Advantages
Music of Kebyar
Commoners
Temporal Perspectives
Village Fields
Knowledge
Magnificent
Betutu
Evidences
Tropical
Mahendradatta
Music of Kebyar
Administrative

Continued...

Temporal perspectives

The courtyard is already filled with players. Most have one or two feathered heroes (gevederde helden) next to them in a wooden or bamboo-woven cage. Others, from the treasure of Chinese coin (Kepeng) placed before them, furnish proof that they intend being anything but idle onlookers. Yonder in the vicinity of the vorst, one also sees a seated priest, who properly ought riot he here, but whose Balinese nature, in the event of a cockfight, runs contrary to dogma.

Everyone impatiently awaits the moment when the juru Kemong will give the signal. Who is this I should almost say the main figure in the ring. Look, he is sitting over there on the southside of the courtyard.
Van Eck mentions the drum, the sinking coconut shell used by this official to time the matches, and the other referees that assure fair play. Finally,
There goes the drum! The first pair of players steps out, each with his cock in hand, there is some to-do over who will take the east side, who the west. At last they are agreed. Now, first the Ebenburtigkeit of both fighting cocks is tested out (already properly proved at home), and their 'hero's blood' is by various devices brought toward the boiling point.
He explains how the cocks' relative strengths are assessed and describes the critical procedure of attaching the spurs (tajen).
Allons donc! ... The spectators grow lively. Each bets a larger or smaller sum on the cock that appears to him most valiant.
He evokes the uproar of bets and counterbets and their equates the state of the owners with that of their animals:
The players themselves do not call out. Deadly calm and without speaking a word ... each awaits the moment when lie can attack his opponent, whom he (perhaps) never before saw, but who in these few minutes has already become his mortal enemy.

Thereupon van Eck portrays in vividly colloquial snatches of phrases and quotations the climax to what is essentially, as Geertz has expressed it, 'a chicken hacking another mindlessly to bits' (1972).
This 'typical match' decided, van. Eck concludes with a Dutch translation of the forty-five written provisions that carefully prescribe appropriate measures for any foreseeable controversy. The articles cover everything: how to decide especially close contests how to maintain tranquility in the village area; punishments for failing to pay off bets requisite offerings proper behavior among contestants; and so forth. Such provisions Iona helped insure another characteristic also noted by Geertz in recent Balinese cockfights: the relative absence of any altercation.

To better appreciate the aims and achievements of so much of these nineteenth-century sketches, it is worth measuring van Eck's 1879 description against C Geertz's (1972c) detailed interpretation of the same kind of event, as observed during 1957-8. Van Eck's study was advanced for its day. Of course, he expressed the standard missionary's dismay over the strains gambling puts on harmonious family life, and he recorded in full the formal legal underpinnings that prospective ...