what is sport?
What is sport?
With reference to Clifford Geertz’s article, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,’ sport can be a means for fostering community relationships through settling disputes and violence in a ritualized manner. The descriptive analysis of the “deep play” of the Balinese cockfight serves to provide an essential insight into the profound social and cultural structure that exists within Balinese communities. The cockfight enables competitors to channel their inner aggression and rivalry through an indirect symbolic sphere of engagement regulated by rules and rituals.
Geertz identifies the cockfight as a method for representing the hierarchical relations among people within the community, as well as a self-expression of community identity as a whole. Using a functionalist approach Geertz explains that, “the cockfight reinforces status discrimination …that it provides a metasocial commentary upon the whole matter of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchal ranks and then organizing the major part of collective existence around that assortment. Its function, if you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves (Geertz, 1972 : 26).” Thus, it is evident as to why Geertz comparatively identifies the Balinese cockfight to an art form, as it symbolises many underlying meanings, which enables daily life to be easily ‘read’ in its ‘produced’ form rather than in its unrendered one (Geertz, 1972 : 23). Additionally, not only does the sport of cockfighting reveal a dramatized depiction of Balinese social and cultural constructs, but it also has the ability of fostering community relations through settling disputes and violence in a regulated and ritualized manner. Sport here is utilised as a “convulsive surge of animal hatred, a mock war of symbolical selves, and a formal simulation of status tensions, and its aesthetic power derives from its capacity to force
With reference to Clifford Geertz’s article, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,’ sport can be a means for fostering community relationships through settling disputes and violence in a ritualized manner. The descriptive analysis of the “deep play” of the Balinese cockfight serves to provide an essential insight into the profound social and cultural structure that exists within Balinese communities. The cockfight enables competitors to channel their inner aggression and rivalry through an indirect symbolic sphere of engagement regulated by rules and rituals.
Geertz identifies the cockfight as a method for representing the hierarchical relations among people within the community, as well as a self-expression of community identity as a whole. Using a functionalist approach Geertz explains that, “the cockfight reinforces status discrimination …that it provides a metasocial commentary upon the whole matter of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchal ranks and then organizing the major part of collective existence around that assortment. Its function, if you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves (Geertz, 1972 : 26).” Thus, it is evident as to why Geertz comparatively identifies the Balinese cockfight to an art form, as it symbolises many underlying meanings, which enables daily life to be easily ‘read’ in its ‘produced’ form rather than in its unrendered one (Geertz, 1972 : 23). Additionally, not only does the sport of cockfighting reveal a dramatized depiction of Balinese social and cultural constructs, but it also has the ability of fostering community relations through settling disputes and violence in a regulated and ritualized manner. Sport here is utilised as a “convulsive surge of animal hatred, a mock war of symbolical selves, and a formal simulation of status tensions, and its aesthetic power derives from its capacity to force