By Clara Ramos
In his
paper about Balinese cockfighting, Clifford Geertz's explanation effectively
provides the reader instances of the 6 aspects of discourse communities, making Balinese cockfights a discourse community itself. The
easiest aspect to identify is the vocabulary used by those who participate in the
cockfighting and their ways of communicating with one another. The Balinese as a
village use metaphors of fights and different chickens to convey a thought or
idea such as when Geertz gives examples of how the Balinese compare different
types of people toward different chickens (p. 3). Cockfights have a plethora of
situations or genres in which it is spoken of: referenced during normal
conversations; used to identify different personalities or people; and of
course during the fights themselves. Cockfighting is an obsession of the
villages and the people make it the focus of their everyday lives. They share
common behaviors and pre-fight procedures/rituals; one example is seen in the following
quote:
"Whenever you see a group of Balinese men squatting idly in the council shed or along the road in their hips down, shoulders forward, knees up fashion, half or more of them will have a rooster in his hands, holding it between his thighs, bouncing it gently up and down to strengthen its legs, ruffling its feathers with abstract sensuality, pushing it out against a neighbor's rooster to rouse its spirit, withdrawing it toward his loins to calm it again." (p. 3)
"Whenever you see a group of Balinese men squatting idly in the council shed or along the road in their hips down, shoulders forward, knees up fashion, half or more of them will have a rooster in his hands, holding it between his thighs, bouncing it gently up and down to strengthen its legs, ruffling its feathers with abstract sensuality, pushing it out against a neighbor's rooster to rouse its spirit, withdrawing it toward his loins to calm it again." (p. 3)
The Balinese cockfighting community is based upon a hierarchical format: loyalties come into play when someone identifies themselves with a side. On the lowest level, family members cheer on for others in the family; as the fights grow larger and begin to integrate other groups of people, loyalties can stretch as far as which town the cock's owner comes from. Geertz also provides a list of how to place a person on a side on pages 8-10. No matter how vast the groups are, however, they all have something at stake during a fight. Everyone uses the fights as a means to compete one another; they see themselves in the fighters and want the chicken they identify with to win. In a way, to everyone the cockfights is the people's way to make them feel dominant and better than other people.
For: Professor Middleton; CAL-103-H
