Balinese Cockfighting
In past weeks, we have examined various definitions of “religion.” Can it be defined, and who has the authority to do so? Under these two questions, others beg to be asked. For our purposes in discussions, we have looked critically at definitions from Durkheim and James to see what these definitions include and, perhaps more importantly, what they do not. After such an examination, we can then ask ourselves for whom does the definition offer the most utility: the sociologist, the psychologist, the theologian, the anthropologist, and so on.
For example, if we look at Clifford Geertz’ definition of religion, which can be found in his work The Interpretation of Cultures, we can ascertain that Geertz has a different framework from that of Durkheim or James. Even though he acknowledges that definitions are notorious for establishing nothing, they can nevertheless provide “…a useful orientation, or reorientation, of thought, such that an extended unpacking of them can be an effective way of developing and controlling a novel line of inquiry” (90). For Geertz, this novel line of inquiry relates to symbolic anthropology and can be witnessed in his definition:
(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. (90)
What may strike one immediately is the absence of a divinity or a deity in this definition. There is no supernatural element, even one of Nature’s forces upon humankind. Rather, Geertz is arguing that humankind is creating religion by “formulating conceptions of a general order of existence.” Yet, where does this general order come from? It would seem from the definition that a general order comes from the collective who are vulnerable to this system of symbols that are jointly created. Therefore, the individual exists insofar as the collective exists. This is seen more fully in Geertz’s “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” where a rooster is seen not only as a symbolic ambulatory penis of the male, but also symbolic of his status within the social hierarchy (417).
This is not the notion of religion that William James puts forth or the religion of beliefs and practices offered by Durkheim. What exists in this definition is truly a religion of symbolism, where the “utilization of symbolic form becomes a social event like any other; they are as public as marriage and as observable as agriculture” (91). Something stands for, or represents, something else.
This is no more fully realized than in Geertz’s account of the cockfights he witnesses in Bali, where the cockfight comes to represent something more than itself. He argues, “In the cockfight, man and beast, good and evil, ego and id, the creative power of aroused masculinity and the destructive power of the loosened animality fuse in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death” (420). He continues, “…in seeking earthly analogues for heaven and hell the Balinese compare the former to the mood of a man whose cock has just won, the latter to that of a man whose cock has just lost” (421).
In Geertz’s definition of religion, then, a Balinese cockfight is a symbolic playground upon which the Balinese develop their knowledge and attitudes about life. It is a powerful and pervasive arena that could almost be construed in Eliadean terms as sacred. This is the sacred activity or space, which serves as the model for further social development. Furthermore, it is bloody, and as Eliade remarked in the sacred and profane, blood propitiation may often be one of the hallmarks of constructing sacred space. There are also these elements of noetic quality and transience that James refers to in his definitions of mystical experience, as the matches are self-contained and occur infrequently.
Yet, Geertz’s account of Balinese cockfights are rather biased. Although Vincent Crapanzano comments on some of these in his article “Hermes’ Dilemma,” I would like to suggest a few more. Geertz has not asked the participants of the cockfight what the matches signify to them, nor has he approached the landlord, village chief, Brahamana priest, or police officers and asked them how they perceive the cockfights. Or, if he has, he has not included them in his account. Also, we have no account of his wife’s insight, and he has remarked that she is also an anthropologist. Furthermore, he does not actively participate in the event. If he did, quite frankly, he might have had a rather different interpretation of this event.
It is this idea of interpretation that is so crucial to Geertz’s work. If the culture is steeped in symbology, it stands to reason that the role of the anthropologist is to “interpret” these symbols for outsiders to understand. The anthropologist is the translator of the text, to use Geertz’s terminology (452). Yet, in Geertz’s account, which comes first: the text or the translator? It would seem that it is the translator. The text only exists because Geertz creates one by contextualizing an event so that he can interpret it for others. His interpretations serves to orient his audience back to his own definition of religion.
This brings me back to my introduction. Before he explicitly defines religion, Geertz argues that a definition provides “a useful orientation, or reorientation, of thought, such that an extended unpacking of them can be an effective way of developing and controlling a novel line of inquiry” (90). His orientation of thought is that of an anthropologist interpreting culture, and his extended unpacking of its symbols is not the only way, but he argues an effective way. Therefore, perhaps we could argue that Geertz knew the dangers of too much subjectivity in observing and researching phenomena. He is, therefore, subtly arguing that other interpretations could exist. He even remarks at the end of his “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” that “…societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has only to learn how to gain access to them” (453). Perhaps we can take this “them” as a plurality of meanings to be translated contingent upon the methods of interpretation, a method, in this case, dictated by Geertz’s theory of symbolic anthropology.
