What was the cause of the commotion? The men had come to the house-
hold to speak with Geertz about news they had heard on the radio. Was it
true that the Russians (i.e., the Soviets) had put “a moon” in the sky?
Geertz, understanding what they meant, responded: yes. He knew that the
Russians had indeed put a moon in the sky. (Sputnik had been launched.)
The peasant cultivators leave to go to work, satisfied that if an American
admits the Russians have done it, it must be true. Geertz writes:
“Empiricism in action. Intercultural communication professionally effected.
The Cold War in real time” (Geertz, 1995,p. 67). That is a bit of a rhetori-
cal flourish, but we get the main idea.
It would be possible to revisit Geertz’s published work in detail and
pointout ways in which he leaves out certain details in order to tell certain
kinds of stories in one context, only to reveal those details more fully in
another context. Cliff and Hildred are living with a family. But not just any
family! They live with aBrahmanfamily, a high caste family. That in itself
makes a significant point about the cockfight incident. What if Geertz had
run away from the police and hidden in a poorSudrahousehold? (The
pecking order isBrahman, Satriya, Wesia, andSudra. There is little or no
untouchability in Bali today.) When the “petty commodity producers” ask
him about Sputnik they defer to him and call him by the term of respect
often used for older men:Pak(from Bapak, father), even though he is in
his thirties and many of them are far older. Yet by and large Geertz does
not emphasize the importance of caste in his ethnographic accounts. He
does not emphasize the fact that even as a young man he was, by virtue of
being a rich American, a man of very high status.
The idiographic description of a few events puts the immediate here and
now into the limelight, but the cost of that is context. Geertz also wrote
other things about Bali, including a book about the same Balinese village.
He wrote that together with his wife Hildred Geertz(1975) ;it is entitled
Kinship in Bali. He did set a context in his oeuvre considered as a whole
(Geertz, 1959, 1966). It is clear that Geertz made a major contribution to
Interpretivist, Symbolic Anthropology, and that should not be disparaged
(Bruner, 2005). But the cockfight essay has often been read out of context.
Many people who have never been to Bali read Geertz’s famous essay and
think that the key aspect of Balinese life is the cockfight. It is not.
My own contribution may be scant in terms of ethnography, even when
compared to standard accounts found in popular books likeCovarrubias
(1973[1937], pp. 236288)or Eiseman (1990). Neither Covarrubias nor
Eiseman made any claims to being an anthropologist or Symbolic
Interactionist, but their semipopular work remains in print because it
Geertz’s “Thick Description” and a Balinese Temple Ritual 99