Preface

83
People in Bali are also often described in the literature as
‘playful’. One should not assume however that ‘play’ refers to the
same class of discriminable phenomena in different cultures (cf.
Huizinga 1949: 29-45). Where the English word links the activity
of children, relaxation, story-telling, sport, joking, theatre and so
on, Balinese designates each by a separate term and, as far as I can
tell, these are not treated as deriving from any core, or essential,
set of characteristics. 86 Care is required in using such preconstrained
terms with heavy connotations in depicting other
cultures.
It has not been established, however, that the cockfight is ipso
facto a meta-social commentary, nor that its object is precarious
status battle in which Geertz sees the Balinese as being caught. It
is, however, unnecessarily Durkheimian to assume that status
relations somehow constitute the reality of which something else
is a dramatic representation (especially if one takes Goodman’s
point that representations are of something as something else,
1968: 27-31). One might note that much theatre and literature
develops the theme of fighting, be it interpreted as dualistic,
agonistic, Manichaean, metaphysical or whatever. The characters
in shadow theatre, and orators in public meetings, are often caught
in conflict of potentially lethal outcome. What is a commentary
on, or reflection of, what?
The themes of conflict or contradiction (both roughly glosses of
the Balinese lawan or miegan, which is also ‘fighting’) and
violence are too complex to be dismissed as the idiom of status
claims. The former, as the Dutch noted long ago although in a
rather different context, is so widespread in many Indonesian
societies as to be worth considering as a potential ontological
principle. Western commentators seem to have great difficulty
with the role of violence in Balinese society. The editors of the
Siwaratrikalpa, an Old Javanese text found in Bali, felt it
necessary to excuse ‘the gruesome methods of warfare which the
poet’s imagination conjures up’ (Teeuw et al. 1969: 32) and
remark more generally that
86
The word ‘play’ seems to have undergone interesting changes during its etymological
history, (Onions 1966), although one should beware of dictionaries, especially
etymological, as sources of instant essentialism.