- In The Interpretation of Culture (1973), an enormously influential compilation of his essays(last essay – Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight), he argued that an analysis of culture should “not [be] an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” .
- Culture is expressed by the external symbols that a society uses rather than being locked inside people’s heads. He defined culture as “an 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 their attitudes toward life”
- Societies use these symbols to express their “worldview, value-orientation, ethos, [and other aspects of their culture]” (Ortner 1983:129).
- For Geertz symbols are “vehicles of ‘culture’” (Ortner 1983:129), and he asserts that symbols should not be studied in and of themselves, but for what they can reveal about culture.
- Geertz’s main interest was manner in which symbols shape the ways that social actors see, feel, and think about the world (Ortner 1983:129).
- Throughout his writings, Geertz characterized culture as a social phenomenon and a shared system of intersubjective symbols and meanings (Parker 1985).
Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
“Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” is an essay included in the book The Interpretation of Cultures, written by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. The essay, which is considered Geertz’s most seminal work, addresses the symbolism and social dynamics of cockfighting (sabungan) in Balinese culture. It is an important example of Geertz’s use of “thick description”(indeapth study in emic perspective) as an anthropological approach.
Background
In early April 1958, Geertz arrived in a Balinese village with his wife. They were “malarial and diffident,” and they were largely ignored by the villagers, as they were “intruders, professional ones,” as Geertz wrote. The couple moved into an extended family compound, and they initially only interacted with their landlord and village chief.
Ten days after their arrival, the couple viewed their first cockfight. The fight was held to raise money for a new school. At the time, cockfights were illegal in Indonesia, as they had also been under Dutch colonial rule. For these reasons, cockfights were usually held in secluded areas, although some fights were in more central location if bribes and arrangements were made. The couple attended one of these larger matches, which was in a public square. It was broken up by the police, and the crowd rushed away in a panic. The couple fled with the crowd, and they hid from the police in the courtyard of a local family. Their host was questioned by the police, and the host defended both himself and the foreign couple.
The next day, the village opened up to the couple. The experience of hiding from the police in the courtyard allowed Geertz to break the tension between himself and the villagers. As he explained, “…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.” However, he also noted that they had fled due to fear, rather than bravery and solidarity. Despite this, they were able to discuss and laugh about the police raid with the village. As Geertz explained, “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.’“ As a result, Geertz was able to perform the interviews and observation which make up The Interpretation of Cultures. The couple stayed in the village for a year, where they attended and observed cockfights.
Thick Description is a term Geertz borrowed from the philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, to describe and define the aim of interpretive anthropology. He argues that social Anthropology is based on ethnography or the study of culture. Culture is based on the symbols that guide a community‘s behaviour. Symbols obtain meaning from the role which they play in the patterned behaviour of social life. Culture and behaviour cannot be studied separately because they are intertwined. By analyzing the whole of culture one develops a “thick description” which details the mental processes and reasoning of members of the culture. To illustrate thick description, Geertz uses Ryle’s example which discusses the difference between a “blink” and a “wink.” One, a blink, is an involuntary twitch , a „thin description“, and the other, a wink, is a conspiratorial signal to a friend, the thick description. While the physical movements involved in each are identical, each has a distinct meaning.
The most popular of his works is the one that of Balinese cockfight, where he linked it with the status hierarchy, tension inside the society and between societies and kinship bonding. Geertz found that, ‘Sabung’, the word used for a cock is having several meanings in the society, which metaphorically meant ‘a hero’, ‘warrior’, ‘tough guy’, ‘lady killer’, etc. He also noted in his chapter ‘Deep play’, that, both a type of man like, a man who make irrational effort ‘extracting’ himself is compared to a roster with a dying cock, etc.
He has talked extensively on the owner and their cocks, how they take care of their cocks and they start reflecting their own image in their rosters, the money involved (the primary bet and the secondary one along with their characteristics), the fight and how these fights vary on the basis of money and the prestige involved. He showed that even the status in society is connected with rosters and a hierarchy based on participation and a link to the status oriented fights.
In Balinese society where, participants taking part in larger bet have the highest social status, the kind of status gamble involved make them important in other affairs of society where as poor, women, children are the one, lowest in hierarchy, who either are starting or do not play or gamble in pennies. It is reported in the account that, the hierarchy is felt so strongly that, none of the men would like to a around the one lowest in the social hierarchy. He also talked of function of these fights in resolving inter and intra group tension via defeating the other person but, at the same time brought out that for the people who bet often it is not a matter of prestige in fact a mode of economic gain. Geertz drew from Balinese cockfight that, the themes of gambling, status hierarchy involved, aesthetic evoking excitement, etc. are all connected to rage and its fear, bound by rules they have a symbolic structure in which the inner social ties can be felt where one is having close friends and kin in their centre bet while when it is between two villages, allies is the one from the same village and the roster of Home is supported.
After Geertz, the doctrine became popular in Anthropology and many other scholars pursued this method. Along with Geertz, the interpretivism in anthropology is best reflected in Victor Turner’s work with Ndembu’s. Later, Turner (Ndembu), Mary Douglas (Natural Symbols) and David Schneider also became popular for practicing interpretative anthropology.
Legacy and Critique
The Interpretation of Cultures helped to define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their disciple is ultimately about. It served to introduce an important new concept of culture, and how culture should or could be studied. Especially in regards to this work, Clifford Geertz remains one of the few anthropologists frequently cited outside, as well as inside, the discipline.
One of the main critiques of “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” is that Geertz overlooks the importance of women in Balinese culture, even though he recognizes that they are a part of it, and that Geertz does not first explain the social origins of status in Balinese society to give context to his theories and interpretations of what he saw and studied.
Of the collection of essays overall, there are two key critiques. The first is that there is an inevitable limitation to the culture-as-text approach – it fails to consider how that “text” was created in the first place, and the significance of its’ development in the society. The second is that it does not address the bigger pictures in cultures overall, such as how they were formed, and the historical context for why symbols are created or occur. In the end, Geertz’s work provokes thought regarding the nature of culture and how it is studied, and was greatly influential in shaping the symbolic and interpretive anthropology.