Afterword

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Clifford Geertz was a name to conjure with across the humanities and the humanistically oriented social sciences. ¹ During the heyday of interest in Geertz, probably none of his pieces was thought to be more exemplary than the famous ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, published most accessibly as the last chapter of his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures . It was in this piece that Geertz demonstrated how his notion of cultural expressions as texts could be put into practice. If you remember the piece, or know about it by reputation, the chances are good that what you know is the famous opening section, in which Geertz tells readers about how running away along with the Balinese members of the crowd at a cockfight that was raided by the police helped him and Hildred Geertz finally begin to develop some rapport with the Balinese villagers among whom they were working. Even more than this, you probably recall the famous closing passages, in the midst of which Geertz (1973: 452) declares that “The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong”—surely one of the key quotations from the second half of the twentieth century in all of the humanities. If you remember anything that comes between the essay’s justly famous opening and conclusion, my guess is that it is something general about the violence of the cockfights and the way Geertz argues that this violence articulates for the Balinese the tensions that underlie their strictly hierarchical social order; tensions they most of the time keep very securely under wraps beneath their implacably calm presentations of self. I have heard anecdotally, however, that these were not the parts of the essay of which Geertz was most proud. For him, at least as I have heard it, the greatest accomplishment of the essay was a section on how betting works during the cockfight.