06/11/2026
AT June 2026 (42–3)
Front cover caption, volume 42 issue 3
GEERTZ'S BALINESE COCKFIGHT
Man with a c**k in a basket, Bali, c. 1920–1935. This photograph, taken some two decades before Clifford Geertz arrived in Tihingan in April 1958, documents the cultural practice that would later become the subject of one of anthropology's most celebrated essays.
Geertz's Deep play: Notes on the Balinese c**kfight (1972) transformed the c**kfight from a local pastime into an icon of interpretive anthropology, a text through which generations of scholars have read Balinese culture. The image captures something close to what Geertz himself sought to convey: the quiet intimacy between a Balinese man and his bird, the careful tending, the moment of stillness that precedes public spectacle. The c**k in its woven basket is not yet in the ring; it is at home, where the relationship that makes the fight meaningful is formed.
Yet the very practice that drew Geertz's interpretive attention also draws Henk Schulte Nordholt's historical scrutiny. By comparing Geertz's published account of the famous police raid with the fieldnotes preserved in the Geertz papers, Nordholt reveals that the dramatic transformation Geertz described, from ignored outsider to embraced insider, appears nowhere in the contemporaneous record. The fieldnotes show no 10-day period of social rejection, no euphoric morning-after embrace, no hastily arranged tea table. What they show instead is fieldwork proceeding methodically, the day after the raid given over to careful notes on a temple ceremony.
The photograph thus marks the gap between the anthropologist as observer of events and the anthropologist as author of narratives. Nordholt's question is whether literary ambition came to overshadow historical accuracy in Geertz's account, and whether the discipline's enthusiasm for thick description has at times allowed the construction of compelling stories to take precedence over the patient work of getting the record right.
PHOTO CREDIT: KITLV
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70070