CLIFFORD GEERTZ.  "Deep Play:  Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." 
The Interpretation of Cultures.  New York:  Basic Books, 1973. 
Pp. 412-53.   


     Clifford Geertz's "Deep Play" is a strange read to the
historian who has not been exposed previously to anthropological
works.  The historian approaches anthropology the same way he
might approach philosophy:  the words and phrases are seductive
and exotic, lying on the outskirts of the neophyte's intellectual
experience.  The same dangers are attendant on this reading of an
out-of-field text as with any other.  Just as the historian
should beware of adopting a sophomoric adoration of, for example,
psychohistory, that same historian should exercise judgment when
trying to adopt anthropological methodology into his own work.
     Geertz has certainly had an authentic anthropological
experience, he and his wife immersing themselves in the Balinese
culture in order to study it.  This immersion is consummated in
the couples adoption of tribal behavior (running from the
cockfight police, in this instance) instead of maintaining their
separate (and privileged?) European identities.  Geertz uses this
internal vantagepoint to make a detailed study of the cockfight. 
The cockfight, to Geertz, is Balinese society in microcosm.  All
of the kinship and social bonds are stressed, built, and
maintained during the ritual participation of this "deep play."  
     Similar to a social historian, Geertz quantifies his
observation whenever possible.  He breaks down, with social
historian's attention to detail, fifty-seven cockfights according
to the wagers placed therein (426).  Geertz also relies on a
tightly structured form later in his article when he begins to
sum up his ideas of the relevance of the cockfight to Balinese
society in general.  Late in the subsection Playing with Fire he
falls back on numbering each idea, each paragraph so that it will
retain it's own organic identity.  The more formless, flowing
inter-sliding ideas of the narrative-style historian are
unwelcome in this summation.  Ideas are to be categorized and
relegated to their rightful place in the paradigm (see page 441).
     Geertz does not totally reject the narrative historian's use
of 'good writing.'  "You have crossed, somehow, some moral or
metaphysical shadow line," he writes, referring to acceptance
into Balinese society, and hence Balinese reality.  His extensive
use of the cock/cock wordplay also demonstrates that he is not
wholly straightjacket into the dry style of the purist social
historian.  Geertz, falling in line with Stone, has mixed the
quantitative 'reality' of the social historian, and mixed it with
the imagination (intellectual hedonism?) of the narrative
historian, along with a strange and heady dose of the quasi-
philosophical esoterica of the anthropologist.  
     
     Jason Carr
     University of Texas at Arlington
     Arlington
http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/uta/