An Annotated Cockfight

Multiple thematic concerns which we’ve explored as a class this semester buttressed the choices we made in framing the excerpt below from the ethnographic documentary Tajen. Clifford Geertz is a legendary figure in the methodological development of both ethnography and cultural history. His essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” is a canonical text in our respective disciplines and, in Ayluonne’s words, can be seen as “deaccessing a particular form of positivist empiricism” which had guided the epistemological assumptions of the social sciences for decades. We intend to demonstrate, through the interplay of text, image, and paratext, the points of interpretive overlap, friction, and incommensurability between our disciplinary perspectives, while also meditating on how certain forms of knowledge production become accessed, deaccessed, or reaccessed through “bridge figures” like Geertz in our respective disciplines. How do certain modes of interpretation and methods of gathering quantitative and qualitative data become linked with specific figures and texts? What becomes of the disciplinary orientations which they dislodge?

Visitors are invited to record impressions in the guest book: we hope to encourage visitors to reflect on the analytic preconceptions they bring to bear on the act of observing, describing, and extracting cultural and social meaning from (or imposing meaning on?) what Geertz calls a “paradigmatic human event.”

Nick Barone and Ayluonne Tereszkiewicz 

Ayluonne: Thick Description and Reflexive Annotations

In this clip from the ethnographic film Tajen (2017), the viewer beholds a scene of choreographed violence: at some point in time, two animals lunged at one another on a dirt stage, surrounded by a crowd of viewers intent on the fight’s timely and definitive conclusion—these men sought a winner [note 1]. A man, most likely the steward of the standing gamecock, separated his frenetic competitor from the corpse of the expired antagonist as money was distributed between many hands, settling short and long bets and possibly linking individuals (mostly men) across a subset of the community the filmmakers choose to document [note 2].

Following this opening scene, a low-angle camera lens apprehended the dirt floor of the fight as shorn bird feathers tossed across in the wind; this scene grants an aesthetic to the social context—that of ephemerality, which appears to have shrouded this cockfight entirely. It is possible that this brief image also alluded to two other shifts: that of the social status of the two men and gamecocks in competition moments before and of the tone of the larger intersubjective atmosphere at the fight’s close, a transition from liveliness and performative tensions to something more resembling deference, sobriety, and formality, with an unexpected and contradictory casualness however that seeps in as well. In the next cut, the faces of three young men were captured as each viewed the steward of the winning bird as he unweaved the thick red thread that held the mauling blade in place, and the steward  of the losing bird as he prepared his gamecock for butchering.

This scene captured the simultaneous co-witnessing and co-creation of the losing ‘corpse’—the return from ‘fighter’ to ‘poultry’—as the dance of slippery signifiers and signification and as the expression of the fungibility of both corporeality and social stature. Those involved in this co-witnessessing and creation included the bird that claimed victory, his calm steward, and his steward’s laboring competitor. Additionally, the losing bird’s corpse appeared to be dutifully decimated and chopped to pieces as a way of desecrating its visibility and presence as an esteemed, fetishized object. Notably, the editors of this scene did not evoke sentiments of disgrace for the losing side, nor did the men filmed engage in obviously critical stances towards their antagonists. Instead, the entirety of these post-fight affairs (a minute long, or so) were civil and processual. The actions taken appeared as though they were integral to the task of finality, and the men attended to this task as if the ending of this intersubjective engagement was personal, something only they could do, do well, and do quietly, despite the cracking, ripping, and visceral sounds these closing exercises produced [note 3].

After the winning gamecock was placed in union with the deceased one in a burlap carrier bag and driven home, to be tended to by his steward with gel ointments and cayenne pills, which gave ‘spirit’ to the bird, the steward’s female family member or friend cleaned the corpse of the losing gamecock for cooking, and potential feeding to the victor. Here, the dance of signifier and signification continues as the materialities involved swing pendulum-like between the symbolic abstractions of human mastery over “animality,” masculinity and social stature, and put simply, power, and the concreteness of flesh and food. Overall, these five minutes of footage suggest that boundaries generated the value of this particular social experience, even in the presence of symbolic slippages and temporal precarities. The discreteness of this Balinese cockfight as a particular space, time, and series of participants—which together produced an ephemeral albeit intense utterance of socio-cultural ‘truths,’ as a web of emergent properties— was central to the significance of this human-animal praxis: intersubjectively produced boundaries generated an aura of critical value and deference on that day [note 4].

In its attempt to capture a fragment of a Balinese cockfight, this film clip exhibited the possible social, cultural, and economic stakes and negotiations at play at one designated point in time. While it exposed the brief articulation of several potential deep forms —a socio-cultural text, or phrase—which could be interpreted for potent cultural significance, what remains uncertain is the gravity of this aesthetic vignette to the larger social fabric of Bali. The possible definitions of the scene as a socio-cultural event were only present in what was unsaid and unwritten. To interpret further without meaningful engagement with the community on film, and communities across Bali, and without documentation of interlocutor engagement and expressions, is to engage in an act of complete narrative imposition, and to engage in vain [note 5].

Nick: Descriptions and Annotations

This excerpted clip from the 2017 ethnographic short documentary Tajen opens with the bloody culmination of a cockfight in an open-air ring on the western half of Bali. A murmuring audience fixes its gaze on the mangled carcass of the vanquished cock and the corybantic gesticulations of the victor before squaring up their wagers. Many in the all-male crowd are wearing denim, graphic T-shirts, and other accouterments indicative of “Western” modernity. These sartorial cues gesture towards the larger macrohistorical phenomena circumscribing the scene’s content beyond the immediate sensorial positioning of the viewer, such as Indonesia’s increasing exposure to Euro-American and Chinese markets, commodity flows, and private investment and its turn towards low-waged, export-driven manufacturing under the deregulatory economic reforms of Suharto in the 1980s and 1990s [note 6]. I wonder where the cock fits within this political-economic matrix––where did both winner and loser acquire their gamecocks? How were the mass-produced commodities of capitalist modernity, and the social messages they communicate, integrated into already-established frameworks of fetishism, ritualistic observance, and inheritable status? Put differently, what was their substantive relation to the more outwardly enduring features of the cockfight: the spurs, the cock, and so on?

The owner or handler of the injured, though still living, gamecock removes its spurs and places it in a sack along with the dead, ceremonially mutilated body of its defeated competitor. The man drives home on a motorized scooter, each gamecock in tow. In his dwelling, a female member of his family washes the defeated cock’s body to prepare it for consumption, indicative perhaps of a sexual division of labor that materially scaffolds the symbolic edifice of the cockfight. Meanwhile, the man tends to the victorious cock’s wounds with an elixir mixed in Coca-Cola and Fanta bottles. The seemingly timeless negotiations of status that the cockfight instantiates are visually shaped and delimited by signifiers of modernity, of historical rupture and cultural intermingling (the clothes, the soda bottle, the motorized scooter) which populate the landscape of a tradition which has existed for centuries [note 7]. The cockfight, with its mimetic and performative depth, its aesthetic reproduction and literal embodiment of masculine social values, fears of and identification with the beastial, ascriptive status categories, and extra-consanguineous political alliances, can also be said to have metaphysical “width” through the evidentiary fragments of historical particularity which appear, however indirectly, onscreen.

To be sure, in “Deep Play,” Geertz emphasizes that the cockfight as a cultural practice is not an agent of historical change and is marked by a temporality of non-causal immediacy: “You cannot ascend the status ladder by winning cockfights[.]” [note 8] Structures of local governance are not reconfigured by, nor do the economic fortunes of kin- and village-based alliances hinge on, the results of a fight. Its lack of concrete material stakes, coupled with its transitory and in some ways undocumentable character, renders the cockfight difficult for traditional historical analysis. The goal of the social or cultural historian would be to locate those moments of symbolic and subjective slippage, where the seemingly ahistorical, permanent features of the fight coexist uneasily with that which is “new” and anomalous. The medicinal concoction stirred in the commodity perhaps most associated with modern globalization and neoliberal incursion into formerly colonized nation-states, the Coca-Cola bottle, uncovers the interdependence of that which is generalizable, structural, and enduring about the cockfight and that which is contingent, revisable, and aporetic.