Geertz and Cockfighting
As a kid in South Florida I was terrified and a little fascinated to hear about the cockfights that go down in Miami. What sort of mentality fuels cockfights and dogfights? Is this just extended adolescent machismo? What else comes into play? Can we learn anything here about how we send kids into wars? And so on...
I was surprised to find "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" by anthropologist Clifford Geertz on the class reading list. I dove in and summarized the reading here in the class wiki. It turned out to be a fascinating read, more for new insights it gave me into how people use games than into connections between cockfights and wars.
A few personal comments on the reading:
Geertz avoids judgmentalism: I was impressed that Geertz avoided the typical rich Westerner's reaction of preaching that these people are brutal; he studiously avoids bringing his own moral judgments into the piece. I know this is what he's supposed to do, but during cockfights I doubt I could have pulled that off.
Status war? What status war? Several times Geertz states or implies that cockfights present a form of struggle between social classes; for instance, he calls the cockfight a “status war” (417). Elsewhere in the essay he claims flat out that nobody’s status changes (443) as a result of a cockfight and he implies strongly that, in a match, each cock owner generally opposes another owner from similar rank in the fights, and in the most popular, most emotional, most highly-bet upon, “deepest” fights the opponents come from the same class. Did I miss something?
Doesn’t this also seem to be a way for the Balinese to transfer the parts of themselves that they’re least comfortable with (open confrontation, violence, loss of composure) onto animals? (Geertz never says this flat out.) As well as viewing these events as reflections of Balinese society, we can see them as inversions of it. Geertz writes that the cockfight’s “flat-out, head-to-head (or spur-to-spur) aggressiveness, makes it seem a contradiction, a reversal, even a subversion of” Balinese social life, in which overt antagonism is avoided and frowned upon. (Am I turning into a shrink?)
Posted by sean at Březen 24, 2004 11:54 AM
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on the status thing... I'm thinking maybe what Geertz observed was that the fights often reflected class/status struggles but that cockfighting was not how status/class changes... that is, it takes more that a strong cock and a fist full of dough to make it to the top. I wish I could say as much about our country... If GWB is any indication, all you need is the fist full of dough... not even a healthy, bad-ass chicken!