Growing up in the rural mountains
of Tennessee you learn pretty quick that football isn’t just a sport, it’s a
religion. From a young age I learned that entire weekends are blocked off for
10-16 weeks at a time. Friday is dedicated to the local high school football
team, Saturday belongs to college football, and Sunday was meant for church and
NFL football. Every individual had his or her unique mix of team allegiances
and when Monday rolled around the losing fan was always pointed out at the
water cooler. My entire town of two thousand people followed this routine in
the Fall and after reading Geertz’s “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese
Cockfights”, I realized that this dedication to football is significant to fans in the same way cockfights are significant to the Bali people. Geertz explained
how the cockfight serves as a cultural text, which embodies what it means to be
Balinese. Similarly, I argue that intimately identifying with a football team to a point of aggression is the making of a crazy fan.
In his ethnography, Geertz reports
that the Balinese people gamble on the fights and in fact that gambling is a
major part of the cockfight. However, Geertz argues that there is more at stake
than just money. Monetary bets only serve to symbolized the risk because prestige
and status are also on the line. This is very similar to the occasional bet
between friendly companions on a football game. Winning money is great and it
can definitely come in handy, but the amount of money wagered only symbolizes
the risk. Everyone knows that the real victory is the chance to rub your team’s
victory in the face of your counterpart. A team’s victory feels like an
individual fan’s personal victory when he or she identifies with a specific
team. The team then becomes a proxy between two individuals in competition.
That is why the gloating and bragging feels like the better prize for victory.
In this report Geertz distinguishes
“deep bets”, with high wages, and “shallow bets”, usually with low wages of
both gambling and prestige. These deep fights have high stakes and people can
lose their rationality because the results are so unpredictable. Those who
participate in deep fights are usually dominant members of society. In terms of
football, the people who participate in deep fights are those with winning
teams and it has been well established that a good game is composed of two good
teams with an unpredictable outcome. Sometimes a fan can become irrational when these deep fights happen and they can lose a lot of money. The higher the status of the participants
in the cockfight, the deeper the fight is, the more a person identifies with
his cock. This can similarly be said about football and its fans. The better
your team is in terms of victories, the more competitive the games are, and the
more a person identifies with that team.
Cockfights in Bali, just like
football in America, are symbolic manufactured representations of something
very real in the social life. Geertz noted that the cockfights channel
aggression and rivalry into an indirect symbolic sphere of engagement. I argue
that the same case can made for American football and its fans. When fans
intimately identify with their teams they become aggressive over actions that
they don't control. This argument can made for multiple sports in America and I only note football as an example because of my up-bringing. Across the board though, there are “crazy fans” that act aggressively because, by proxy, the
teams represent the fan’s status among the world of fans.
Geertz, Clifford. "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" in The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, 1973.
Geertz, Clifford. "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" in The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, 1973.
I really like how you applied Geertz’s interpretation to football, but when I was writing about Geertz and trying to think about an applicable example that truly was applicable and explanatory to American Western Culture, I initially thought of “America’s National Pastime” – baseball.
ReplyDeleteI can clearly see, like how you described with football, how individuals would identify would particular teams, and even how those alliances between teams and rivalries could, and have, been passed along through multiple generations. It is easy to see the pride fans have when their teams win in that it confers a sense of prestige and status upon those fans for being better than the fans of the loosing team. Thus it is easy to see how any sport in America can be used to symbolize relationships and the power dynamics present in our lives.
However, I became stuck when trying to think how Geertz would explain the extreme dedication shown by many fans in baseball when their teams go through losing streaks for long periods of time. Although not a big baseball fan myself, a quick Google search showed that the Chicago Cubs haven’t won a World Series in 105 years (http://www.gamingtoday.com/articles/article/46003-Chicago_Cubs_haven_t_won_a_World_Series_in_105_years#.UzLS74Xlb2Y)! So why have their fans maintained their loyalty to the team?
Would Geertz have explained it as individuals are hoping for a larger reward when their teams eventually do win after years of losing? Perhaps in this sense, it provides a new type of “deep bet” in which the stakes seem deceptively low for competitors, but are in actuality quite high. This emulates the idea of the long-shot in betting, that the risks of losing are high, but the rewards of winning are even higher.
It could be that this provides an even better explanation of American culture as a cultural text, in that those attempting to achieve the “American Dream” must undergo this new form of “deep betting” in order to succeed.
My first thought while reading Geertz's article, similarly to Danny and Meredith's, turned to sports- but, for me, since it is March Madness, that thought was college basketball. Many of the aspects among these different sporting endeavors are similar: the varied levels of investments based on the levels of the competition, in this case based on Division I, II, or III; the watching of aggressive behaviors while sitting on the sidelines, with different degrees of separation based on your status in the community- from courtside seats to watching the game on TV; the betting against your friends, neighbors, and even strangers (via brackets in the case of March Madness); your allegiance to “family” teams and the expectation of allegiance that follows that aka always rooting for Wake Forest or the ACC. All of these similarities make help highlight the important place that March Madness has in basketball season and in the lives of Americans.
ReplyDeleteBut then I reflected further on Geertz's main, symbolic anthropology point, and found that there is a huge difference, I believe, between Americans' interest in commercial sports and Geertz’s analysis of the Balinese cockfights. This difference lies mainly in Geertz’s assertion that the cocks are expressions “of what the Balinese regard as the direct inversion, aesthetically, morally, and metaphysically, of human status: animality” (61). It is the representation of all that they are not supposed to be that makes the cockfights important to the Balinese, which is quite opposite of Americans’ fascination with the college basketball championship games.
For Americans, college basketball players do not represent the negative, opposite, of humanity, but rather the epitome and goal of humanity, or at least masculinity. The skill, intelligence, physical fitness, and endurance that the men on the court display is the ideal for humanity, especially if looking at it from the lens of a sociobiologist or evolutionist. The game is very organized, with rigid structure of play and rules that keep actions and behaviors in line while on the court, and so in no way represents the chaos or bestiality that is characteristic of the cockfights. This organization is very much like the social structure in America, so does not represent anything that Americans cannot see everywhere else in their lives.
This difference, between the idealization of humanity and the representation of animality, means that it is hard to compare Balinese cockfights and college basketball in America. Though both things are symbolic to the culture from which it comes, they are symbols in very opposite manners. From both things, we can read something about the cultures, but the stories and interpretations we read are quite opposite.
This is very thought-provoking, Olivia, and I wouldn't say the two situations can't be compared because you compare them quite enthusiastically! And your contention that symbolic analyses produce culturally-specific accounts is right on target. I do wonder, though, if there isn't a bit more inversion going on in American professional sports than you acknowledge. Are there any values, aesthetic, moral or otherwise, that apply very differently in sports than they do in typical U.S. life and culture?
ReplyDeleteDanny and Meredith, I like both your comparisons. Remember, though, that the our main goal isn't to figure how cockfighting and sport X are or are not alike . . . it is to see how the conceptual and methodological tools of symbolic anthropology can help us interpret sport X. There is no reason to expect sport X to be like cockfighting, though we can learn from Geertz' analysis.
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