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

Continued...

administrators would need to know ill order to formulate a policy on cockfights. But such duties accomplished, lie manages to enter into the drama of emotions ill combat and to suggest their intensity with a series of verbal montages, close-ups, and fade-outs. The reader is left with less a sense of pity for the wives and children than a strong desire to experience for himself this bit of exotica.

Van Eck possesses both the prose style and the sensibilities to capture tile event itself. But the depth of his evocation is limited by his scientific will to generalize and the requirements fie thought this entailed. Van Eck wanted this match to represent not just all Balinese cockfights, but the same 'passion' throughout the Indies and Malaysia. To this end it was necessary to empty his description of ally contextual data specific to Bali. According to his standards, to generalize about all Malayoindies cockfights, lie could safely stress only feathered furies backed by betting addicts, since this is all that is common across the variants. Here was that nineteenth century predicament: a romantic attraction to local color but the lingering neoclassical suspicion that local color was superficial and that underneath lay the universal abstract form itself."
Geertz's treatment brings a fresh range of perspectives to Balinese cockfights, including a Weberian one, ill the sense that:

Weber's social science focused on understanding individual events and historically located entities, conceived in their uniquely given individuality, rather than searching for universal generalizations about classes of units or events ... it was a comparative method that was to proceed with the use of 'ideal types,' that focused on extreme cases rather than on the average case ... (Gouldner 1974),

In this view, it is pointless to seek average cases of complex cultural forms. This is most clearly the case where the forms vary as widely as cockfights in different areas of Indonesia. But even ill relatively homogeneous regions - for example, Hindu-Bali - this comparativist approach eschews the average and embraces the extreme. Geertz does not survey. the range of Balinese cockfights; rather lie telescopes repeated observations into an ideal-typical description of a choice elaboration of the form in one village-area. Here the cockfight is capable of clarifying, satisfying, and intensifying its participants' innermost social being a profound status drive. By carefully plotting ach match against the social factions in this community of hotly competitive iron-smith ancestor groups, Geertz reveals the cockfight as a public stage for Bah-Hindu social action. This is not necessarily what the cockfight averages out to be but what it. apparently, strains to become. Indeed, elsewhere ill progressive Balinese towns of greater ethnic diversity, we find cockfights which, rather than being the center ring of status competition, are literally sideshows. Tabanan town. for example, sports a large cockpit, but the regular players are only a small minority of the population. And the real addicts include two Hajis from the Islamic quarter and several Chinese who - it is suggested by proud, condescending, and poorer Balinese - have nothing better to do with their time or money.

Geertz conclusively demonstrates the potential of cockfights to register with ...