Deep pockets. Notes on the Indonesian cockfight in a globalising world

Abstract

When anthropologists Clifford and Hildred Geertz arrived in a small village on Bali in the late 1950s, they were outsiders. It was, Clifford Geertz wrote, 'as though we were not there. For them, and to a degree for ourselves, we were non-persons, specters, invisible men' (1973:412). Things changed ten days later when they visited their first cockfight.