Deep Play Notes On The Balinese Cockfight Analysis

Clifford Geertz became the face of the discipline of anthropology during the 1970s. With his new approach to synthesizing fieldwork and his conceptualization of the connection between biological evolution and cultural evolution, his work transcended the boundaries of discipline by altering perspectives and frameworks in fields such as philosophy and biology. During the same decade, playwright and writer Alice Walker influenced a resurgence of Zora Neale Hurston’s publications on the Black American experience in the South. Hurston was a Boasian, a student of Franz Boas during the 1920s, whose contributions to the discipline of anthropology had been long forgotten. These anthropologists came to the forefront of the anthropological discussions of the 1970s despite their very different approaches to fieldwork and writing about their work. This paper seeks to analyze the ethnographic work of these two anthropologists. Hurston’s book Mules and Men (1935) explores folktales and hoodoo in southern, African-American culture. The concluding chapter in Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), entitled “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” discusses the aspects of cockfighting in a Balinese village …show more content…
Geertz published The Interpretation of Cultures, proposing new ways to theorize culture and new tactics for conducting fieldwork. The final chapter of his book, which will be the basis for this comparison, is an in depth examination of cockfighting in Balinese culture. In contrast to Hurston, Geertz’s narration of his experiences in the Balinese villages does not utilize dialogue to incorporate the voices of his informants. Take, for example, a brief excerpt from Geertz’s recounting of a police raid at a