response paper

--

4 16 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

The next morning the village was a completely different world for us. Not only were we no longer invisible, we were suddenly the center of all attention, the object of a great outpouring of warmth, interest, and most especially, amusement . Everyone in the village knew we had fled like everyone else. They asked us about it again and again (I must have told the story, small detail by small detail, fifty times by the end of the day), gently, affectionately, but quite insistently teasing us : "Why didn't you just stand there and tell the police who you were?" "Why didn't you just say you were only watching and not bctting?" "Were you really afraid of those little guns?" As always, kinesthetically minded and, even when fleeing for their livcs (or, as happened eight years later, surrender­ ing them), the world's most poised people, they gleefully mimicked, also over and over again , our graceless style of running and what they claimed were our panic-stricken facial expressions. But above all, everyone was extremely pleased and even more surprised that we had not simply "pulled out our papers" (they knew about those too) and as­ serted our Distinguished Visitor status, but had instead demonstrated our solidarity with what were now our covillagers. (What we had ac­ tually demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that too .) Even the Brahmana priest, an old, grave, halfway-to-heaven type who because of its associations with the underworld would never be in­ volved, even distantly, in a cockfight , and was difficult to approach eveD to other Balinese, had us called into his courtyard to ask us about what had happcned, chuckling happily at the sheer extraordinariness of it all.

In Bali, to be tcased is to be acccpted. It was the turning point so far as our relationship to thc community was concerned, and we were quite literally "in." Thc whole village opened up to us, probably more than evcr would have otherwise (I might actually never have gotten to that priest, and our accidental host became one of my best informants), certainly vcry much faster. Getting caught, or almost caught, in a raid is perhaps not a vcry generalizable recipe for achieving that rious necessity of anthropological field work, rapport, but for me worked very well. It led to a sudden and unusually complete acceptaDCC into a socicty extrcmely difficult for outsiders to penetrate. It gave the kind of immediate , inside-view grasp of an aspect of "peasant tality" that anthropologists not fortunate enough to flee headlong their subjects from armed authorities normally do not get. And, most important of all, for the other things might have come in ways , it put mc very quickly on to a combination emotional f"xnln5iD&

Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 417

status war, and philosophical drama of central significance to the society whose inner nature I desired to understand. By the time I left I had spent about as much time looking into cockfights as into witchcraft, irri­ gation, caste, or marriage.

CII ffD(tl. (, ,! !.r+-z.. .:­ ~" O t .e f' PI,,'f ~ t\..1:,.~tS en.. ~ P;,G..Lk~~c.. (oct,c, s,!,,+

Of Cocks and Men ~ . "117 ~ 'i'l l " '-tl{~ -Ltt; 3

Bali, mainly because it is Bali, is a well-studied place. Its mythology, art, ritual, social organization, patterns of child rearing, forms of law, even styles of trance, have all been microscopically examined for traces of that elusive substance Jane Belo called "The Balinese Temper." 2 But, aside from a few passing remarks, the cockfight has barely been noticed, although as a popular obsession of consuming power it is at least as important a revelation of what being a Balinese "is really like" as these more celebrated phenomena.3 As much of America surfaces in a ball park, on a golf links, at a race track, or around a poker table, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring. r:or it is only apparently~ that are..ftghtin there . Actuall , it is men.

To anyone who has been in Ba I ny length of time • . ~ deep psycho­ I ic ntification of Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable. The double entendre here IS deliberate. t wor s In exactly the same way in Balinese as it does in English, even to producing the same tired jokes. strained puns. and uninventive obscenities. Bateson and Mead have even suggested that, in line with the Balinese conception of the body as a set of separately animated parts, cock re vie d as detach ­ ~lf-operating penises, ambulant genitals with a life of their own.4

2 J. Belo, "The Balinese Temper," in Traditional Balinese Culture, ed. J. Belo (New York, 1970) (originally published in 1935), pp. 85-110.

3 The best discussion of cockfighting is again Bateson and Mead's Balinese Charpcter, pp. 24-25, 140; but it, too, is general and abbreviated.

4 Ibid., pp. 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 ex­ clUded. 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 eco­ nomics, to kinship, to dress, Bali is a rather "unisex" society, a fact both its cus· loms and its symbolism clearly express. Even in contexlS 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

------------------

4 18

And while I do not have the kind of unconscious material either to COD­ firm or disconfirm this intriguing notion , the fact that they are~ line symbols par excellence is about as indubitable, and to the Balinese about as ev ident, as the fact that water runs downhill. /y'he Ian uage of everyday moralism is shot throu h, on the male side of it, with roostens Imagery. Sabting, the word fo r cock (and one which appears In inscriptions as early as A. D. 922), is 7sed metaphori­ cally to mean "hero," "warrior," "champion," "man of parts," " politi­ caI E ndidate," "bachelor," "dandy," "lady-killer," or "tough guy." A pompous man whose behavior presumes above his station is compared to a tailless cock who struts about as though he had a large, spectacular one. A desperate man who makes a last, irrational effort to extricate himself from an impossible situation is likened to a dying cock who makes one final lunge at his tormentor to drag him along to a common destruction. A stingy man, who promises much, gives little, and be­ grudges that, is compared to a cock which, held by the tail, leaps at an­ other without in fact engaging him. A marriageable young man still shy with the opposite sex or someone in a new job anxious to make a good impression is called "a fighting cock caged for the first time. " 5 Court trials, wars, political contests, inheritance disputes, and street arguments are all compared to coekfights. 6 Even the very island itself is perceived from its shape as a small, proud cock, poised, neck extended, back taut, tail raised, in eternal challenge to large, feckless, shapeless J av~

But the intimacy of men with their cocks is more than metaphorical. BaiT;;se men, or anyway a l arge~y--or'Balinese men, spend an enormous amount of time with their favorites, grooming them, feeding them, dISCUSSIng them, tryIng tnem out against one another, or just gaz­

socially enforced . To this general pattern, the cockfight, entirely of, by, and for men (women-at least Balillese women-do not even watch), is the most striking exception.

s C. Hooykaas, The Lay of Ihe Jaya Prana (London, 1958), p. 39 . The lay has a stanza (no. 17) with the reluctant bridgegroom usc. 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 encagedl indeed I am on my mettle/ I am alone / as yet the flame has not been fanned ."

6 For these, see V. E. Korn. Hel Adalreclrl van Bali. 2d ed . (The Hague, 1932), index under lair .

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 pass ionate cockfighting gambler. Sec C. Hooykaas, Agama Tirllra (Amster­ dam, 1964). p. 184.

Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 41 9

ing at them with a mixture of rapt admiration and dream self-absorp­ tion. enever yo sec a group o f Ba inese men squatting idly in the

COuiicil shed or along the road in their hips down, shoulders forward, knees up fashion, half or more of them will have a rooster in his hands, holding it between his thighs, bouncing it gently up and down to strengthen its legs, ruffling its feathers with abstract sensuality, pushing it out against a neighbor's rooster to rouse its spirit, withcirawing it to­ ward his loins to calm it again. Now and then t a feel for another bird, a man will fiddle thi s way wit so meone else's cock for a while, but usually by moving around to squat in place behind it, rather than

J

ju"St haVIng It passed across to him as though it were merely an animal. In the houseyard, the high-walled enclosures where the people live,

fighting cocks are kept in wicker cages, moved frequently about so as to maintain the optimum balance of sun and shade. Th0 are fed a special diet, which varies somewhat according to individual theories but which is mostly maize, sifted for impurities with far more care than it is when - mere humans are going to eat it, and offered to the animal kernel by kernel. Red pepper is stuffed down their beaks and up their anuses to give them spirit. They are bathed in the same ceremonial preparation of tepid water, medicinal herbs, flowers, and onions in which infants are bathed, and for a prize cock just about as often. Their combs are cropped, their plumage dressed , their spurs trimmed, and their legs massaged, and they are inspected for flaws with the squinted concentra­ tion of a diamond merchant. A man who has a passion for cocks, an enthusiast in the literal sense of the term, can s e with -t em, and even those, the overwhelming majority, whose passion thou---h intense has not entirely run away with them, can and do spend ' what seems not only to an outsider, but also to t emse ves, an inor Ina e amount of time with them. " I am cock crazy, ' my landlord, a quite or­ dinary afficionado by Balinese standards, used to moan as he went to move another cage, give another bath, or conduct another feeding. "We're all cock crazy."

The madness has some less visible dimensions, however, because al­ though it is true that cocks are symbolic expressions or magnifications of their owner's self, thC" narcIssIStic male ego wni out in Aesopian terms, the -are ex ress ions- and rather more immediate ones-of what the Balinese regard as the direct inversion, aest etlca y, morally, and'"i'ile'rnpnysiCalIy, of human status: aOlm:!!ny.

The Balinese revulsion against any behavior regarded as animal-like ........

42 0 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

an hardly be overstressed. Babies arc not allowed to crawl for that rea-_ son. Incest,thOugh hardly approvell ,iSamuch lesshorrifying crime-­than bestiality. (The appropriate punishment for the second is death by drowning, for the first being forced to live like an animal.) 8 Most de­ mons arc rcpresented - in sculpture, dancc, ritual, myth - in some real or fantastic animal form. The main puberty rite consists in filing the child's teeth so '11 not look like animal fangs. Not only defecation but eating is regarded as a disgus I conducted hurr 'edl because of its ~uct:it1on With ani­ nja Ity. Even fallin down or any form of clumsiness is consl ere to be bad or these reasons. Aside from cocks and a few domestic anlmals­ ~xen, ducks-of no emotional significance, the Balinese arc aversive to animals and treat their large number of dogs not merely callously but with a phobic cruelty. ~i.t¥iog with his cock, the Balinese man is identifying not just with his ideal self or eyen his penis, but also, and at th0ame tll11;'-with what he most1ear..s... hates, and ambivalence being what it is , is fascinated by-"The Powers of Darkness.,::" -

The con1}ection of cocks and cockfighting with such Powers, with the animalistic demons that threaten constantly to invade the small, cleared-off space in which the Balinese have so carefully built their lives and devour its inhabitants, is quite explicit. A cockfight, any cocJs;.. fight , is in the first instance a blood sacrifice offercd, with the appropri­ ate chants and oblations to t emons in ~er to acll their raven­ ous, cannibal hun&£!:: No temple festival should be conducted until one is made. (If it is omitted, someone will inevitably fall into a trance and command with the voice of an angercd spirit that the oversight be im­ mediately corrected.) Collective responscs to natural evils-illness, crop failure, volcanic eruptions- almost always involve them. And that fa­ mous holiday in Bali , "The Day of Silence" (A'jepi) when everyone sits silent and immobile all diY"long in order to avoid contact with a sudden:­

i~:..::e::m;:o::.n:..::s::.....::c:;.h:=a::.se::;d::...:m.::.::o.:..:m.:..:eo>n""'t=a:..;ri:.:.IYL.....:o::..:u::.:t:......::o;.f...:.h:.::e:.:.I1~, -,i:.:;s...p!:.:..:re:.:c::e:.:d:.:e.::d_t:.:h;.;e~p..:..;;re- vious day by large-scale cockfights (in this case legal in' . village on the ~n .

In the cockfight, man and beast, good and evil, ego and id, the ~ ., ~~asculinityai1d the destru~1 _. -- .

S An incestuous couple is forced to wear pig yokes over their necks and crawl to a pig trough and eat with their mo uths there. On this. see J . Belo. "Customs Pertaining to Twins in Bali." in Traditio nal Balill ese Culture. ed . J. Belo. p. 49; on the abhorrence of animality generally . Bateson and Mead. Balin ese Character, p. 22.

Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 421

,imality fuse in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death. It ..is little wondcr th~n, as is-the invariable rule, t~of the

. winning cock takes the carcass of the loser-often torn limb from limb \. by its enraged owner-home to eat, he does so with a mixture of social

embarrassment, moral satisfaction, aesthetic disgust, and cannibal joy. Or that a man who has lost an important fight is sometimes driven to wreck his family shrines and curse the gods, an act of metaphysical (and social) suicide. Or that in seeking earthly analogues for heaven and hell the Balinese compare the former to the mood of a man whose cock has just won, the latter to that of a man whose cock has just lost.

The Fight

Cockfights (tetadjen; sabungan) are held in a ring about fifty feet square. Usually they begin toward late afternoon and run three or four hours until sunset. About nine or ten separate matches (sehet) comprise a pro­ gram. Each match is precisely like the others in general pattern: there is no main match , no connection between individual matches, no variation in their format, and each is arranged on a completely ad hoc basis. After a fight has ended and the emotional debris is cleaned away-the bets have been paid, the curses cursed, the carcasses possessed-seven, eight, perhaps even a dozen men slip negligently into the ring with a cock and seek to find there a logical opponent for it. This process, which rarely takes less than ten minutes, and often a good deal longer, is conducted in a very subdued, oblique, even dissembling manner. Those not immediately involved give it at best but disguised, sidelong attention; those who, embarrassedly, are, attempt to pretend somehow that the whole thing is not really happening.

A match made, the other hopefuls retire with the same deliberate in­ difference, and the selected cocks have their spurs (tadji) affixed.:­

ointed steel swords, four or five inches. IQ!lIt....This is a del­ icatel ob which only a small pro ortion of men, a half-dozen or so in most VI ages , now how to do properly. The man who attaches the spurs also provides them, and if the rooster he assists wins, its owner awards him the spur-leg of the victim. The spurs are affixed by winding a long length of string around the foot of the spur and the leg of the

442 443 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

commoner usurpcrs. Thus spared, he returned to dispatch the upstart, regain the throne, reconstitute the Balinese high tradition, and build its most powerful, glorious, and prosperous state. ~long with everytbm& else that the Balinese see in fighting cocks-themselves their social

order, abstract hatred, mascu 101 y, emoOlc power-they arc etype of status virtue, e arrogant, resolute, honor-ma ~

real fire , the ksatria princeY ....-­

27 In another of Hooykaas·van Leeuwen Boomkamp's folk tales ("De Gast," Sprookjes en Verhalen van Bali. pp. 172-180)., a low caste Sudra. a generous, pious, and carefree man who is also an accomplished cock fighter. 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-"\ bet." he says, "upon the Un­

seen World."His wife. a good and hard-working 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 run 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. \n 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: "\ have beaten fifteen opponents." The second crows, "\ have beaten twenty-five opponents." The third crows, "\ 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, "\ have no money; \ 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 payoff. \n order to insure 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 \ndic 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. ("\ will fight no more cockfights. \ have bet on the Unseen and won .") He enters the hermitage and his

son becomes king.

Notes on thc Balinese Cockfight

Feathers, Blood, Crowds, and Money

"Poetry makes nothing happen," Auden says in his clegy of Yeats, "it survives in the valley of its saying . . . a way of happening, a mouth." The cockfight tOQ, in this colloquial sense, makes nothing happen. Men'-------- -----... - ­go on allegorically humiliating one another and being allegoricalJy hu­ miliated by one another, day after day , glorying quietly in the experi­ ence if they have triumphed, crushed only slightly more openly by it if they have not. put /10 one',l' swlJ..!!. rC'ally. dW.!!.F~ You cannot ascend the status ladder by winning cockfights; you cannot, as an individual,

ZI Addict gamblers-­are really less declassed (for their status is, as everyone else's, inherited) than merely impoverished and personally disgraced , The most p-ominent addict gambler in my cockfight circuit was actually a very high caste _ ,ia 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, re­ prded him as sick). he was publicly treated with the elaborate deference and po­ liacness due his rank. On the independence of personal reputation ami public sta­

in Bali, see above, Chapter 14.

444

445 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

those historically positioned to appreciate the construction, meaningful -visible, tangible, graspable-ureal," in an ideational sense..~ image, fiction, a model , a metaphor, the cockfi ht is a eans of e~~ ~io~s~tion is neither to assuage social passions nor to.J!!O.ighten them (though, in its playing-with-fire way it does a bit of both) , b~ ~ium of feathers, blood, crowds and money, to dis la them.

The question of how it is that we perceive qualities in things­ paintings, books, melodies, plays-that we do not feel we can assert lit­ erally to be there has come, in recent years, into the very center of aes­ thetic theory .29 Neither the sentiments of the artist, which remain his, nor those of the audience, which remain theirs, can account for the agi­ tation of one painting or the serenity of another. We attribute grandeur, wit, despair, exuberance to strings of sounds; lightness, energy, vio­ \cnce, fluidity to blocks of stone. Novels are said to have strength, buildings eloquence, plays momentum, ballets repose . In this realm of

eccentric predicates, ~ that!..he cockfight, in its perfected ~ least... is "dis~ietful" docs not seem at all unnatural,---;erely, as I have

.~ denied it practi~cmse-~ng. Ihe-dQ.~~ss arises, "s'£pe~," o.!:!!-JlL~_SQniuru:tio.!l.of thre~

.~es-Gf-the....figh.t;.-i!s immediate dra~apejts metaphor~n­ ~ and its social cont~t. 0 cult~ftgure-...agair!st a social ground, the_ fi.ght.JS-'il..Qnc.s..-a convulsive SUlg~_ of animaJj1~-,-~ mock wa~ bolical selves, an a formal simulation of status tensi ns, ~ its ~ t~Q\Wer deriv~tr..om Its -apaci y to orce..!~ese dive,.ru: realities. ThSIeason it is d~ie1fu1 is not that it has material effects (it ~.has some, but they are minor); the reason that it is disquietful is that,

to selfhood, selfhood to cocks,

Into wmll IS In 1l~t:1I <. 1 a ...~' v.ank and unvarious spectacle, a commo­ tion of beating wings and throbbing legs, is effected by interpreting it as expressive of something unsettling in the way its authors and audience

live, or, even more ominously , what they are. As a dramatic shape, the fight displays a characteristic that does not

seem so remarkable until one realizes that it does not have to be there:

29 For four, somewhat variant . treatments , see S. Langer, Feeling and For," (New York, 1953); R. Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (New York. 1968); N. Goodman. Languages 0/ Art (Indianapolis. 1968); M. Merleau·Ponty, "The Eye and the Mino," in his The Primacy 0/ Perception (Evanston, 1Il., 1964), pp.

159-190.

Notes on the Balinese Cockfight

a radically atomistical structure.30 Each match is a world unto itself, a particulate burst of form. T~s the matchmaking. there is the bet­ ting, there is the fight, there is the result-utter lrjum.e.h and utt~ defeat and there is .the hurriedJ wharrassed passing of money"...The loser ~ consoled. People drift away from him, look around him, leave im to assimilate his momentary descent into nonbeing, reset his face, and return, scarless and intact, to the fray . N~ gratulated, or events rehashed' match is ended the crowd's atten­ tion turns tot~iIy to the next, with no looking back. A shadow of t e perIei1Ce no doubt remains with the principals, perhaps even with some of the witnesses of a deep fight, as it remains with us when we leave the theater after seeing a powerful play well-performed; but it quite soon fades to become at most a schematic memory-a diffuse glow or an abstract shudder-and usually not even that. Any expressive form

..~---. 1~~~Js_eILcr~les". But, here, that

present is severed into a string of flashes, some more bright than others, but all of them disconnected, aesthetic quanta. Whatever the COckfight says, it says in spurts .

But, as I have argued lengthily elsewhere, the ~1il).,eSJ!. !lve-d -6 c. -. spurts. 31 Their life, as they arrange it and perceive it, ~ less a flow, a ~I 'movement out of the ast, through the prese~t, toward the 5"~

.:;t.!!' future t an an on-off pulsat ion of mean' Utt ar thmic alternation iods when "somethin " (that is, something sig­

appenin and equally short ones where "nothing" (that is, ~\ is-between what they themselves cal • ull" and

"empty times, or, in another i 10m, "'unctures" and "holes." In focus­ ing activity own to a burnlOg-glass dot, the cockfight is merely being Balinese in the same way in which everything from the monadic en­

30 British cockfights (the sport was ban:ted there in 1840) indeed seem to have Iac~ed 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 abo "battle Royales," both in England and on the Continent, in which a large

of cocks were let loose at once with the one left standing at the end the . And in Wales. the so·called Welsh main followed an elimination pattern, the lines of a present-day tennis tournament. winners proceeding to the next

As a genre. the cock fight has perhaps less compositional flexibility than, comedy. but it is not entirely without any. On cockfighting more gen· A. Ruport, The Art 0/ Cockfighting (New York, 1949); G . R. Scott,

0/ Cockfighting (london. 1957); and L. Fitz·Barnard, Fighting Sports .~,,-",>Ddon, 1921).

~I Above, pp. 391-398.

446 447 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

counters of everyday life, through the clanging pointillism of gamelan music, to the visiting-day-of-the-gods temple celebrations arc. It is not an imitation of the punctuateness of Balinese social life, nor a depiction of it, nor even an expression of it; it is an example of it, carefully pre­

32 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, Lallguages of Art. pp.

61-110,45-91. 225-241. 33 N. Frye. The Educated Imagillatioll (Bloomington. Ind., (964), p. 99. J'There are two other Balinese values and disvalues whicn, connected with

punct uate 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 caB rame. and what they caB palillg. Rame means crowded, noisy. and active, and is a highly sought-after social state.: crowded markets. mass festivals. busy streets are all rame. as, of course, is, in the extreme, a cockfight. Rame is what happens in the "fuB" times (its opposite, sepi. "quiet." is what happens in the "empty" ones). Paling is social vertigo, the djzzy, 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 fundamental 10 ordered life (krama) and palillg. the sort of whirling COD-

Notes on the Balinese CockRght

The angle, of course, is stratificatory. What, as we have already seen, the cockfight talks most forcibly about is status relationships, and what it says about them is that they are matters of life and death. That pres­ tige is a profoundly serious business is apparent everywhere one looks in Bali-in the village, the family, the economy, the state. A peculiar fusion of Polynesian title ranks and Hindu castes, the hierarchy of pride is the moral backbone of the society. But only in the cockfight are the sentiments upon which that hierarchy rests revealed in their natural colors. Enveloped elsewhere in a haze of etiquette, a thick cloud of eu­ phemism and ceremony, gesture and allusion, they are here expressed in only the thinnest disguise of an animal mask, a mask which in fact dem­ onstrates them far more effectively than it conceals them. Jealousy is as much a part of Bali as poise, envy as grace, brutality as charm; but without the cockfight the Balinese would have a much less certain un­ derstanding of them, which is, presumably, why they value it so highly. r=- .J' Any expressive form works (when it works) by disarranging semantic contexts in sueh a way that pr,operties conventionally ascribed to certai,9 things are unconventionally ascribed to others, which are then seen ac­ tu;lly to possess them. I.2_call the wind a cripple, as Stevens does, to fix tone and manipulate timbre, as Schoenberg does, or, closer to our case, to picture an art critic as a dissolute bear, as Hogarth does, is ta...F~ c~~r~ the established conjunctions between objects an thetr qualities arc altered, and phenomena-fall weather, melodic shape, or

cultural journalism-a~eJiloJgei lnas~nifie~ ;xhich Dorm'illt other referents.J :; Similarly, to co~ct-anOd connect, ai?' - ­ ~ 'C:V:;f v .th.. h d' ..co tSlon 0 roosters WI t e IVlslvenes

fusion of position the scrambling coeks exemplify as its profoundest enemy and con­ tradiction. On rame. see Bateson and Mead, Balinese Character. pp. 3. 64; on paling, ibi~ . , p. II. and Belo, ed., Traditional Balillese Culture. p. 90 IT.

35 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") [Copyright 1947 by Wallace Stevens. reprinted from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevells by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.] ; the Schoenberg reference is to the third of his Five Orchestral Pieces (Opus 16), and is borrowed from H. H. Drager, "The Concept of Tonal Body,''' in Reflections on Art. ed. S. Langer (New York, 1961), p. 174. 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 Psychology alld the Visual Arts. ed. J. Hogg (Baltimore. 1969), pp. 149-170. 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., (962), p. 25 ff; Goodman. uJIlguage as Art. p. 44 ff; and W. Percy, "Metaphor as Mistake," Sewanee Review 66 (1958): 78-99.

THE INTERPRETATlON OF CULTURES448

ofj2s:rceptions from the fo rmer to the latter, a transfer which is at once a i,escription and a judgme.nt. (Logically, the transfer could, of course, as welI go the other way; but, like most of the rest of us, the Balinese arc a great deal more interested in understanding men than they are in understanding coc~0

What sets the cockfight apart from the ordinary course of life, lifts it from the realm of everyday practical affairs, and surrounds it with an aura of enlarged importance is no~, as functionalist sociology would have it, that it reinforces status~C'i-iminations (such reinforcement is

• I1afclTYnecessary in a society where every act proclaims them), but that it e.rovides a met~n the whole matter of s' r in !'i,uman bein ~ 0 fixed hierarchical ranks and then organ 10 the

~ ~<!Lo!..£.ar ~ collective ex ,istence aroun a ~trn.e.uL..Jts functlQ!!, if you want to calI it that, ~tive: it is a Balinese readin a­ linese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves.

, ~ ---....~~~-=--

Saying Something of Something

To put the matter this way is to engage in a bit of metaphorical refocus­ ing of one's own, for it shifts the analysis of cultural forms from an en­ deavor in general parallel to dissecting an organism, diagnosing a symptom, deciphering a code, or ordering a system-the dominant analogies in contemporary anthropology-to one in general parallel with j?enetratil'lg a.literary t.c.U:. If.gne takes the cockfi,ght, or any other co ivc\ sustained s rnbolic structure, as a means of " a in ome-~ t~~voke a famous Aristot<:!l~g ,_then one i~ faceii wit~em not in social mechanics b~a.U~anties.36 For the anthropologist, whose concern iswi~ulating sociological prin­ ciples, not with promoting or appreciating cockfights, the question is, w,l.u!t does one learn about such principles from examining culture as an

assembla~e of texts? "'" -S~.Ch an extension of the notion of a ~~~~

36 The tag is from the second book of the Organon. On Illterpretation. For a discussion of it, and for the whole argument for freeing "the notion of text ... from the notion of scripturc or writing" and constructing. thus, a general herme­ neutics, see P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven, 1970), p. 20 ff.

Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 449

and ev ond verbal, is, though metaphorical, not, of course. all that no~eL The inlerpretatio naturae tradition of the middle ages, whie , .. - - - - ,

culminating in Spinoza, attempted to read niUYle as Scrjpture, the Nietszchean effort to treat value systems as glosses on the will to power (or the Marxian one to treat them as glosses on property relations), and the Freudian replacement of the enigmatic text of the manifest dream

with the ~ain one of the Ta~_ill.£!fer .2~ced~...i.f..not eq~re~._ ~mendable ones.37 But tlie idea remains theoretically undevc\oped; and the more profound corollary, so far as anthropology is concerned, t~ltural forms can b~ texts, as imaginative works bui~ out of social materials, has yet to be systematicallY exploited.3~ ~ the case at hand. to t~at the cockfight as a text is tobring out a

feature of it (in my opinio~, tt;;c~eaturc of it) that tr~a.ting it as a ri te or a pastime, the two most obvious alternatives wpuld tend to ob­

~ its u~ gfAmoli~ £p'sQit~etS%!sAWhat the cockfight says it says in ~ocabulary of sentiment-the thrill of risk, the despair of loss, the pleasure of triumph. Yet what it says is not merely that risk is excit­ ing, loss depressing, or triumph gratifying, banal tautologies of affect, but that it is of these emotions. thus ex ampled. that society is built and individuals are put together. Attending cockfights and participating in

--:.--' th~ the Balinese, a.!.~oi.-Sentimental educatiol1.. What he ~ learns there is what his culture's ethos and his private sensibili~ (or, ~ anyway, certain aspects of them) look like when spelled out externally in a collective text; that the two are near enough alike to be ar~d in the symboliCS' of a single such text; and-the ,disquieting part-that the text in which this revelation is accomplished consists of a chicken hacking another mindlessly to bits.

Every people, the proverb has it, loves its own form of violence. The cockfight is the Balinese reflection on theirs : on its look, its uses, its force, its fascination. Drawing on almost every level of Balinese experi­.-­ ence, it brings together themes-animal sava.1lery, male narcissism, op­ ponenr ga~mg,Status rivalry, mass excitement. blood sacrifice­

-~--- 37 Ibid. 38 Levi-Strauss' "structuralism" might seem an exception. But it is only an

apparent one, for, rather than taking myths, totem rites, marriage rules, or what­ ever as texts to interpret, Levi-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 (mean­ ings. emotions, concepts, altitudes); he seeks to understand them entirely in terms of their internal structure, independent de tout .mj,'t , de tout objet, et de toute contexte. See above, Chapter 13 .

THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES450

whose main connection is their involvement with rage and the fear of rage, and, binding them into a set of rules which at once contains them and allows them play, builds a symbolic structure in which, over and over again, the reality of their inner affiliation can be intelligibly felt. If, to quote Northrop Frye again, we go to sec Macbeth to learn what a man feels like after he has gained a kingdom and lost his soul, Balinese 8.,0 to cockfis..hts to find out what a man, usually composed, aloof, almos~ obsessively self-absorbed, a kind of iTIoral autocosm, f~els likeWh-cn,at­ t~cked, tormented,n challenged, insunea,anadi'iVel'nrfTcsuTlto the ex­ tremesof fury, he has totally triumphed or becnorought totally lOW: Thewhole passage, as it takes us back to Anstotle (though to the Poet­ ics rather than the Hermelleutics), is worth quotation:

But the poet [as opposed to the historian). Aristotle says. never makes any real statements at all. certainly no particular or specific ones . The poet's job is not to tell you what happened . but what happens: not what did take place. but the kind of thing that always does take place. He I!ives you t~ typical. recurring, or what Aristotle . . niversal event. V;;;; wouldn't go to Macher to learn a bo ut the history of Scotland-you go to it to learn whar-::f"man feel s !i~c 3£tcr RC' s gained a kin sdQR'I !IRa lost his soUl: When you meet such a character as Micawber in Dickens, you don ' t feel that there must have been a man Dickens knew who was exactly like this: you feel that there's a bit of Micawber in almost everybody you know, including yourself. Our impressions of human life are picked up one by one, and re­ main for most of us loose and disorganized. But we constantly flT1d things in literature that suddenly coordinate and bring into focus a great many such impressions, and this is part of what Aristotle means by the typical or uni­

versal human event.:J~

It is this kind of bringing of assorted experiences of everyday life to focus that the cockfight, set aside from that life as "only a game" and reconnected to it as "more than a game," accomplishes, and so creates what, better than typical or universal, could be called a paradigm. human event-that is, one that tells us less what happens than the k -­

• O'fthing that would happen if, as is not the case, life were art and could be as freely shaped by styles of feeling as Macbeth and David Copper­

flelj arc . Enacted and re-enacted, so far without end, the cockfight <;"dUl\" ......

Balinese, as, read and reread, Macbeth enables us, to see a dimension ' ~jWn SUbjectivity. As he watches fight after fight, with the active -watching of an owner and a bettor (for cockfighting has no more inter­

~9 Frye, The Educated Imagillatioll, pp. 63-64.

Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 45 1

est as a pure spectator sport than docs croquet or dog racing), he grows familiar with it and what it has to say to him, much as the attentive lis­ tener to string quartets or the absorbed viewer of still life grows slowly more familiar with them in a way which opens his subjectivity to him­ self. 40

Yet, because-in another of those paradoxes, along with painted feelings and uneonsequeneed acts, which haunt aesthetics-that subjec­ tivity does not properly exist until it is thus organized, art forms gener­ ate and regenerate the very subjectivity they pretend only to display. Quartets, still lifes, and cockfights are not merely reflections of a pre-ex­

isting sensibility analogically represented; they are positive agents in the creation and maintenance of such a sensibility. If we see ourselves as a pack of Micawbers, it is from reading too much Dickens (if we sec our­ selves as unillusioned realists, it is from reading too little); and simi­ larly for Balinese, cocks, and cockfights. It is in such a way, coloring experience with the light they cast it in, rather than through whatever material effects they may have, that the arts play their role, as arts, in social Ii fe .41 \Iii the cockfight, then, the Balinese forms and discovers his tempera­

ment and his society's temper at the same tim~.Or, more exactly, he forms and discovers a particular facet of them. Not only are there a great many other cultural texts providing commentaries on status hier­

_0 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 ges­ tura! mimicry of the cocks' maneuvers, means that much of the individual's expe­ rience 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. 1957). p. 9] the cock· fight is it. On the enormous role of kinesthetic perception in Balinese life. Bate­ son and Mead, Balinese Character, pp. 84-88; on the active nature of aesthetic per­ ception in general, Goodman. Language of Art, pp. 241-244.

H All this coupling of the occidental great with the oriental lowly will doubt­ less disturb certain sorts of aestheticians as the earlier efforts of anthropologists to speak of Christianity and totem ism 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 sociol­ ogy of art. In any case, the attempt to deprovinciaJize the concept of art is but part of the general anthropological conspiracy to deprovinciaJize all important so­ cial 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 socio­ logical analysis, it is no th.reat to the conviction, for which Robert Graves claims to have been reprimanded at his Cambridge tripos. that some poems are better than others.

453 45 2 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

archy and self-regard in Bali, but there are a great many other critical sectors of Balinese life besides the stratificatory and the agonistic that receive such commentary. The ceremony consecrating a Brahmana priest, a matter of breath control, postural immobility, and vacant con­ centration upon the depths of being, displays a radically different, but to the Balinese equally real, property of social hierarchy-its reach to­ ward the numinous transcendent. Set not in the matrix of the kinetic emotionality of animals, but in that of the static passionlessness of di­ vine mentality, it expresses tranquillity not disquiet. The mass festivals at the village temples, which mobilize the whole local population in elaborate hostings of visiting gods-songs, dances, compliments, gifts -assert the spiritual unity of village mates against their status inequal­ ity and project a mood of amity and truSt. 12 The cockfight is not the master key to Balinese life. any more than bullfighting is to Spanish. What it says about that life is not unqualified nor even unchailenged by what other equally eloquent cultural statements say about it. But there is nothing more surprising in this than in the fact that Racine and Mo­ liere were contemporaries, or that the same people who arrange chry­ santhemums cast swords ..")

The ure ~f a pe0i'le is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensem­ bles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong. There are enormous difficulties in such an enterprise, methodological pitfalls to make a Freudian quake,

42 For the consecration ceremony. see V. E. Korn. 'The Consecration of the Priest," in Swellengrcbel. cd .• Bali: Studies, pp. 131-154; for (somewhat exagger­ ated) village communion, R. Goris, "The Religious Character of the Balinese Vii· lage," ibid .• pp. 79-100.

13 That what the cockfight has to say about Bali is not altogether without per­ ception and the disquiet it expresses about the general pallern of Balinese life is not wholly without reason is allested 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. [J. Hughes, In­ donesian Upheaval (New York, 1967), pp. 173-U!3. Hughes' figures are. of course. rather casual estimates, but they arc 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 shadow· plays, 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.

Notes on the Balinese Cockfight

and some moral perplexities as well. Nor is it the only way that sym­ bolic forms can be sociologically handled. Functionalism lives, and so does psychologism. But to regard such forms as "saying something of something," and saying it to somebody, is at least to open up the possi­ bility of an analysis which attends to their substance rather than to re­ ductive formulas professing to account for them.

As in more familiar exercises in close reading, one can start any­ where in a culture's repertoire of forms and end up anywhere else. One can stay, as I have here, within a single, more or less bounded form, and circle steadily within it. One can move between forms in search of broader unities or informing contrasts. One can even compare forms from different cultures to define their character in reciprocal relief. But whatever the level at which one operates, and however intricately, the

guiding principle is the sarne::-s~o=c~ie-;t;-ie_s_,-:I_ik_e~li_v~~~~h~r.~_i.!!:::__.,. terpretations. One has o!!!y to learn how to gain access to the-ill. .. ----.----~-.- ---­