Chapter 11 Insular Southeast Asia 429violence versus head-hunting versus cockfighting), but the motivations for
aggression are explained by the same set of principles across cultures, including
physical and emotional frustration, narcissistic injury, and the thwarting of
desires and wishes (Spiro 1999). Research conducted in Insular Southeast Asia
contributed greatly both to the initial insights and to recognition of the limita-
tions of those insights.The Balinese Cockfight
“Much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring. For it is only apparently cocks that
are fighting there. Actually, it is men” (Geertz 1973).
If that sounds like a double-entendre, it is. The word for cock, sabung,
Geertz tells us, works in Balinese just as the term works in English: an unmis-
takable pun, “producing the same tired jokes, strained puns, and uninventive
obscenities” (p. 418). Balinese men raise, coddle, ruffle, and groom their roost-
ers and, as often as possible, fight them in furtive cockfights that are the great
passion of Balinese men, though illegal. Raising cocks and fighting them is an
obsession among men (not women), and anthropologist Clifford Geertz
attempted to get to the bottom of this obsession by attending 57 matches,
observing the bloody fights between cocks, recording the bets made and paid,
and then studying the social connections among bettors. His analysis in “Deep
Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (1973) is one of the most widely read of
all papers in anthropology.
The argument begins with evidence of masculine identification with cocks
and cockfighting through descriptions of men’s emotional behavior with their
cocks, excerpts of conversations with men about them, usually of the “I’mBalinese men raise fighting cocks and
identify closely with them; cock-
fighting is as popular as ever today.