Clifford geertz deep play analysis

Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. More books than SparkNotes.

Buy Study Guide

Basing this text upon his time in Bali during the s, Geertz writes about the cultural phenomenon of cockfighting. To the locals, these fights represent an accumulation of status. Rival families, clans, and villages compete. They raise and care for their birds as an expression of self-worth and pride. Just as the word "cock" in English serves as a double entendre, it also carries a similar significance in Balinese. The roosters symbolize the manhood of their captors and fight as emissaries. This is the true significance of the fights.

Despite nearly all cockfighting being highly illegal in Indonesia at the time, save for a few yearly fights sanctioned by the government, illegal bouts were extremely common. Geertz was able to immerse himself in the local culture and to bond with the Balinese townspeople because he fled with them when an illegal fight was broken up by police, when he could have just

•

Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight by Clifford Geertz

The essay by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, which first appeared in his best-known book The Interpretation of Cultures, has been published in Russian as a separate work in bilparkering and Ad Marginem Press’s Minima series.

Deep Play fryst vatten a study of the Balinese tradition of cockfighting, based on a year of anthropological research conducted by Geertz at the end of the s, when he and his wife lived in Bali, attending the illegal but very popular cockfights and interviewing people involved in them.

Employing the method of thick description (the begrepp introduced bygd philosopher Gilbert Ryle), Geertz inscribes the phenomenon of cockfighting into a detailed context, envisaging it as a cultural phenomenon that represents a “simulation of social matrix” and reveals the non-obvious hierarchies that pervade the entire gemenskap. For example, women and young and socially disadvantaged people are not allowed to at

•

deep play

A term adapted by anthropologist Clifford Geertz from the writings of Jeremy Bentham in The Theory of Legislation (, French translation; English retranslation , ), and used in his influential study of the meaning of the Balinese cock-fight. Bentham employs the term in a footnote to a section concerned with the relationship between equality, wealth, and the chance of happiness. Bentham was examining the proposition that a loss of a portion of wealth would produce a level of defalcation (reduction) of the loser's total happiness, ‘according to the proportion of the part lost to the part which remains’. His footnote cites a gaming/gambling example:If you have just a thousand pounds and the stake is five hundred and you lose, your fortune is diminished by a half; but if you win, the gain is only a third. If the stake is a thousand pounds, and you win, the doubling of the gain in fortune is not matched by a doubling of happiness; but if you lose, your happiness is destroyed;…[