But when he was handed the 10,000 prize money, Cliff was shocked. Cliff was crowned the winner, and the world cheered with him. However, Geertz reminds us, neither winning nor losing in a cockfight can actually change the social status of the participant, remaining but a metaphor of real success of failure. CliffsNotes is the original (and most widely imitated) study guide. And that’s how Cliff Young, a 61-year-old farmer, set a new world record for one of the most grueling marathons in the world. For the local population, cockfighting is also an instrument of self-analysis and a way of presenting their culture to the outsiders. Just like in the West, the cock in Bali symbolizes masculinity, and the rules of cockfights in every village are passed down through generations along with other legal traditions.īased on a large pool of observations and interviews, Geertz concludes that the cockfight as a cultural phenomenon offers rich anthropological material for the interpretation of the Balinese society. The actual cockfight is a human competition, delegated to animals, where the winner gets respect and admiration from the others, while money (although Geertz does describe the complex betting system in great detail) is secondary. Useful learning features include study tips, chapter objectives, case studies, critical thinking questions, summary boxes, review questions, and chapter tests. by the haunting nightmares of human extinction that. In the 12th century, as universities were being established in Italy, Emperor Frederick II made it mandatory for students of medicine to take courses on human anatomy and surgery. whilst her physical body, her Ka, came to the real world. For many decades human dissection was thought unnecessary when all the knowledge about a human body could be read about from early authors such as Galen. For example, women and young and socially disadvantaged people are not allowed to attend cockfights, while the main players are the most respected and politically involved members of the community. Deadman notes that this is impossible because Cliff would be too old for that.
The essay by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, which first appeared in his best-known book The Interpretation of Cultures, has been published in Russian as a separate work in Garage and Ad Marginem Press’s Minima series.ĭeep Play is a study of the Balinese tradition of cockfighting, based on a year of anthropological research conducted by Geertz at the end of the 1950s, when he and his wife lived in Bali, attending the illegal but very popular cockfights and interviewing people involved in them.Įmploying the method of thick description (the term introduced by philosopher Gilbert Ryle), Geertz inscribes the phenomenon of cockfighting into a detailed context, envisaging it as a cultural phenomenon that represents a “simulation of social matrix” and reveals the non-obvious hierarchies that pervade the entire society.