a large number of frustrated bettors crying for shorter or longer odds to the end - the movement more or less ceases. But a detailed understanding of the whole process awaits what, alas, it is not very likely ever to get : a decision theorist armed with precise observations of individual behavior.
20. Assuming only binomial variability, the departure from a fifty-fifty expectation, in the 60 ringgits and below case is 1.38 standard deviations, or (in a one-direction test) an 8 in 100 possibilily by chance alone ; for the below 40 ringgits case it is 1.6.5 standard deviations, or about 5 in 100. The fact that these departures though real are not extreme merely indicates, again, that even in the smaller fights the tendency to match cocks at least reasonably evenly persists. It is a matter of relative relaxation of the pressures toward equalization, not their elimination. The tendency for high-bet, contests to be coin-flip propositions is, of course, even more striking, and suggests the Balinese know quite well what they are about.
21. The reduction in wagering in smaller fights (which, of course, feeds on itself; one of the reasons people find small fights uninteresting is that there is less wagering in them, and contrariwise for large ones) takes place in three mutually reinforcing ways. First, there is a simple withdrawal of interest as people wander off to have a cup of coffee or chat with a friend. Second, the Balinese do not mathematically reduce odds, but bet directly in terms of stated odds as such. Thus, for 39-8 bet, one man wagers 9 ringgits, the other 8; for 5 - 4, one wagers 5, the other 4. For any given currency unit, like the ringgit, therefore, 6.3 times as much money is involved in a 10 - 9 bet as in a 2 - 1 bet, for example, and, as noted, in small fights betting settles toward the longer end. Finally, the bets which are made tend to be one- rather than two-, three-, or in some of the very largest fights, four- or five-finger ones. (The fingers indicate the multiples of the stated bet odds at issue, not absolute figures. Two fingers in a 6 - 5 situation means a man wants to wager 10 ringgits on the underdog against 12, three in an 8 - 7 situation, 21 against 24, and so on.)
22. Besides wagering there are other economic aspects of the cockfight, especially its very close connection with the local market system which, though secondary both to its motivation and to its function, are not without importance. Cockfights are open events to which anyone whowishes may corne, sometimes from quite distant areas, but well over 90 percent, probably over 95, are very local affairs, and the locality concerned is defined not by the village, nor even by the administrate district, but by the rural market system. Bali has a three-day market week with ihe familiar "solar-syslem" type rotation. 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. Most of the fights are in fact organized and sponsored by small combines of petty rural merchants under the general premise, very strongly held by them and indeed by all Balinese, that cockfights are good for trade because "they gel money out of the house, they make it circulate." Stalls selling various sorts of things as well as assorted sheer-chance gambling games (see below) are set up around the edge of the area so that this even takes on the quality of a small fair. This connection of cockfighting with markets and market sellers is very old, as, among other things, their conjunction in inscriptions (Roelof Goris, Prasasti Bali, 2 vols. [Bandung: N. V. Masa Baru, 1954]) indicates. Trade has followed the cock for centuries in rural Bali and the sport has been one of the main agencies of the island's monetization.
23. The phrase is found in the Hildreth translation, International Library of Psychology, 1931, note to 106; see L. L. Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), 6ff.
24. Of course, even in Bentham, utility is not normally confined as a concept to monetary losses and gains, and my argument here mightbe more carefully put in terms of a denial that for the Balinese, as for any people, utility (pleasure, happiness . . .) is merely identifiable with wealth. But such terminological problems are in any case secondary to the essential point : the cockfight is not roulette.
25. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston : Beacon Press, 1963). There is nothing specifically Balinese, of course, about deepening significance with money, as Whyte's description of corner boys in a working-class district of Boston demonstrates : "Gambling plays an important role in the lives of Cornerville people. Whatever game the corner boys play, they nearly always bet on the outcome. When there is nothing at stake, the game is not considered a real contest. This does not mean that the financial element is all-important. I have frequently heard men say that the honor of winning was much more important than the money at stake. The corner boys consider playing for money the real test of skill and, unless a man performs well when money is at stake, he is not considered a good competitor."
26. W. F. Whyte, Street Corner Society, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 140.
27. 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 folktale I Tuhung Kuning. A gambler becomes so deranged by his passion that, leaving on a trip, he orders his pregnant wife to take care of the prospective newborn if it is a boy but to feed it as meat to his fighting cocks if it is a girl. The mother gives birth to a girl, but rather than giving the child to the cocks she gives them a large rat and conceals the girl with her own mother. When the husband returns the cocks, crowing a jingle, inform him of the deception and, furious, he sets out to kill the child. A goddess descends from heaven and takes the girl up to the skies with her. 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. The story is given as "Geel Komkommertje" in Jacoba Hooykaas-van Leeuwen Boomkamp, Sprookjes en Verhalen van Bali (s'Gravenhage : Van Hoeve, 1956), 19-25.
28. For a fuller description of Balinese rural social structure, see Clifford Geertz, "Form and Variation in Balinese Village Structure," American Anthropologist 61 (1959) : 94-108 ;
29. "Tihingan, A Balinese Village," in R. M. Koentjaraningrat, Villages in Indonesia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), 210-243;
30. and, though it is a bit off the norm as Balinese villages go, V. E. Korn, De Dorpsrepubliek tnganan Pagringsingan (Santpoort [Netherlands] : C. A. Mees, 1933).
31. Goffman, Encounters, 78.
32. B. R. Berelson, P. F. Lazersfeld, and W. N. McPhee, Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1954).
33. As this is a formal paradigm, it is intended to display the logical, not the causal, structure of cockfighting. Just which of these considerations leads to which, in what order, and by what mechanisms, is another matter - one I have attempted to shed some light on in the general discussion.
34. In another of Hooykaas-van Leeuwen Boomkamp's folk tales ("De Gast," Sprookjes en Verhalen van Bali, 172-180), a low caste Sudra, a generous, pious, and carefree man who is also an accomplished cockfighter, loses, despite his accomplishment, fight after fight until he is not only out of money but down to his last cock. He does not despair, however - "I bet," he says, "upon the Unseen World." His wife, a good and hardworking woman, knowing how much he enjoys cockfighting, gives him her last "rainy day" money to go and bet. But, filled with misgivings due to his ran of ill luck, he leaves his own cock at home and bets merely on the side. He soon loses all but a coin or two and repairs to a food stand for a snack, where he meets a decrepit, odorous, and generally unappetizing old beggar leaning on a staff. The old man asks for food, and the hero spends his last coins to buy him some. The old man then asks to pass the night with the hero, which the hero gladly invites him to do. As there is no food in the house, however, the hero tells his wife to kill the last cock for dinner. When the old man discovers this fact, he tells the hero he has three cocks in his own mountain hut and says the hero may have one of them for fighting. He also asks for the hero's son to accompany him as a servant, and, after the son agrees, this is done. 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. In time, the hero decides to visit his son and collect the promised cock. Lifted up into Siva's presence, he is given the choice of three cocks. The first, crows : "I have beaten fifteen opponents." The second crows, "I have beaten twenty-five opponents." The third crows, "I have beaten the King." "That one, the third, is my choice," says the hero, and returns with it to earth. When he arrives at the cockfight, he is asked for an entry fee and replies, "I have no money; I will pay after my cock has won." As he is known never to win, he is let in because the king, who is there fighting, dislikes him and hopes to enslave him when he loses and cannot pay off. In order to ensure that this happens, the king matches his finest cock against the hero's. When the cocks are placed down, the hero's flees, and the crowd, led by the arrogant, king, hoots in laughter. The hero's cock then flies at the king himself, killing him with a spur stab in the throat. The hero flees. His house is encircled by the king's men. The cock changes into a Garuda, the great mythic bird of Indic legend, and carries the hero and his wife to safety in the heavens. When the people see this, they make the hero king and his wife queen and they return as such to earth. Later their son, released by Siva, also returns and the hero-king announces his intention to enter a hermitage. ("I will fight no more cockfights. I have bet on the Unseen and won.") He enters the hermitage and his son becomes king.
35. Addict gamblers are really less declassed (for their status is, as everyone else's, inherited) than merely impoverished and personally disgraced. The most prominent addict gambler in my cockfight circuit was actually a very high caste satria who sold off most of his considerable lands to support his habit. Though everyone privately regarded him as a fool and worse (some, more charitable, regarded him as sick), he was publicly treated with the elaborate deference and politeness due his rank. On the independence of personal reputation and public status in Bali, see Geertz, Person, Time, and Conduct, 28-35.
36. For four, somewhat variant, treatments, see Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1953);
37. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (New York : Harper and Row, 1968);
38. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill, 1968);
39. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Eye and the Mind," in his The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159-190.
40. British cockfights (the sport was banned there in 1840) indeed seem to have lacked it, and to have generated, therefore, a quite different family of shapes. Most British fights were "mains," in which a preagreed number of cocks were aligned into two teams and fought serially. Score was kept and wagering took place both on the individual matches and on the main as a whole. There were also "battle Royales," both in England and on the Continent, in which a large number of cocks were let loose at once with the one left standing at the end the victor. And in Wales, the so-called "Welsh main" followed an elimination pattern, along the lines of a present-day tennis tournament, winners proceeding to the next round. As a genre, the cockfight has perhaps less compositional flexibility than, say, Latin comedy, but it is not entirely without any. On cockfighting more generally, see Arch Ruport, The Art of Cockfighting (New York: Devin-Adair, 1949);
41. G. R. Scott, History of Cockfighting (London : Charles Skilton, 1957);
42. and Lawrence Fitz-Barnard, Fighting Sports (London: Odhams Press, 1921).
43. Person, Time, and Conduct, esp. 42ff. I am, however, not the first person to have argued it: see
44. G. Bateson, "Bali, the Value System of a Steady State," and "An Old Temple and a New Myth," in Belo, ed., Traditional Balinese Culture, 384-402, 111-136.
45. For the necessity of distinguishing among "description," "representation," "exemplification," and "expression" (and the irrelevance of "imitation" to all of them) as modes of symbolic reference, see Goodman, Languages of Art, 6-10, 45-91, 225-241.
46. Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Bloomington : University of Indiana Press, 1964), 99.
47. There are two other Balinese values and disvalues which, connected with punctuate temporality on the one hand and unbridled aggressiveness on the other, reinforce the sense that the cockfight is at once continuous with ordinary social life and a direct negation of it : what the Balinese call ramé, and what they call paling. Ramé means crowded, noisy, and active, and is a highly sought-after social state : crowded markets, mass festivals, busy streets are all ramé as, of course, is, in the extreme, a cockfight. Ramé is what happens in the "full" times (its opposite, sepi, "quiet," is what, happens in the "empty" ones). Paling is social vertigo, the dizzy, disoriented, lost, turned-around feeling one gets when one's place in the coordinates of social space is not clear, and it is a tremendously disfavored, immensely anxiety-producing state. Balinese regard the exact maintenance of spatial orientation ("not to know where north is" is to be crazy), balance, decorum, status relationships, and so forth, as fondamental to ordered life (krama) and paling, the sort of whirling confusion of position the scrambling cocks exemplify as its profoundest enemy and contradiction. On ramé see Bateson and Mead, Balinese Character, 3, 64;
48. on paling, Balinese Character ibid., 11
49. and Belo, ed., Traditional Balinese Culture, 90ff.
50. The Stevens reference is to his "The Motive for Metaphor," ("You like it under the trees in autumn, / Because everything is half dead. / The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves / And repeats words without meaning"); the Schoenberg reference is to the third of his Five Orchestral Pieces (Opus 1.6), and is borrowedfrom H. H. Drager, "The Concept of 'Tonal Body,'" in Susanne Langer, ed., Reflections on Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 174.
51. On Hogarth, and on this whole problem - there called "multiple matrix matching" - see E. H. Gombrich, "The Use of Art for the Study of Symbols," in James Hogg, ed., Psychology and the Visual Arts (Baltimore : Penguin Brooks, 1969), 149-170.
52. The more usual term for this sort of semantic alchemy is "metaphorical transfer," and good technical discussions of it-can be found in M. Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962), 25ff;
53. Goodman, Language as Art, 44ff;
54. and W. Percy, "Metaphor as Mistake," Sewanee Review 66 (1958) : 78-99.
55. The tag is from the second book of the Organon, On Interpretation. For a discussion of it, and for the whole argument for freeing "the notion of text . . . from the notion of scripture or writing," and constructing, thus, a general hermeneutics, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), 20ff.
56. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (1970) Ibid.
57. Lévi-Strauss's "structuralism" might seem an exception. But it is only an apparent one, for, rather than taking myths, totem rites, marriage rules, or whatever as texts to interpret, Lévi-Strauss takes them as ciphers to solve, which is very much not the same thing. He does not seek to understand symbolic forms in terms of how they function in concrete situations to organize perceptions (meanings, emotions, concepts, attitudes); he seeks to understand them entirely in terms of their internal structure, indépendent de tout sujet, de tout objet, et de toute contexte. For my own view of this approach - that is suggestive and indefensible - see Clifford Geertz, "The Cerebral Savage : On the Work of Lévi-Strauss," Encounter 48 (1967) : 25-32.
58. Frye, The Educated Imagination, 63-64.
59. The use of the, to Europeans, "natural" visual idiom for perception - "see," "watches,"and so forth - is more than usually misleading here, for the fact that, as mentioned earlier, Balinese follow the progress of the fight as much (perhaps, as fighting cocks are actually rather hard to see except as blurs of motion, more) with their bodies as with their eyes, moving their limbs, heads, and trunks in gestural mimicry of the cocks' maneuvers, means that much of the individual's experience of the fight is kinesthetic rather than visual. If ever there was an example of Kenneth Burke's definition of a symbolic act as "the dancing of an attitude" (The Philosophy of Literary Form, rev. ed. [New York : Vintage Books, 1957], 9) the cockfight is it.
60. On the enormous role of kinesthetic perception in Balinese life, Bateson and Mead, Balinese Character, 84-88;
61. on the active nature of aesthetic perception in general, Goodman, Language of Art, 241-244.
62. All this coupling of the occidental great with the oriental lowly will doubtless disturb certain sorts of aestheticians as the earlier efforts of anthropologists to speak of Christianity and totemism in the same breath disturbed certain sorts of theologians. But as ontological questions are (or should be) bracketed in the sociology of religion, judgmental ones are (or should be) bracketed in the sociology of art. 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, law, rationality - and though this is a threat to aesthetic theories which regard certain works of art as beyond the reach of sociological analysis, it is no threat to the conviction, for which Robert Graves claims to have been reprimanded at his Cambridge tripos, that some poems arc better than others.
63. For the consecration ceremony, see V. E. Korn, "The Consecration of the Priest," in Swellengrebel, ed., Bali, 131-154;
64. for (somewhat exaggerated) village communion, Roelof Goris, "The Religious Character of the Balinese Village," Bali, ibid., 79-100.
65. That what the cockfight has to say about Bali is not altogether without perception and the disquiet it expresses about the general pattern of Balinese life is not wholly without reason is attested by the fact that in two weeks of December 1965, during the upheavals following the unsuccessful coup in Djakarta, between forty and eighty thousand Balinese (in a population of about two million) were killed, largely by one another - the worst outburst in the country. (John Hughes, Indonesian Upheaval [New York: McKay, 1967], 173-183. Hughes's figures are, of course, rather casual estimates, but they are not the most extreme.) This is not to say, of course, that the killings were caused by the cockfight, could have been predicted on the basis of it, or were some sort of enlarged version of it with real people in the place of the cocks - all of which is nonsense. It is merely to say that if one looks at Bali not just through the medium of its dances, its shadowplays, its sculpture, and its girls, but - as the Balinese themselves do - also through the medium of its cockfight, the fact that the massacre occurred seems, if no less appalling, less like a contradiction to the laws of nature. As more than one real Gloucester has discovered, sometimes people actually get life precisely as they most deeply do not want it.