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The Balinese Cockfight

The Balinese Cockfight


In Language, Sapir defines that culture is "the socially inherited assemblage of practice and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives". Herskovits also defines culture as an essential construction "that describes the total body of belief, behavior, knowledge, sanctions, values, and goals that mark the way of life of any people" and through culture, one is able to describe the things that people have, things that they do, and what they think (948).

Likewise, Ward Goodenough describes that culture is "the various standards for perceiving, evaluating, believing, and doing that... [a person] attributes to other persons as a result of his experience of their actions and admonitions." Geertz adds that "culture denotes a historical "historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life." Geertz perceives that cultures forms people's actions.

Today, culture has become a structural forces and material condition determined by the dominant group in a society. Giroux (1983) claims culture is "constituted as a dialectical instance of power and conflict, rooted in the struggle over both material conditions and the form and content of practical activity" Culture does not provide a cognitive map but represents a guide map to understand the behavior and characteristics of certain people, in this case the Balinese.

As a culture, people form non-conventional gathering with an understanding to manifest acts and artifacts through traditional setting. Through culture, man makes sense the patterns, ordered clusters of significant symbols.

Culture is not complex but it represents "customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters" and a set of control mechanism to govern for human's social behavior. As a control mechanism to govern for human's social behavior, culture also symbolizes a set of principles that would frame ones' experience in an event in particular ways, but it does not set equilibrium on the world.

As a society, the Balinese' cultures of cockfighting represents their belief, not as a material phenomenon. Cockfighting is a culture that does not exist in things, people and their behavior or emotions but in a non-formal organizational setting. It introduces three attributes: the immediate dramatic shape, metaphoric content, and social content.

According to Geertz, the Balinese cockfighting represents a cultural figure against a social ground. He believes it portrays a convulsive surge of surge of animal hatred, a mock war of one's symbol, a formal simulation of tensions, and an aesthetic power derives from a force of togetherness of the diverse realities.

Balinese cockfight is defined as a sociological entity that produces a double altercation without rules but between cocks. As a sociological entity, Greetz quoted the words of Erving Goffman who calls such event as "focused gathering", which is a structureless group of people gather together, engage in a common activity, and relate to one another through this activity.

Cockfight has material effects and pride but also destruction. Another author describes that cockfight displays certain characteristics - ones that radically has the atomistic structure – the match making, the betting, the fight, and the results of the defeat, the triumph, the hurried, or the passing of the money. The loser is not consoled and the winner is not congratulated. The match ends and the crowd turn its attention to the next fight.

One interesting thing about the Balinese cock fighting is that there are no rules that are literally translated. Rather the rules are written down in palm leaf and passed on from generation to generation.

In classical times, as Greetz describes it, where no bureaucrats tried to improve morality, cockfight was simply a social matter. He also believes that as a social matter, cockfight is an important event for adult males to engage in an open conflict with a themes of "death, masculinity, rage, pride, lose, beneficence, chance, and relief … an image, fiction, a model, a metaphor" (p294). Geertz's description of the cockfight symbolizes the masculine power and the destructive power, a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death, but it could also have different meaning to the Balinese.
According to Greetz, the cockfight is a means of expression. Its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them. Rather it is a medium where one could see the feathers, the blood, the crowd, and the money.

The fight itself represents a cultural figure against a social ground. As mentioned earlier, it is convulsive surge of animal hatred and a mock war. The dimension of cockfight's structure is lack of temporary direction. It is like the segment of general social life and its aggressiveness, without temporary direction.

Some people tend to take culture for granted as they travel. Nevertheless, all over the world, other people do determine the characteristics of other people (Clifford Geertz, 1973). They assemble texts and determines to which group a person comes from including his or her characteristics.

Though living and enhancing into modernization, cockfight survives. It survives the politics of modernization. It becomes Balinese males’ obsession. It provides a mean for an open conflict with the spirit of sportsmanship as neither loser nor winner is consoled or celebrated.

Be it in any form, cockfight is an open social event. It portrays the subtleness of the male to present themselves as wild and murderous even like persons with manic depression who have cruel instincts. Balinese men form a special bond and discover it in the rink of a cockfight.

According to Greetz, 95% of the event is organized and sponsored locally by small combination of petty rural merchants who have turned it as a commercial sport but often argue that cockfights are good for trade, because they can "get the money out of the house and circulate it." In a sense, cockfight is meant as a social sport but it has become a gambling arena and one of the main means of the island's monetization.

Cockfight, for everyday person’s experience, is only a game. But it is more than just a game. It is a traditional medium of gambling and a paradigmatic human event. It is enacted and reacted of the cocks without ends, and at same time, the participant owners are reading and rereading as they watch the cock fight. They are calculating and contemplating a strategy without speculation. Their interest is no longer merely sport. As they watch fight after fight, they grow familiar with it. They become sensible with it and eventually they become subject to it as simply a display. Yet, a display that is radically different. To the Balinese, cockfight is a reality that projects the property of social hierarchy. It reaches toward the numinous transcendent society set not in the matrix of kinetic human emotion but in that of the animals.

Cockfight is a static and passionless event. It connects them with their gods. In this static passionless of divine mentality of the Brahman priest, it expresses tranquility. It endorses the mass festivals and mobilizes the people to visit their gods at the temples with singing, dancing, and giving offering and asserting their spiritual unity against their inequality and trust.

Indeed, says Greetz, cockfight is part of the master key to the Balinese life. The slaughter of the cock, which loses during the fight at the ring, is stratifactory. It symbolizes death and life – either wins or loses and dies. Cockfight also portrays the temper of the Balinese society, especially the male society, like the Spanish males and their bullfight. It portrays that life is worth qualified and challenged. But life itself and the society contain their own interpretation. The only way to learn and understand them is to get access to them.





Work Cited

Frake, 1977 in Greetz, Clifford. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.
Giroux, Henry. Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling, 1981 in Some Definitions Of Culture: Language and Culture in the Deaf Community. June 26, 2007. http://web.mac.com/swilcox/iWeb/UNM/Courses_files/culturedef-2.pdf
Geertz, 1966 in Greetz, Clifford. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.
Geertz, Clifford. Person 1973 in Greetz, Clifford. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.
Greetz, Clifford. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.
Ogburn & Nimkoff. Sociology. In Greetz, Clifford. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. 1940
Some Definitions Of Culture: Language and Culture in the Deaf Community. June 26, 2007. http://web.mac.com/swilcox/iWeb/UNM/Courses_files/culturedef-2.pdf

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