An Annotated Cockfight: notes

Here, the social phenomena of Balinese cockfighting is described in the past tense (despite the film evoking the sense of the present) – interestingly, this reflexive choice of mine points to both my readings of Johannes Fabian’s work on the “ethnographic present,” and the tensions in visual anthropology itself. First, the “ethnographic present,” produced by writing ethnography in present tense, is a literary and epistemological stance that extracts communities and their cultural praxis from time and space (history), and occludes the possibility for interlocutors to share in contemporaneous modernity with the author/scholar.

It further assumes a universal and unchanging interpretation of “social facts” in the name of timeless, capital “T” Theory in Social and Cultural Theory. See Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object and Anthropology with An Attitude by Johannes Fabian (Fabian 1983; Fabian 2001). By writing in the past tense, this thick description details a particular occurrence of two gamecocks fighting to death that unfolded at one specific time and place. Therefore, whatever is deemed “true” is gleaned from a specific intersubjective encounter of heterogeneous theoretical praxis, the praxis of the author of this thick description included, and it is thus only “true” in that context.

Second, this raises the tensions and debates that have surrounded visual anthropology as a medium which can evoke presentism and positivism by presenting ethnographic encounters as phenomenological experiences seemingly extracted from the past-tense and made present.

This reading of the scene is based, perhaps, on an overdetermined reading of Geertz analysis in “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” (1972), wherein Geertz argues that the central theme of the cockfights was the depth of the play. Depth refers to the level of social, political, and economic stakes in which the two competitors are engaged that increases the degree to which the fight signifies more abstract and defining values, e.g., masculinity, royalty and power, and family name, than merely money and performative entertainment.

Shows central interest in what substance these aesthetic collective experiences provide to the structure of subjectivities.

Reveals my anthropological assumption of deep epistemological forces, whether collectively shared by many as webs of cultural significations (Geertz 1972), intersubjectively produced at smaller, “relentlessly specific” (Abu-Lughod 1993) scales, or individually generated (Behar 1996) — undergirding exterior social phenomena and interior human subjectivities, that can be accessed through rigorous interpretation, but never abject positivism and empiricism in the traditional and scientific sense. In other words, as Clifford Geertz argued in his seminal “Deep Play” (1972) and “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” (1973), ethnographic writing should forefront subjective and rich interpretations of the social and of culture as a text of complex semiotic values and relational “webs of signification,” not as objects dictated by strict and uniform laws, structures, and rituals that exist in a positivist and objective sense; no ethnographer could claim to know the rules of any society or culture with certainty, nor should certainty be the north star of anthropological hermeneutics as a methodology for knowledge production.

However, I am also alluding to the shift in my discipline’s stance on “culture” itself and the importance of introducing “time” and particularity to these epistemologies and structures—to interpret them as porous, soft, shifting, and responsive forces within the social world—as a way of writing against monolithic theories of how communities behave, a.k.a. “culture.” See Writing Women’s Worlds by Lila Abu-Lughod (1993). Abu-Lughod writes,“…the particulars suggest that others live as we perceive ourselves living not as automatons … but as people going through life wondering what they should do…” (Lila Abu-Lughod 1993, 22).

Anthropologists writing after Geertz, and particularly about the Balinese cockfight, have challenged Geertz’ interpretations of the event he witnessed, and even the very importance of cockfighting to Balinese society. I concede once again that this thick description is an overdetermined viewpoint, as I am a student of Anthropology with significant experience reading Geertz and his students, and so I granted the event with the gravitas of something central without any experience or engagement with cockfighting.

Here, I reveal my methodological bias towards contextualism and the positivist historian’s mandate to tether the production of cultural meaning in rituals like the cockfight to patterns of political or economic “change over time,” one of the most important phrases in the historian’s discursive toolbox. This stands in stark contrast to the account of the cockfight given by Clifford Geertz, who attempted to operationalize the ritual as an interpretative portal through which to understand the seemingly timeless social-symbolic structures of Balinese society and, in his words, “their essential nature[.]” The historian would argue that Geertz’s more schematic approach leaves little room for how political, economic, and technological developments may have altered the webs of signification knit by the cockfight. Geertz even seems to acknowledge the problems that historical contingency poses to stabilizing the cockfight’s meaning within a definitive interpretive framework, regulated by sempiternal principles: Geertz marks the 1908 Dutch invasion of Java as a definitive temporal break in the cockfight’s symbolic history. Before this date, “[T]here were no bureaucrats around to police popular morality,” therefore rendering the social-representational significance of the cockfight less oblique. How Dutch standards of morality specifically caused cockfighting practices and “the connection between the excitements of collective life and those of blood sport” on which they depended to assume a more abstract quality is left unexplored. Nonetheless, both Geertz and the cultural historians he influenced were united in their shared locating of representational abundance in ostensibly unexpected places. See Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” Daedalus 101, no. 1 (1972): 65 and Sarah Maza, “Stephen Greenblatt, New Historicism, and Cultural History, Or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Interdisciplinarity,” Modern Intellectual History 1, no. 2 (2004): 262.

One of the key methodological differences between Geertz and a cultural historian is the curious inattention the former pays to the palm-leaf documents which stipulate the rules of cockfighting and embed them within “the general legal and cultural tradition of the villages.” For a cultural historian, such texts, and their use and reception by different social actors , would form the basis of her analysis. The logocentrism of Anglo-American history persists, even among those who work on material culture or conduct oral histories. See Geertz, “Deep Play,” 64. For an account of how the historical profession has changed its epistemic approach to, without dislodging its reliance on, documentary sources, see Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 63-85.

Geertz, “Deep Play,” 78.