a complete critique of Geertz’s philosophical assumptions would involve a
significant challenge to the assumption Bentham makes concerning “deep
play.” Bentham was a secular thinker and Geertz accepts a purely secular
framework. Perhaps that is why he did not apply his idea of deep play to
deeper play (and even the deepest forms of play) in religious rituals.
Implicit assumptions about social change can shape the way one concep-
tualizes deep play (Zijderveld, 1976; Fuller, 1964; Gandhi, 1993; Dawkins,
2012 [2011]; Elden, 2012).
Geertz’s essay has become widely known, in part because the first part
readslike an adventure story. It is an interesting narrative account. He and
his wife, Hildred, are caught in a police raid and instead of pulling rank
as visiting foreign researchers with a lot of prestige and a lot of money
they go along with the crowd. Geertz states that this helped him to become
accepted in the village. Perhaps it did. However, the actual truth of the
account is somewhat suspect, since that was not the very first time that
Clifford and Hildred Geertz had been to that village in Bali (Geertz, 1959;
Geertz & Geertz, 1975). Moreover, Clifford does not emphasize the fact
that by that time they both spoke some Indonesian, the national language
(Bahasa Indonesia). They did not learn much Balinese, a very complex and
difficult language that few foreigners have tackled, much less mastered. But
they were able to converse in the national language. The narrative he pre-
sents in his “Deep Play” essay is relatively easy to read. It is not until later
in the essay that he starts to get a bit bogged down in the intricacies of
Balinese society. He stresses that he studied an illegal activity carried out
by men and that for the men and boys who engaged in the activity it was a
matter of “deep play.” He then goes on to present a detailed discussion of
facts that were obviously not merely a matter of information gathered
through ethnographic research. Geertz goes well beyond thick description
in the bulk of the article.
Ironically, there is actually very little thick description of the cockfight
perse. The thick description we do get is of the police raid and his reaction.
What Geertz does so well is that he is able to present an intuitively appeal-
ing story about a society that is quite different from most modern (or post-
modern) societies with which most readers are familiar. Even the
undergraduate student gets a sense of what he is writing about; the opening
paragraphs are vivid and appealing. They are “right out of a movie,” as we
say. Unfortunately, his discussion is also somewhat misleading. In a collec-
tion of essays about Geertz (Shweder & Good, 2005)the point is made that
Geertz, one of the most influential anthropologists of the last half of the
twentieth century, has set the agenda for ethnographic description. Geertz’s
84 J. I. (HANS) BAKKER