1.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/b>Here, the social phenomena of Balinese cockfighting is described in the past tense (despite the film evoking the sense of the present) \u2013 interestingly, this reflexive choice of mine points to both my readings of Johannes Fabian\u2019s work on the \u201cethnographic present,\u201d and the tensions in visual anthropology itself. First, the \u201cethnographic present,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
It further assumes a universal and unchanging interpretation of \u201csocial facts\u201d in the name of timeless, capital \u201cT\u201d Theory in Social and Cultural Theory. See Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object<\/i> and Anthropology with An Attitude<\/i> 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 \u201ctrue\u201d is\u00a0 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 \u201ctrue\u201d in that context.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
2.<\/p>\n
This reading of the scene is based, perhaps, on an overdetermined reading of Geertz analysis in \u201cDeep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight\u201d (1972), wherein Geertz argues that the central theme of the cockfights was the depth<\/i> of the play. Depth<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
3.<\/p>\n
Shows central interest in what substance<\/i> these aesthetic collective experiences provide to the structure of subjectivities.<\/p>\n
4.<\/p>\n
Reveals my anthropological assumption of deep epistemological forces, whether collectively shared by many as webs of cultural significations (Geertz 1972), intersubjectively produced at smaller, \u201crelentlessly specific\u201d (Abu-Lughod 1993) scales, or individually generated (Behar 1996) \u2014 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 \u201cDeep Play\u201d (1972) and \u201cThick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture\u201d (1973), ethnographic writing should forefront subjective and rich interpretations of the social and of culture as a text <\/i>of complex semiotic values and relational \u201cwebs of signification,\u201d not as object<\/i>s 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.<\/p>\n
However, I am also alluding to the shift in my discipline\u2019s stance on \u201cculture\u201d itself and the importance of introducing \u201ctime\u201d and particularity to these epistemologies and structures\u2014to interpret them as porous, soft, shifting, and responsive forces within the social world\u2014as a way of writing against monolithic theories of how communities behave, a.k.a. \u201cculture.\u201d See Writing Women\u2019s Worlds <\/i>by Lila Abu-Lughod (1993). Abu-Lughod writes,\u201c…the particulars suggest that others live as we perceive ourselves living not as automatons \u2026 but as people going through life wondering what they should do\u2026\u201d (Lila Abu-Lughod 1993, 22).<\/p>\n
5.<\/p>\n
Anthropologists writing after Geertz, and particularly about the Balinese cockfight, have challenged Geertz\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
6.<\/p>\n
Here, I reveal my methodological bias towards contextualism and the positivist historian\u2019s mandate to tether the production of cultural meaning in rituals like the cockfight to patterns of political or economic \u201cchange over time,\u201d one of the most important phrases in the historian\u2019s 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, \u201ctheir essential nature[.]\u201d The historian would argue that Geertz\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s symbolic history. Before this date, \u201c[T]here were no bureaucrats around to police popular morality,\u201d therefore rendering the social-representational significance of the cockfight less oblique. How Dutch standards of morality specifically caused cockfighting practices and \u201cthe connection between the excitements of collective life and those of blood sport\u201d 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, \u201cDeep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,\u201d Daedalus<\/i> 101, no. 1 (1972): 65 and Sarah Maza, \u201cStephen Greenblatt, New Historicism, and Cultural History, Or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Interdisciplinarity,\u201d Modern Intellectual History <\/i>1, no. 2 (2004): 262.<\/p>\n
7.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cthe general legal and cultural tradition of the villages.\u201d 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, \u201cDeep Play,\u201d 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 <\/i>(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 63-85.<\/p>\n
8.<\/p>\n
Geertz, \u201cDeep Play,\u201d 78.<\/p>\n
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1. \u00a0Here, the social phenomena of Balinese cockfighting is described in the past tense (despite…<\/p>\n