Pain: Cockfight in Bali

Jeff Meller

20 Nov. 13

545 words

The last thought of the fighting cock was: "One minute – champ; the next minute - dinner."

Sauntering down a serene gung, an alley, with morning incense lingering around open doorways, we hear the clamor of voices and gongs echoing from the other side of a high, limestone wall. The wall is built of square blocks, mined from what had been a coral reef, embedded with ancient seashells and marine life.

We follow the sounds to an open-air compound with a hundred squatting Balinese men in a raucous circle. They are sweating in the tropical heat, yelling unintelligibly in Bahasa, another of the 6,500 world languages we don’t speak. During the workweek the men wear pants; today they are wearing traditional sarongs.

The circle is celebrating a venerable, if illegal, Balinese pastime. Cockfighting is central to Balinese culture, a social relief valve for tension in a rigid, hierarchical society. The blood sport contrasts unexpectedly with otherwise aesthetic Balinese society in which the highest castes are dancers, musicians, poets and wood cavers; hedge fund managers dwell in the social netherworld.

The yelling, which first seized our attention, is partisans calling: “five on the spotted, white,” “four on the speckled.”

In the center of the circle of men a white circle 20 feet across is painted in chalk on the dirt floor. Two handlers parade around the circle showing off their cocks, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz reports that the double entendre is the same in Balinese as in English, to encourage betting. The cocks are the size of chickens except that special diets and training produce legs which are longer and more muscular. They display the ornate plumage of an Edwardian dowager sailing down Pall Mall in her “murderous millinery.”

The fighting weapons are a 3 inch long, thin razor lashed with red string to the rear of one leg.  Legend has it that blades are sharpened only during an eclipse and should be kept out of sight of women. From the high deference accorded to the blade by the man affixing them, we infer that even a slight mishandling will slash a finger instantly to the bone.

The two handlers step into the center of the ring holding their cocks face to face. To provoke the birds, red pepper is stuffed up their butts. The handlers step back, release the birds. The fight begins, the crowd quietens to semi-religious reverence.

The cocks do not tear at each other haphazardly. There is abundant beating of wings and squawking. But more impressively these two animals, who have only an ounce of bird brain, act with the trained, military nobility of samurai warriors. They psych their opponent, circle patiently looking for an opening, parry and feint, until finally one leaps on the other in a torrent of flapping and clawing and neatly draws the razor across his adversary’s throat, exactly as Kurasawa would have directed. The fight lasts 30 seconds.

If a cock can be such a calculating combatant, maybe he is capable of more profound introspection than we give him credit for. Perhaps his last thought might progress along the following lines: "One minute – champ; the next minute - dinner."

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Source: “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures.