Geertz, Clifford | |
|---|---|
| ] | "Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight."
In his The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. 1973 [1972 |
Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders, professional ones, (p. 56)
the anthropologist(s) as hero(es)?
... the villagers dealt with us as the Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their life who yet press themselves upon them: as though we were not there. For them, and to a degree for ourselves, we were nonpersons, specters, invisible men. ... When you first meet a Balinese, he seems virtually not to relate you at all: he is, in the term Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead made famous, "away." (pp. 56-57)
spectacularly "culturalist": "they" are like THAT. See my paper on "collective representations in anthropology" with an early critique of the use of "they" when writing about people dealing with other people.
Bentham's concept of "deep play" is found in his The Theory of Legislation (1931). By it he means play in which the stakes are so high that it is, from his utilitarian standpoint irrational for men to engage in it at all. If a man whose fortune is a thousand pounds wages five hundred of it on an even bet, the marginal utility of the pound he stands to win is clearly less than the marginal disutility of the one he stands to lose... Having come together in search of pleasure [both participants] have entered into a relationship which will bring the participants, considered collectively, net pain rather than net pleasures. (p. 432)