“Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”
Clifford Geertz
Reprinted from The Interpretation of Cultures
The Raid
Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived,
malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we
intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small
place, about five hundred people, and relatively
remote, it was its own world. We were intruders,
professional ones, and the villagers dealt with us
as Balinese seem always to deal with people not
part of their life who yet press themselves upon
them: as though we were not there. For them,
and to a degree for ourselves, we were
nonpersons, specters, invisible men.
We moved into an extended family compound
(that had been arranged before through the
provincial government) belonging to one of the
four major factions in village life. But except for
our landlord and the village chief, whose cousin
and brother-in-law he was, everyone ignored us
in a way only a Balinese can do. As we
wandered around, uncertain, wistful, eager to
please, people seemed to look right through us
with a gaze focused several yards behind us on
some more actual stone or tree. Almost nobody
greeted us; but nobody scowled or said anything
unpleasant to us either, which would have been
almost as satisfactory. If we
ventured to approach someone
(something one is powerfully
inhibited from doing in such an
atmosphere), he moved,
negligently but definitively,
away. If, seated or leaning
against a wall, we had him
trapped, he said nothing at all,
or mumbled what for the
Balinese is the ultimate
nonword-"yes." The
indifference, of course, was studied; the
villagers were watching every move we made
and they had an enormous amount of quite
accurate information about who we were and
what we were going to be doing. But they acted
as if we simply did not exist, which, in fact, as
this behavior was designed to inform us, we did
not, or anyway not yet.
My wife and I were still very much in the gust
of wind stage, a most frustrating, and even, as
you soon begin to doubt whether you are really
real after all, unnerving one, when, ten days or
so after our arrival, a large cockfight was held in
the public square to raise money for a new
school.
Now, a few special occasions aside, cockfights
are illegal in Bali under the Republic (as, for not
altogether unrelated reasons, they were under the
Dutch), largely as a result of the pretensions to
puritanism radical nationalism tends to bring
with it. The elite, which is not itself so very
puritan, worries about the poor, ignorant peasant
gambling all his money away, about what
foreigners will think, about the waste of time
better devoted to building up the country. It sees
cockfighting as "primitive," "backward,"
"unprogressive," and generally unbecoming an
ambitious nation. And, as with those other
embarrassments -opium smoking, begging, or
uncovered breasts-it seeks, rather
unsystematically, to put a stop to it.
As a result, the fights are usually held in a
secluded corner of a village in semisecrecy, a
fact which tends to slow the action a little-not
very much, but the Balinese do not care to have
it slowed at all. In this case, however, perhaps
because they were raising money for a school
that the government was unable to give them,
perhaps because raids had been few recently,
perhaps, as I gathered from subsequent
discussion, there was a notion that the necessary
bribes had been paid, they thought they could
take a chance on the central square and draw a
larger and more enthusiastic crowd without
attracting the attention of the law.
They were wrong. In the midst of the third
match, with hundreds of people, including, still
transparent, myself and my wife, fused into a
single body around the ring, a superorganism in
the literal sense, a truck full of policemen armed
with machine guns roared up. Amid great
screeching cries of "pulisi! pulisi!" from the
crowd, the policemen jumped out, and, springing
into the center of the ring, began to swing their
guns around like gangsters in a motion picture,
though not going so far as actually to fire them.
The superorganism came instantly apart as its
components scattered in all directions. People
raced down the road, disappeared head first over
walls, scrambled under platforms, folded
themselves behind wicker screens, scuttled up
coconut trees. Cocks armed with steel spurssharp enough to cut off a finger or run a hole
through a foot were running wildly around.
Everything was dust and panic.
On the established anthropological principle,
When in Rome, my wife and I decided, only
slightly less instantaneously than everyone else,
that the thing to do was run too. We ran down
the main village street, northward, away from
where we were living, for we were on that side
of the ring. About half-way down another
fugitive ducked suddenly into a compound-his
own, it turned out-and we, seeing nothing ahead
of us but rice fields, open country, and a very
high volcano, followed him. As the three of us
came tumbling into the courtyard, his wife, who
had apparently been through this sort of thing
before, whipped out a table, a tablecloth, three
chairs, and three cups of tea, and we all, without
any explicit communication whatsoever, sat
down, commenced to sip tea, and sought to
compose ourselves.
A few moments later, one of the policemen
marched importantly into the yard, looking for
the village chief. (The chief had not only been at
the fight, he had arranged it. When the truck
drove up he ran to the river, stripped off his
sarong, and plunged in so he could say, when at
length they found him sitting there pouring
water over his head, that he had been away
bathing when the whole affair had occurred and
was ignorant of it. They did not believe him and
fined him three hundred rupiah, which the
village raised collectively.) Seeing my wife and
I, "White Men," there in the yard, the policeman
performed a classic double take. When he found
his voice again he asked, approximately, what in
the devil did we think we were doing there. Our
host of five minutes leaped instantly to our
defense, producing an impassioned description
of who and what we were, so detailed and so
accurate that it was my turn, having barely
communicated with a living human being save
my landlord and the village chief for more than
a week, to be astonished. We had a perfect right
to be there, he said, looking the Javanese upstart
in the eye. We were American professors; the
government had cleared us; we were there to
study culture; we were going to write a book to
tell Americans about Bali. And we had all been
there drinking tea and talking about cultural
matters all afternoon and did not know anything
about any cockfight. Moreover, we had not seen
the village chief all day, he must have gone to
town. The policeman retreated in rather total
disarray. And, after a decent interval, bewildered
but relieved to have survived and stayed out of
jail, so did we.
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 betting?" "Were you really afraid of those
little guns?" As always, kinesthetically minded
and, even when fleeing for their lives (or, as
happened eight years later, surrendering 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 asserted our Distinguished Visitor
status, but had instead demonstrated our
solidarity with what were now our covillagers.
(What we had actually 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
involved, even distantly, in a cockfight, and was
difficult to approach even to other Balinese, had
us called into his courtyard to ask us about what
had happened, chuckling happily at the sheer
extraordinariness of it all.
In Bali, to be teased is to be accepted. It was the
turning point so far as our relationship to the
community was concerned, and we were quite
literally "in." The whole village opened up to us,
probably more than it ever would have otherwise
(I might actually never have gotten to that priest
and our accidental host became one of my best
informants), and certainly very much faster.
Getting caught, or almost caught, in a vice raid
is perhaps not a very generalizable recipe for
achieving that mysterious necessity of
anthropological field work, rapport, but for me it
worked very well. It led to a sudden and
unusually complete acceptance into a society
extremely difficult for outsiders to penetrate. It
gave me the kind of immediate, inside view
grasp of an aspect of "peasant mentality" that
anthropologists not fortunate enough to flee
headlong with their subjects from armed
authorities normally do not get. And, perhaps
most important of all, for the other things might
have come in other ways, it put me very quickly
on to a combination emotional explosion, 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, irrigation, caste, or
marriage.
Of Cocks and Men
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. For it
is only apparently cocks that are fighting there.
Actually, it is men.
2For it is only
apparently
cocks that
are fighting
there.
Actually, it
is men.
To anyone who has been in Bali any length of
time, the deep psychological identification of
Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable.
The double entendre here is deliberate. It works
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, cocks are
viewed as detachable, self-operating penises,
ambulant genitals with a life of their own. And
while I do not have the kind of unconscious
material either to confirm or disconfirm this
intriguing notion, the fact that they are
masculine symbols par excellence is about as
indubitable, and to the Balinese about as
evident, as the fact that water runs downhill.
The language of everyday moralism is shot
through, on the male side of it, with roosterish
imagery. Sabung, the word for cock (and one
which appears in inscriptions as early as A.D.
922 ), is used metaphorically to mean "hero,"
"warrior," "champion," "man of parts," "political
candidate," "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 begrudges that is compared to a
cock which, held by the tail, leaps at another
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." Court trials, wars, political
contests, inheritance disputes, and street
arguments are all compared to cockfights. 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 Java.
But the intimacy of men with their cocks is
more than metaphorical. Balinese men, or
anyway a large majority of Balinese men, spend
an enormous amount of time with their
favorites, grooming them, feeding them,
discussing them, trying them out against one
another, or just gazing at them with a mixture of
rapt admiration and dreamy self-absorption.
Whenever you see a group of Balinese men
squatting idly in the council 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,
withdrawing it toward his loins to calm it again
Now and then, to get a feel for another bird, a
man will fiddle this way with
someone else's cock for a while,
but usually by moving around to
squat in place behind it, rather
than just 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. They 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, their
legs massaged, and they are inspected for flaws
with the squinted concentration of a diamond
merchant. A man who has a passion for cocks,
an enthusiast in the literal sense of the term, can
spend most of his life with them, and even those,
the overwhelming majority, whose passion
though intense has not entirely run away with
them, can and do spend what seems not only to
an outsider, but also to themselves an inordinate
amount of time with them. "I am cock crazy,"
my landlord, a quite ordinary aficionado 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 although it is true that cocks
are symbolic expressions or magnifications of
their owner's self, the narcissistic male ego writ
out in Aesopian terms, they are also expressionsand rather more immediate ones-of what the
Balinese regard as the direct inversion,
aesthetically, morally, and
metaphysically, of human status:
animality.
The Balinese revulsion against any
behavior as animal-like can hardly be
overstressed. Babies are not allowed to
crawl for that reason. Incest, though
hardly approved, is a much less
horrifying crime than bestiality. (The
appropriate punishment for the second
is death by drowning, for the first being forced
to live like an animal.) Most demons are
represented-in sculpture, dance, ritual, myth-in
some real or fantastic animal form. The main
puberty rite consists in filing the child's teeth so
they will not look like animal fangs. Not only
defecation but eating is regarded as a disgusting,
almost obscene activity, to be conducted
hurriedly and privately, because of its
association with animality. Even falling down or
any form of clumsiness is considered to be bad
for these reasons. Aside from cocks and a few
domestic animals-oxen, ducks-of no emotional
significance, the Balinese are aversive to
animals and treat their large number of dogs not
merely callously but with a phobic cruelty. In
identifying with his cock, the Balinese man is
3Those not
immediately
involved
give it at
best but
disguised,
sidelong
attention;
those who,
embarrasse
dly, are,
attempt to
pretend
somehow
that the
whole thing
is not really
happening.
identifying not just with his ideal self, or even
his penis, but also, and at the same time, with
what he most fears, hates, and ambivalence
being what it is, is fascinated by-The Powers of
Darkness.
The connection 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 cockfight, is in the
first instance a blood sacrifice
offered, with the appropriate chants
and oblations, to the demons in
order to pacify their ravenous,
cannibal hunger. 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
angered spirit that the oversight be
immediately corrected.) Collective
responses to natural evils-illness,
crop failure, volcanic eruptionsalmost always involve them. And
that famous holiday in Bali, The
Day of Silence (Njepi), when
everyone sits silent and immobile all
day long in order to avoid contact
with a sudden influx of demons
chased momentarily out of hell, is
preceded the previous day by largescale cockfights (in this case legal)
in almost every village on the
island.
In the cockfight, man and beast, good and evil,
ego and id, the creative power of aroused
masculinity and the destructive power of
loosened animality fuse in a bloody drama of
hatred, cruelty, violence, and death. It is little
wonder that when, as is the invariable rule, the
owner 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.
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
program. 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 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 indifference, and the selected
cocks have their spurs (tadji) affixed- razor
sharp, pointed steel swords, four or five inches
long. This is a delicate job which only a small
proportion of men, a half-dozen or so in most
villages, know 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 cock. For reasons I
shall come to, it is done somewhat differently
from case to case, and is an obsessively
deliberate affair. The lore about spurs is
extensive-they are sharpened only at eclipses
and the dark of the moon, should be kept out of
the sight of women, and so forth. And they are
handled, both in use and out, with the same
curious combination of fussiness and sensuality
the Balinese direct toward ritual objects
generally.
The spurs affixed, the two cocks are placed by
their handlers (who may or may not be their
owners) facing one another in the center of the
ring. A coconut pierced with a small hole is
placed in a pail of water, in which it takes about
twenty-one seconds to sink, a period known as a
tjeng and marked at beginning and end by the
beating of a slit gong. During these twenty-one
seconds the handlers (pengangkeb) are not
permitted to touch their roosters. If, as
sometimes happens, the animals have not fought
during this time, they are picked up, fluffed,
pulled, prodded, and otherwise insulted, and put
back in the center of the ring and the process
begins again. Sometimes they refuse to fight at
all, or one keeps running away, in which case
they are imprisoned together under a wicker
cage, which usually gets them engaged.
Most of the time, in any case, the cocks fly
almost immediately at one another in a wingbeating, head-thrusting, leg-kicking explosion of
animal fury so pure, so absolute, and in its own
way so beautiful, as to be almost abstract, a
Platonic concept of hate. Within moments one or
the other drives home a solid blow with his spur.
The handler whose cock has delivered the blow
immediately picks it up so that it will not get a
return blow, for if he does not the match is likely
4to end in a mutually mortal tie as the two birds
wildly hack each other to pieces. This is
particularly true if, as often happens, the spur
sticks in its victim's body, for then the aggressor
is at the mercy of his wounded foe.
With the birds again in the hands of their
handlers, the coconut is now sunk three times
after which the cock which has landed the blow
must be set down to show that he is firm, a fact
he demonstrates by wandering idly around the
rink for a coconut sink. The coconut is then sunk
twice more and the fight must recommence.
During this interval, slightly over two minutes,
the handler of the wounded cock has been
working frantically over it, like a trainer
patching a mauled boxer between rounds, to get
it in shape for a last, desperate try for victory.
He blows in its mouth, putting the whole
chicken head in his own mouth and sucking and
blowing, fluffs it, stuffs its wounds with various
sorts of medicines, and generally tries anything
he can think of to arouse the last ounce of spirit
which may be hidden somewhere within it. By
the time he is forced to put it back down he is
usually drenched in chicken blood, but, as in
prize fighting, a good handler is worth his
weight in gold. Some of them can virtually make
the dead walk, at least long enough for the
second and final round.
In the climactic battle (if there is one; sometimes
the wounded cock simply expires in the
handler's hands or immediately as it is placed
down again), the cock who landed the first blow
usually proceeds to finish off his weakened
opponent. But this is far from an inevitable
outcome, for if a cock can walk he can fight,
and if he can fight, he can kill, and what counts
is which cock expires first. If the wounded one
can get a stab in and stagger on until the other
drops, he is the official winner, even if he
himself topples over an instant later.
Surrounding all this melodrama - which the
crowd packed tight around the ring follows in
near silence, moving their bodies in kinesthetic
sympathy with the movement of the animals,
cheering their champions on with wordless hand
motions, shiftings of the shoulders, turnings of
the head, falling back en masse as the cock with
the murderous spurs careens toward one side of
the ring (it is said that spectators sometimes lose
eyes and fingers from being too attentive),
surging forward again as they glance off toward
another - is a vast body of extraordinarily
elaborate and precisely detailed rules.
These rules, together with the developed lore of
cocks and cockfighting which accompanies
them, are written down in palm leaf manuscripts
(lontar; rontal) passed on from generation to
generation as part of the general legal and
cultural tradition of the villages. At a fight, the
umpire (saja konong; djuru kembar) - the man
who manages the coconut - is in charge of their
application and his authority is absolute. I have
never seen an umpire's judgment questioned on
any subject, even by the more despondent losers,
nor have I ever heard, even in private, a charge
of unfairness directed against one, or, for that
matter, complaints about umpires in general.
Only exceptionally well-trusted, solid, and, given
the complexity of the code, knowledgeable
citizens perform this job, and in fact men will
bring their cocks only to fights presided over by
such men. It is also the umpire to whom
accusations of cheating, which, though rare in
the extreme, occasionally arise, are referred; and
it is he who in the not infrequent cases where the
cocks expire virtually together decides which (if
either, for, though the Balinese do not care for
such an outcome, there can be ties) went first.
Likened to a judge, a king, a priest, and a
policeman, he is all of these, and under his
assured direction the animal passion of the fight
proceeds within the civic certainty of the law. In
the dozens of cockfights I saw in Bali, I never
once saw an altercation about rules. Indeed, I
never saw an open altercation, other than those
between cocks, at all.
This crosswise doubleness of an event which,
taken as a fact of nature, is rage untrammeled
and, taken as a fact of culture, is form perfected,
defines the cockfight as a sociological entity. A
cockfight is what, searching for a name for
something not vertebrate enough to be called a
group and not structureless enough to be called
a crowd, Erving Goffman has called a "focused
gathering"-a set of persons engrossed in a
common flow of activity and relating to one
another in terms of that flow. Such gatherings
meet and disperse; the participants in them
fluctuate; the activity that focuses them is
discreet-a particulate process that reoccurs
rather than a continuous one that endures. They
take their form from the situation that evokes
them, the floor on which they are placed, as
Goffman puts it; but it is a form, and an
articulate one, nonetheless. For the situation, the
floor is itself created, in jury deliberations,
surgical operations, block meetings, sit-ins,
cockfights, by the cultural preoccupations-here,
as we shall see, the celebration of status rivalrywhich not only specify the focus but, assembling
actors and arranging scenery, bring it actually
into being.
In classical times (that is to say, prior to the
Dutch invasion of 1908) when there were no
bureaucrats around to improve popular morality,
the staging of a cockfight was an explicitly
societal matter. Bringing a cock to an important
fight was, for an adult male, a compulsory duty
of citizenship; taxation of fights, which were
usually held on market day, was a major source
of public revenue; patronage of the art was a
stated responsibility of princes; and the cock
ring, or wantilan, stood in the center of the
village near those other monuments of Balinese
civility-the council house, the origin temple, the
marketplace, the signal tower, and the banyan
tree. Today, a few special occasions aside, the
newer rectitude makes so open a statement of
the connection between the excitements of
collective life and those of blood sport
impossible, but, less directly expressed, the
connection itself remains intimate and intact. To
expose it, however, it is necessary to turn to the
5The Balinese
never do
anything in
a simple way
that they
can contrive
to do in a
complicated
one.
aspect of cockfighting around which all the
others pivot, and through which they exercise
their force, an aspect I have thus far studiously
ignored. I mean, of course, the gambling.
Odds and Even Money
The Balinese never do anything in a simple way
that they can contrive to do in a complicated
one, and to this generalization cockfight
wagering is no exception.
In the first place, there are two sorts of bets, or
toh. There is the single axial bet in the center
between the principals (toh ketengah), and there
is the cloud of peripheral ones around the ring
between members of the audience (toh kesasi ).
The first is typically large; the second typically
small. The first is collective, involving coalitions
of bettors clustering around the owner; the
second is individual, man to man. The first is a
matter of deliberate, very quiet, almost furtive
arrangement by the coalition members and the
umpire huddled like conspirators in the center of
the ring; the second is a matter of impulsive
shouting, public offers, and public acceptances
by the excited throng around its edges. And most
curiously, and as we shall see most revealingly,
where the first is always, without exception,
even money, the second, equally without
exception, is never such. What is a fair coin in
the center is a biased one on the side.
The center bet is the official one, hedged in
again with a webwork of rules, and is made
between the two cock owners, with the umpire
as overseer and public witness. This bet, which,
as I say, is always relatively and sometimes very
large, is never raised simply by the owner in
whose name it is made, but by him together with
four or five, sometimes seven or eight, allieskin, village mates, neighbors, close friends. He
may, if he is not especially well-to-do, not even
be the major contributor, though, if only to show
that he is not involved in any chicanery, he must
be a significant one.
Of the fifty-seven matches for which I have
exact and reliable data on the center bet, the
range is from fifteen ringgits to five hundred,
with a mean at eighty-five and with the
distribution being rather noticeably trimodal:
small fights (15 ringgits either side of 35 )
accounting for about 45 per cent of the total
number; medium ones (20 ringgits
either side of 70) for about 25 per
cent; and large (75 ringgits either
side of 175) for about 20 per cent,
with a few very small and very large
ones out at the extremes. In a
society where the normal daily wage
of a manual laborer - a brickmaker,
an ordinary farmworker, a market
porter - was about three ringgits a
day, and considering the fact that
fights were held on the average
about every two-and a-half days in
the immediate area I studied, this is
clearly serious gambling, even if the
bets are pooled rather than
individual efforts.
The side bets are, however, something else
altogether. Rather than the solemn, legalistic
pactmaking of the center, wagering takes place
rather in the fashion in which the stock
exchange used to work when it was out on the
curb. There is a fixed and known odds paradigm
which runs in a continuous series from ten-tonine at the short end to two-to-one on the long:
10-9, 9-8, 8-7, 7-6, 6-5, 5-4, 4-3, 3-2, 2-1. The
man who wants the underdog cock shouts the
short-side number indicating the odds he wants
to be given. That is, if he shouts gasal, "five," he
wants the underdog at five-to-four (or, for him,
four-to-five); if he shouts "four," he wants it at
four-to-three (again, he putting up the "three"),
if "nine" at nine-to-eight, and so on. A man
backing the favorite, and thus considering giving
odds if he can get them short enough, indicates
the fact by crying out the color-type of that cock
- "brown," "speckled," or whatever.
Almost always odds calling starts off toward the
long end of the range - five-to-four or four-tothree- and then moves toward the shorter end
with greater or less speed and to a greater and
lesser degree. Men crying "five" and finding
themselves answered only with cries of "brown"
start crying "six." If the change is made and
partners are still scarce, the
procedure is repeated in a move to
"seven," and so on. Occasionally, if
the cocks are clearly mismatched,
there may be no upward movement
at all, or even movement down the
scale to four-to-three, three-to-two,
very, very rarely to two-to-one, a
shift which is accompanied by a
declining number of bets as a shift
upward is accompanied by an
increasing number. But the general
pattern is for the betting to move a
shorter or longer distance up the
scale toward the, for sidebets,
nonexistent pole of even money,
with the overwhelming majority of
bets falling in the four-to-three to
eight-to-seven range.
The higher the center bet, the more likely the
match will in actual fact be an even one. In a
large-bet fight the pressure to make the match a
genuinely fifty-fifty proposition is enormous,
and is consciously felt as such. For medium
fights the pressure is somewhat less, and for
small ones less yet, though there is always an
effort to make things at least approximately
equal, for even at fifteen ringgits (five days
work) no one wants to make an even money bet
in a clearly unfavorable situation. And, again,
what statistics I have tend to bear this out. In my
fifty-seven matches, the favorite won thirtythree times over-all, the underdog twenty-four, a
1.4 to 1 ratio. But if one splits the figures at
6sixty ringgits center bets, the ratios turn out to
be 1.1 to 1 (twelve favorites, eleven underdogs)
for those above this line, and 1.6 to 1 (twentyone and thirteen) for those below it. Or, if you
take the extremes, for very large fights, those
with center bets over a hundred ringgits the ratio
is 1 to 1 (seven and seven); for very small fights,
those under forty ringgits, it is 1.9 to 1 (nineteen
and ten).
The paradox of fair coin in the middle, biased
coin on the outside is thus a merely apparent
one. The two betting systems, though formally
incongruent, are not really contradictory to one
another, but part of a single larger system in
which the center bet is, so to speak, the "center
of gravity," drawing, the larger it is the more so,
the outside bets toward the short-odds end of the
scale. The center bet thus "makes the game," or
perhaps better, defines it, signals what,
following a notion of Jeremy Bentham's, I am
going to call its "depth."
The Balinese attempt to create an interesting, if
you will, "deep," match by making the center bet
as large as possible so that the cocks matched
will be as equal and as fine as possible, and the
outcome, thus, as unpredictable as possible.
They do not always succeed. Nearly half the
matches are relatively trivial, relatively
uninteresting-in my borrowed terminology,
"shallow"- affairs. But that fact no more argues
against my interpretation than the fact that most
painters, poets, and playwrights are mediocre
argues against the view that artistic effort is
directed toward profundity and, with a certain
frequency, approximates it. The image of artistic
technique is indeed exact: the center bet is a
means, a device, for creating "interesting,"
"deep" matches, not the reason, or at least not
the main reason, why they are interesting, the
source of their fascination, the substance of their
depth. The question why such matches are
interesting-indeed, for the Balinese, exquisitely
absorbing-takes us out of the realm of formal
concerns into more broadly sociological and
social-psychological ones, and to a less purely
economic idea of what "depth" in gaming
amounts to.
Playing with Fire
Bentham's concept of "deep play" is found in his
The Theory of Legislation. By it he means play
in which the stakes are so high that it is, from
his utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to
engage in it at all.
This, I must stress immediately, is not to say that
the money does not matter, or that the Balinese
is no more concerned about losing five hundred
ringgits than fifteen. Such a conclusion would
be absurd. It is because money does, in this
hardly unmaterialistic society, matter and matter
very much that the more of it one risks the more
of a lot of other things, such as one's pride, one's
poise, one's dispassion, one's masculinity, one
also risks, again only momentarily but again
very publicly as well. In deep cockfights an
owner and his collaborators, and, as we shall see,
to a lesser but still quite real extent also their
backers on the outside, put their money where
their status is.
It is in large part because the marginal disutility
of loss is so great at the higher levels of betting
that to engage in such betting is to lay one's
public self, allusively and metaphorically,
through the medium of one's cock, on the line.
And though to a Benthamite this might seem
merely to increase the irrationality of the
enterprise that much further, to the Balinese
what it mainly increases is the meaningfulness
of it all. And as (to follow Weber rather than
Bentham) the imposition of meaning on life is
the major end and primary condition of human
existence, that access of significance more than
compensates for the economic costs involved.
Actually, given the even-money quality of the
larger matches, important changes in material
fortune among those who regularly participate in
them seem virtually nonexistent, because
matters more or less even out over the long run.
This graduated correlation of "status gambling"
with deeper fights and, inversely, "money
gambling" with shallower ones is in fact quite
general. Bettors themselves form a sociomoral
hierarchy in these terms. As noted earlier, at
most cockfights there are, around the very edges
of the cockfight area, a large number of
mindless, sheer-chance type gambling games
(roulette, dice throw, coin-spin, pea-under-theshell) operated by concessionaires. Only women,
children, adolescents, and various other sorts of
people who do not (or not yet) fight cocks - the
extremely poor, the socially despised, the
personally idiosyncratic - play at these games,
at, of course, penny ante levels. Cockfighting
men would be ashamed to go anywhere near
them. Slightly above these people in standing
are those who, though they do not themselves
fight cocks, bet on the smaller matches around
the edges. Next, there are those who fight cocks
in small, or occasionally medium matches, but
have not the status to join in the large ones,
though they may bet from time to time on the
side in those. And finally, there are those, the
really substantial members of the community,
the solid citizenry around whom local life
revolves, who fight in the larger fights and bet
on them around the side. The focusing element
in these focused gatherings, these men generally
dominate and define the sport as they dominate
and define the society. When a Balinese male
talks, in that almost venerative way, about "the
true cockfighter," the bebatoh ("bettor" ) or
djuru kurung ("cage keeper"), it is this sort of
person, not those who bring the mentality of the
pea-and-shell game into the quite different,
inappropriate context of the cockfight, the
driven gambler (potet, a word which has the
secondary meaning of thief or reprobate), and
the wistful hanger-on, that they mean. For such a
man, what is really going on in a match is
something rather closer to an affaire d'honneur
(though, with the Balinese talent for practical
7fantasy, the blood that is spilled is only
figuratively human) than to the stupid,
mechanical crank of a slot machine.
What makes Balinese cockfighting deep is thus
not money in itself, but what, the more of it that
is involved the more so, money causes to
happen: the migration of the Balinese status
hierarchy into the body of the cockfight.
Psychologically an Aesopian representation of
the ideal/demonic, rather narcissistic, male self,
sociologically it is an equally Aesopian
representation of the complex fields of tension
set up by the controlled, muted, ceremonial, but
for all that deeply felt, interaction of those selves
in the context of everyday life. The cocks may
be surrogates for their owners' personalities,
animal mirrors of psychic form, but the
cockfight is - or more exactly, deliberately is
made to be - a simulation of the social matrix,
the involved system of crosscutting, overlapping,
highly corporate groups --villages, kingroups,
irrigation societies, temple congregations,
"castes" - in which its devotees live. And as
prestige, the necessity to affirm it, defend it,
celebrate it, justify it, and just plain bask in it
(but not given the strongly ascriptive character
of Balinese stratification, to seek it), is perhaps
the central driving force in the society, so also -
ambulant penises, blood sacrifices, and
monetary exchanges aside - is it of the
cockfight. This apparent amusement and
seeming sport is, to take another phrase from
Erving Goffman, "a status bloodbath."
The easiest way to make this clear, and at least
to some degree to demonstratee it, is to invoke
the village whose cockfighting activities I
observed the closest - the one in which the raid
occurred and from which my statistical data are
taken.
Consider, then, as support of the general thesis
that the cockfight, and especially the deep
cockfight, is fundamentally a dramatization of
status concerns, the following facts:
1. A man virtually never bets against a cock
owned by a member of his own kingroup.
Usually he will feel obliged to bet for it, the
more so the closer the kin tie and the deeper
the fight. If he is certain in his mind that it
will not win, he may just not bet at all,
particularly if it is only a second cousin's
bird or if the fight is a shallow one. But as a
rule he will feel he must support it and, in
deep games, nearly always does. Thus the
great majority of the people calling "five" or
"speckled" so demonstratively are
expressing their allegiance to their kinsman,
not their evaluation of his bird, their
understanding of probability theory, or even
their hopes of unearned income.
2. This principle is extended logically. If your
kin group is not involved you will support
an allied kingroup against an unallied one in
the same way, and so on through the very
involved networks of alliances which, as I
say, make up this, as any other, Balinese
village.
3. So, too, for the village as a whole. If an
outsider cock is fighting any cock from your
village you will tend to support the local
one. If, what is a rarer circumstance but
occurs every now and then, a cock from
outside your cockfight circuit is fighting
one inside it you will also tend to support
the "home bird."
4. Cocks which come from any distance are
almost always favorites, for the theory is the
man would not have dared to bring it if it
was not a good cock, the more so the further
he has come. His followers are, of course,
obliged to support him, and when the more
grand-scale legal cockfights are held (on
holidays and so on) the people of the village
take what they regard to be the best cocks in
the village, regardless of ownership, and go
off to support them, although they will
almost certainly have to give odds on them
and to make large bets to show that they are
not a cheapskate village. Actually, such
"away games," though infrequent, tend to
mend the ruptures between village members
that the constantly occurring "home games,"
where village factions are opposed rather
than united, exacerbate.
5. Almost all matches are sociologically
relevant. You seldom get two outsider cocks
fighting, or two cocks with no particular
group backing, or with group backing which
is mutually unrelated in any clear way. When
you do get them, the game is very shallow,
betting very slow, and the whole thing very
dull, with no one save the immediate
principals and an addict gambler or two at
all interested.
6. By the same token, you rarely get two cocks
from the same group, even more rarely from
the same subfaction, and virtually never
from the same sub-subfaction (which would
be in most cases one extended family)
fighting. Similarly, in outside village fights
two members of the village will rarely fight
against one another, even though, as bitter
rivals, they would do so with enthusiasm on
their home grounds.
7. On the individual level, people involved in
an institutionalized hostility relationship,
called puik, in which they do not speak or
otherwise have anything to do with each
other (the causes of this formal breaking of
relations are many: wife-capture, inheritance
arguments, political differences) will bet
very heavily, sometimes almost maniacally,
against one another in what is a frank and
direct attack on the very masculinity, the
ultimate ground of his status, of the
opponent.
8[The
cockfight’s]
function, if
you want to
call it that,
is
interpretive
: it is a
Balinese
reading of
Balinese
experience;
a story they
tell
themselves
about
themselves.
8. The center bet coalition is, in all but the
shallowest games, always made up by
structural allies - no "outside money" is
involved. What is "outside" depends upon
the context, of course, but given it, no
outside money is mixed in with the main
bet; if the principals cannot raise it, it is not
made. The center bet, again especially in
deeper games, is thus the most direct and
open expression of social opposition, which
is one of the reasons why both it
and match making are
surrounded by such an air of
unease, furtiveness,
embarrassment, and so on.
9. The rule about borrowing
money - that you may borrow
for a bet but not in one - stems
(and the Balinese are quite
conscious of this) from similar
considerations: you are never at
the economic mercy of your
enemy that way. Gambling
debts, which can get quite large
on a rather short-term basis, are
always to friends, never to
enemies, structurally speaking.
10. When two cocks are structurally
irrelevant or neutral so far as
you are concerned (though, as
mentioned, they almost never
are to each other) you do not
even ask a relative or a friend
whom he is betting on, because if you know
how he is betting and he knows you know,
and you go the other way, it will lead to
strain. This rule is explicit and rigid; fairly
elaborate, even rather artificial precautions
are taken to avoid breaking it. At the very
least you must pretend not to notice what he
is doing, and he what you are doing.
11. There is a special word for betting against
the grain, which is also the word for "pardon
me" (mpura). It is considered a bad thing to
do, though if the center bet is small it is
sometimes all right as long as you do not do
it too often. But the larger the bet and the
more frequently you do it, the more the
"pardon me" tack will lead to social
disruption.
12. In fact, the institutionalized hostility
relation, puik, is often formally initiated
(though its causes always lie
elsewhere) by such a "pardon
me" bet in a deep fight, putting
the symbolic fat in the fire.
Similarly, the end of such a
relationship and resumption of
normal social intercourse is
often signalized (but, again, not
actually brought about) by one
or the other of the enemies
supporting the other's bird.
13. In sticky, cross-loyalty
situations, of which in this
extraordinarily complex social
system there are of course
many, where a man is caught
between two more or less
equally balanced loyalties, he
tends to wander off for a cup of
coffee or something to avoid
having to bet, a form of
behavior reminiscent of that of
American voters in similar
situations.
14. The people involved in the center bet are,
especially in deep fights, virtually always
leading members of their group-kinship,
village, or whatever. Further, those who bet
on the side (including these people) are, as I
have already remarked, the more established
members of the village - the solid citizens.
Cockfighting is for those who are involved
in the everyday politics of prestige as well,
not for youth, women, subordinates, and so
forth.
15. So far as money is concerned, the explicitly
expressed attitude toward it is that it is a
secondary matter. It is not, as I have said, of
no importance; Balinese are no happier to
lose several weeks' income than anyone else.
But they mainly look on the monetary
aspects of the cockfight as self-balancing, a
matter of just moving money around,
circulating it among a fairly well-defined
group of serious cockfighters. The really
important wins and losses are seen mostly in
other terms, and the general attitude toward
wagering is not any hope of cleaning up, of
making a killing (addict gamblers again
excepted), but that of the horseplayer's
prayer: "Oh, God, please let me break even."
In prestige terms, however, you do not want
to break even, but, in a momentary,
punctuate sort of way, win utterly. The talk
(which goes on all the time) is about fights
against such-and-such a cock of So-and-So
which your cock demolished, not on how
much you won, a fact people, even for large
bets, rarely remember for any length of time,
though they will remember the day they did
in Pan Loh's finest cock for years.
16. You must bet on cocks of your own group
aside from mere loyalty considerations, for
if you do not people generally will say,
"What! Is he too proud for the likes of us?
Does he have to go to Java or Den Pasar [the
capital town] to bet, he is such an important
man?" Thus there is a general pressure to bet
not only to show that you are important
locally, but that you are not so important that
you look down on everyone else as unfit
even to be rivals. Similarly, home team
people must bet against outside cocks or the
outsiders will accuse it - a serious charge -
of just collecting entry fees and not really
being interested in cockfighting, as well as
again being arrogant and insulting.
17. Finally, the Balinese peasants themselves are
quite aware of all this and can and, at least to
an ethnographer, do state most of it in
approximately the same terms as I have.
9Fighting cocks, almost every Balinese I have
ever discussed the subject with has said, is
like playing with fire only not getting
burned. You activate village and kingroup
rivalries and hostilities, but in "play" form,
coming dangerously and entrancingly close
to the expression of open and direct
interpersonal and intergroup aggression
(something which, again, almost never
happens in the normal course of ordinary
life), but not quite, because, after all, it is
"only a cockfight."
More observations of this sort could be
advanced, but perhaps the general point is, if not
made, at least well-delineated, and the whole
argument thus far can be usefully summarized in
a formal paradigm:
THE MORE A MATCH IS . . .
1. Between near status equals (and/or
personal enemies)
2. Between high status individuals
THE DEEPER THE MATCH.
THE DEEPER THE MATCH IS
1. The closer the identification of cock and
man (or: more properly, the deeper the
match the more the man will advance
his best, most closely-identified-with
cock).
2. The finer the cocks involved and the
more exactly they will be matched.
3. The greater the emotion that will be
involved and the more the general
absorption in the match.
4. The higher the individual bets center
and outside, the shorter the outside bet
odds will tend to be, and the more
betting there will be over-all.
5. The less an economic and the more a
"status" view of gaming will be
involved, and the "solider" the citizens
who will be gaming.
Inverse arguments hold for the shallower the
fight, culminating, in a reversed-signs sense, in
the coin-spinning and dice-throwing
amusements. For deep fights there are no
absolute upper limits, though there are of course
practical ones, and there are a great many
legend-like tales of great Duel-in-the-Sun
combats between lords and princes in classical
times (for cockfighting has always been as much
an elite concern as a popular one), far deeper
than anything anyone, even aristocrats, could
produce today anywhere in Bali.
Indeed, one of the great culture heroes of Bali is
a prince, called after his passion for the sport,
"The Cockfighter," who happened to be away at
a very deep cockfight with a neighboring prince
when the whole of his family-father, brothers,
wives, sisters-were assassinated by commoner
usurpers. Thus spared, he returned to dispatch
the upstarts, regain the throne, reconstitute the
Balinese high tradition, and build its most
powerful, glorious, and prosperous state. Along
with everything else that the Balinese see in
fighting cocks-themselves, their social order,
abstract hatred, masculinity, demonic power-they
also see the archetype of status virtue, the
arrogant, resolute, honor-mad player with real
fire, the ksatria prince.
Conclusion
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 not, as functionalist
sociology would have it, that it reinforces status
discriminations (such reinforcement is hardly
necessary in a society where every act proclaims
them), but that it provides a metasocial
commentary upon the whole matter of assorting
human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks and
then organizing the major part of collective
existence around that assortment. Its function, if
you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a
Balinese reading of Balinese experience; a story
they tell themselves about themselves.
What the cockfight says it says in a vocabulary
of sentiment-the thrill of risk, the despair of loss,
the pleasure of triumph. Yet what it says is not
merely that risk is exciting, loss depressing, or
triumph gratifying, banal tautologies of affect,
but that it is of these emotions, thus exampled,
that society is built and individuals put together.
Attending cockfights and participating in them
is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental
education. What he learns there is what his
culture's ethos and his private sensibility (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 articulated 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 experience, it brings together
themes-animal savagery, male narcissism,
opponent gambling, status rivalry, mass
10excitement, blood sacrifice-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 see Macbeth to
learn what a man feels like after he has gained a
kingdom and lost his soul, Balinese go to
cockfights to find out what a man, usually
composed, aloof, almost obsessively selfabsorbed, a kind of moral autocosm, feels like
when, attacked, tormented, challenged, insulted,
and driven in result to the extremes of fury, he
has totally triumphed or been brought totally
low.
11