My wife and I were still very much in the gust of wind stage, a most frustrating, and
even, as you soon begin to doubt whether you are really real after all, unnerving one,
when, ten days or so after our arrival, a large cockfight was held in the public square to
raise money for a new school.

Now, a few special occasions aside, cockfights are illegal in Bali under the Republic
(as, for not altogether unrelated reasons, they were under the Dutch), largely as a result
of the pretensions to puritanism radical nationalism tends to bring with it. The elite,
which is not itself so very puritan, worries about the poor, ignorant peasant gambling all
his money away, about what foreigners will think, about the waste of time better devoted
to building up the country. It sees cockfighting as “primitive,”
“backward,” “unprogressive,” and generally unbecoming an ambitious
nation. And, as with those other embarrassments -opium smoking, begging, or uncovered
breasts-it seeks, rather unsystematically, to put a stop to it.

As a result, the fights are usually held in a secluded corner of a village in
semisecrecy, a fact which tends to slow the action a little-not very much, but the
Balinese do not care to have it slowed at all. In this case, however, perhaps because they
were raising money for a school that the government was unable to give them, perhaps
because raids had been few recently, perhaps, as I gathered from subsequent discussion,
there was a notion that the necessary bribes had been paid, they thought they could take a
chance on the central square and draw a larger and more enthusiastic crowd without
attracting the attention of the law.

They were wrong. In the midst of the third match, with hundreds of people, including,
still transparent, myself and my wife, fused into a single body around the ring, a
superorganism in the literal sense, a truck full of policemen armed with machine guns
roared up. Amid great screeching cries of “pulisi! pulisi!” from the crowd, the
policemen jumped out, and, springing into the center of the ring, began to swing their
guns around like gangsters in a motion picture, though not going so far as actually to
fire them. The superorganism came instantly apart as its components scattered in all
directions. People raced down the road, disappeared head first over walls, scrambled under
platforms, folded themselves behind wicker screens, scuttled up coconut trees. Cocks armed
with steel spurs sharp enough to cut off a finger or run a hole through a foot were
running wildly around. Everything was dust and panic.

On the established anthropological principle, When in Rome, my wife and I decided, only
slightly less instantaneously than everyone else, that the thing to do was run too. We ran
down the main village street, northward, away from where we were living, for we were on
that side of the ring. About half-way down another fugitive ducked suddenly into a
compound-his own, it turned out-and we, seeing nothing ahead of us but rice fields, open
country, and a very high volcano, followed him. As the three of us came tumbling into the
courtyard, his wife, who had apparently been through this sort of thing before, whipped
out a table, a tablecloth, three chairs, and three cups of tea, and we all, without any
explicit communication whatsoever, sat down, commenced to sip tea, and sought to compose
ourselves.

A few moments later, one of the policemen marched importantly into the yard, looking
for the village chief. (The chief had not only been at the fight, he had arranged it. When
the truck drove up he ran to the river, stripped off his sarong, and plunged in so he
could say, when at length they found him sitting there pouring water over his head, that
he had been away bathing when the whole affair had occurred and was ignorant of it. They
did not believe him and fined him three hundred rupiah, which the village raised
collectively.) Seeing my wife and I, “White Men,” there in the yard, the
policeman performed a classic double take. When he found his voice again he asked,
approximately, what in the devil did we think we were doing there. Our host of five
minutes leaped instantly to our defense, producing an impassioned description of who and
what we were, so detailed and so accurate that it was my turn, having barely communicated
with a living human being save my landlord and the village chief for more than a week, to
be astonished. We had a perfect right to be there, he said, looking the Javanese upstart
in the eye. We were American professors; the government had cleared us; we were there to
study culture; we were going to write a book to tell Americans about Bali. And we had all
been there drinking tea and talking about cultural matters all afternoon and did not know
anything about any cockfight. Moreover, we had not seen the village chief all day, he must
have gone to town. The policeman retreated in rather total disarray. And, after a decent
interval, bewildered but relieved to have survived and stayed out of jail, so did we.

The next morning the village was a completely different world for us. Not only were we
no longer invisible, we were suddenly the center of all attention, the object of a great
outpouring of warmth, interest, and, most especially, amusement. Everyone in the village
knew we had fled like everyone else. They asked us about it again and again (I must have
told the story, small detail by small detail, fifty times by the end of the day), gently,
affectionately, but quite insistently teasing us: “Why didn’t you just stand there
and tell the police who you were?” “Why didn’t you just say you were only
watching and not betting?” “Were you really afraid of those little guns?”
As always, kinesthetically minded and, even when fleeing for their lives (or, as happened
eight years later, surrendering them), the world’s most poised people, they gleefully
mimicked, also over and over again, our graceless style of running and what they claimed
were our panic-stricken facial expressions. But above all, everyone was extremely pleased
and even more surprised that we had not simply “pulled out our papers” (they
knew about those too) and asserted our Distinguished Visitor status, but had instead
demonstrated our solidarity with what were now our covillagers. (What we had actually
demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that too.) Even the Brahmana
priest, an old, grave, half-way-to-Heaven type who because of its associations with the
underworld would never be involved, even distantly, in a cockfight, and was difficult to
approach even to other Balinese, had us called into his courtyard to ask us about what had
happened, chuckling happily at the sheer extraordinariness of it all.

In Bali, to be teased is to be accepted. It was the turning point so far as our
relationship to the community was concerned, and we were quite literally “in.”
The whole village opened up to us, probably more than it ever would have otherwise (I
might actually never have gotten to that priest and our accidental host became one of my
best informants), and certainly very much faster. Getting caught, or almost caught, in a
vice raid is perhaps not a very generalizable recipe for achieving that mysterious
necessity of anthropological field work, rapport, but for me it worked very well. It led
to a sudden and unusually complete acceptance into a society extremely difficult for
outsiders to penetrate. It gave me the kind of immediate, inside view grasp of an aspect
of “peasant mentality” that anthropologists not fortunate enough to flee
headlong with their subjects from armed authorities normally do not get. And, perhaps most
important of all, for the other things might have come in other ways, it put me very
quickly on to a combination emotional explosion, status war, and philosophical drama of
central significance to the society whose inner nature I desired to understand. By the
time I left I had spent about as much time looking into cockfights as into witchcraft,
irrigation, caste, or marriage.

To anyone who has been in Bali any length of time, the deep psychological
identification of Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable. The double entendre here
is deliberate. It works in exactly the same way in Balinese as it does in English, even to
producing the same tired jokes, strained puns, and uninventive obscenities. Bateson and
Mead have even suggested that, in line with the Balinese conception of the body as a set
of separately animated parts, cocks are viewed as detachable, self-operating penises,
ambulant genitals with a life of their own. And while I do not have the kind of
unconscious material either to confirm or disconfirm this intriguing notion, the fact that
they are masculine symbols par excellence is about as indubitable, and to the Balinese
about as evident, as the fact that water runs downhill.

The language of everyday moralism is shot through, on the male side of it, with
roosterish imagery. Sabung, the word for cock (and one which appears in inscriptions as
early as A.D. 922 ), is used metaphorically to mean “hero,” “warrior,”
“champion,” “man of parts,” “political candidate,”
“bachelor,” “dandy,” “lady-killer,” or “tough
guy.” A pompous man whose behavior presumes above his station is compared to a
tailless cock who struts about as though he had a large, spectacular one. A desperate man
who makes a last, irrational effort to extricate himself from an impossible situation is
likened to a dying cock who makes one final lunge at his tormentor to drag him along to a
common destruction. A stingy man, who promises much, gives little, and begrudges that is
compared to a cock which, held by the tail, leaps at another without in fact engaging him.
A marriageable young man still shy with the opposite sex or someone in a new job anxious
to make a good impression is called “a fighting cock caged for the first time.”
Court trials, wars, political contests, inheritance disputes, and street arguments are all
compared to cockfights. Even the very island itself is perceived from its shape as a
small, proud cock, poised, neck extended, back taut, tail raised, in eternal challenge to
large, feckless, shapeless Java.

But the intimacy of men with their cocks is more than metaphorical. Balinese men, or
anyway a large majority of Balinese men, spend an enormous amount of time with their
favorites, grooming them, feeding them, discussing them, trying them out against one
another, or just gazing at them with a mixture of rapt admiration and dreamy
self-absorption. Whenever you see a group of Balinese men squatting idly in the council
shed or along the road in their hips down, shoulders forward, knees up fashion, half or
more of them will have a rooster in his hands, holding it between his thighs, bouncing it
gently up and down to strengthen its legs, ruffling its feathers with abstract sensuality,
pushing it out against a neighbor’s rooster to rouse its spirit, withdrawing it toward his
loins to calm it again Now and then, to get a feel for another bird, a man will fiddle
this way with someone else’s cock for a while, but usually by moving around to squat in
place behind it, rather than just having it passed across to him as though it were merely
an animal.

In the houseyard, the high-walled enclosures where the people live, fighting cocks are
kept in wicker cages, moved frequently about so as to maintain the optimum balance of sun
and shade. They are fed a special diet, which varies somewhat according to individual
theories but which is mostly maize, sifted for impurities with far more care than it is
when mere humans are going to eat it and offered to the animal kernel by kernel. Red
pepper is stuffed down their beaks and up their anuses to give them spirit. They are
bathed in the same ceremonial preparation of tepid water, medicinal herbs, flowers, and
onions in which infants are bathed, and for a prize cock just about as often. Their combs
are cropped, their plumage dressed, their spurs trimmed, their legs massaged, and they are
inspected for flaws with the squinted concentration of a diamond merchant. A man who has a
passion for cocks, an enthusiast in the literal sense of the term, can spend most of his
life with them, and even those, the overwhelming majority, whose passion though intense
has not entirely run away with them, can and do spend what seems not only to an outsider,
but also to themselves an inordinate amount of time with them. “I am cock
crazy,” my landlord, a quite ordinary afficionado by Balinese standards, used to moan
as he went to move another cage, give another bath, or conduct another feeding.
“We’re all cock crazy.”

The madness has some less visible dimensions, however, because although it is true that
cocks are symbolic expressions or magnifications of their owner’s self, the narcissistic
male ego writ out in Aesopian terms, they are also expressions- and rather more immediate
ones-of what the Balinese regard as the direct inversion, aesthetically, morally, and
metaphysically, of human status: animality.

The Balinese revulsion against any behavior as animal-like can hardly be overstressed.
Babies are not allowed to crawl for that reason. Incest, though hardly approved, is a much
less horrifying crime than bestiality. (The appropriate punishment for the second is death
by drowning, for the first being forced to live like an animal.) Most demons are
represented-in sculpture, dance, ritual, myth-in some real or fantastic animal form. The
main puberty rite consists in filing the child’s teeth so they will not look like animal
fangs. Not only defecation but eating is regarded as a disgusting, almost obscene
activity, to be conducted hurriedly and privately, because of its association with
animality. Even falling down or any form of clumsiness is considered to be bad for these
reasons. Aside from cocks and a few domestic animals-oxen, ducks-of no emotional
significance, the Balinese are aversive to animals and treat their large number of dogs
not merely callously but with a phobic cruelty. In identifying with his cock, the Balinese
man is identifying not just with his ideal self, or even his penis, but also, and at the
same time, with what he most fears, hates, and ambivalence being what it is, is fascinated
by-The Powers of Darkness.

The connection of cocks and cockfighting with such Powers, with the animalistic demons
that threaten constantly to invade the small, cleared off space in which the Balinese have
so carefully built their lives and devour its inhabitants, is quite explicit. A cockfight,
any cockfight, is in the first instance a blood sacrifice offered, with the appropriate
chants and oblations, to the demons in order to pacify their ravenous, cannibal hunger. No
temple festival should be conducted until one is made. (If it is omitted someone will
inevitably fall into a trance and command with the voice of an angered spirit that the
oversight be immediately corrected.) Collective responses to natural evils-illness, crop
failure, volcanic eruptions-almost always involve them. And that famous holiday in Bali,
The Day of Silence (Njepi), when everyone sits silent and immobile all day long in order
to avoid contact with a sudden influx of demons chased momentarily out of hell, is
preceded the previous day by large-scale cockfights (in this case legal) in almost every
village on the island.

In the cockfight, man and beast, good and evil, ego and id, the creative power of
aroused masculinity and the destructive power of loosened animality fuse in a bloody drama
of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death. It is little wonder that when, as is the
invariable rule, the owner of the winning cock takes the carcass of the loser- often torn
limb from limb by its enraged owner-home to eat, he does so with a mixture of social
embarrassment, moral satisfaction, aesthetic disgust, and cannibal joy.

A match made, the other hopefuls retire with the same deliberate indifference, and the
selected cocks have their spurs (tadji) affixed- razor sharp, pointed steel swords, four
or five inches long. This is a delicate job which only a small proportion of men, a
half-dozen or so in most villages, know how to do properly. The man who attaches the spurs
also provides them, and if the rooster he assists wins its owner awards him the spur-leg
of the victim. The spurs are affixed by winding a long length of string around the foot of
the spur and the leg of the cock. For reasons I shall come to, it is done somewhat
differently from case to case, and is an obsessively deliberate affair. The lore about
spurs is extensive-they are sharpened only at eclipses and the dark of the moon, should be
kept out of the sight of women, and so forth. And they are handled, both in use and out,
with the same curious combination of fussiness and sensuality the Balinese direct toward
ritual objects generally.

The spurs affixed, the two cocks are placed by their handlers (who may or may not be
their owners) facing one another in the center of the ring. A coconut pierced with a small
hole is placed in a pail of water, in which it takes about twenty-one seconds to sink, a
period known as a tjeng and marked at beginning and end by the beating of a slit gong.
During these twenty-one seconds the handlers (pengangkeb) are not permitted to touch their
roosters. If, as sometimes happens, the animals have not fought during this time, they are
picked up, fluffed, pulled, prodded, and otherwise insulted, and put back in the center of
the ring and the process begins again. Sometimes they refuse to fight at all, or one keeps
running away, in which case they are imprisoned together under a wicker cage, which
usually gets them engaged.

Most of the time, in any case, the cocks fly almost immediately at one another in a
wing-beating, head-thrusting, leg-kicking explosion of animal fury so pure, so absolute,
and in its own way so beautiful, as to be almost abstract, a Platonic concept of hate.
Within moments one or the other drives home a solid blow with his spur. The handler whose
cock has delivered the blow immediately picks it up so that it will not get a return blow,
for if he does not the match is likely to end in a mutually mortal tie as the two birds
wildly hack each other to pieces. This is particularly true if, as often happens, the spur
sticks in its victim’s body, for then the aggressor is at the mercy of his wounded foe.

With the birds again in the hands of their handlers, the coconut is now sunk three
times after which the cock which has landed the blow must be set down to show that he is
firm, a fact he demonstrates by wandering idly around the rink for a coconut sink. The
coconut is then sunk twice more and the fight must recommence.

During this interval, slightly over two minutes, the handler of the wounded cock has
been working frantically over it, like a trainer patching a mauled boxer between rounds,
to get it in shape for a last, desperate try for victory. He blows in its mouth, putting
the whole chicken head in his own mouth and sucking and blowing, fluffs it, stuffs its
wounds with various sorts of medicines, and generally tries anything he can think of to
arouse the last ounce of spirit which may be hidden somewhere within it. By the time he is
forced to put it back down he is usually drenched in chicken blood, but, as in prize
fighting, a good handler is worth his weight in gold. Some of them can virtually make the
dead walk, at least long enough for the second and final round.

In the climactic battle (if there is one; sometimes the wounded cock simply expires in
the handler’s hands or immediately as it is placed down again), the cock who landed the
first blow usually proceeds to finish off his weakened opponent. But this is far from an
inevitable outcome, for if a cock can walk he can fight, and if he can fight, he can kill,
and what counts is which cock expires first. If the wounded one can get a stab in and
stagger on until the other drops, he is the official winner, even if he himself topples
over an instant later.

Surrounding all this melodrama – which the crowd packed tight around the ring follows
in near silence, moving their bodies in kinesthetic sympathy with the movement of the
animals, cheering their champions on with wordless hand motions, shiftings of the
shoulders, turnings of the head, falling back en masse as the cock with the murderous
spurs careens toward one side of the ring (it is said that spectators sometimes lose eyes
and fingers from being too attentive), surging forward again as they glance off toward
another – is a vast body of extraordinarily elaborate and precisely detailed rules.

These rules, together with the developed lore of cocks and cockfighting which
accompanies them, are written down in palm leaf manuscripts (lontar; rontal) passed on
from generation to generation as part of the general legal and cultural tradition of the
villages. At a fight, the umpire (saja konong; djuru kembar) – the man who manages the
coconut – is in charge of their application and his authority is absolute. I have never
seen an umpire’s judgment questioned on any subject, even by the more despondent losers,
nor have I ever heard, even in private, a charge of unfairness directed against one, or,
for that matter, complaints about umpires in general. Only exceptionally well-trusted,
solid, and, given the complexity of the code, knowledgeable citizens perform this job, and
in fact men will bring their cocks only to fights presided over by such men. It is also
the umpire to whom accusations of cheating, which, though rare in the extreme,
occasionally arise, are referred; and it is he who in the not infrequent cases where the
cocks expire virtually together decides which (if either, for, though the Balinese do not
care for such an outcome, there can be ties) went first. Likened to a judge, a king, a
priest, and a policeman, he is all of these, and under his assured direction the animal
passion of the fight proceeds within the civic certainty of the law. In the dozens of
cockfights I saw in Bali, I never once saw an altercation about rules. Indeed, I never saw
an open altercation, other than those between cocks, at all.

This crosswise doubleness of an event which, taken as a fact of nature, is rage
untrammeled and, taken as a fact of culture, is form perfected, defines the cockfight as a
sociological entity. A cockfight is what, searching for a name for something not
vertebrate enough to be called a group and not structureless enough to be called a crowd,
Erving Goffman has called a “focused gathering”-a set of persons engrossed in a
common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that flow. Such gatherings
meet and disperse; the participants in them fluctuate; the activity that focuses them is
discreet-a particulate process that reoccurs rather than a continuous one that endures.
They take their form from the situation that evokes them, the floor on which they are
placed, as Goffman puts it; but it is a form, and an articulate one, nonetheless. For the
situation, the floor is itself created, in jury deliberations, surgical operations, block
meetings, sitins, cockfights, by the cultural preoccupations-here, as we shall see, the
celebration of status rivalry-which not only specify the focus but, assembling actors and
arranging scenery, bring it actually into being.

In classical times (that is to say, prior to the Dutch invasion
of 1908) when there were no bureaucrats around to improve popular morality, the
staging of a cockfight was an explicitly societal matter. Bringing a cock to an important
fight was, for an adult male, a compulsory duty of citizenship; taxation of fights, which
were usually held on market day, was a major source of public revenue; patronage of the
art was a stated responsibility of princes; and the cock ring, or wantilan, stood in the
center of the village near those other monuments of Balinese civility-the council house,
the origin temple, the marketplace, the signal tower, and the banyan tree. Today, a few
special occasions aside, the newer rectitude makes so open a statement of the connection
between the excitements of collective life and those of blood sport impossible, but, less
directly expressed, the connection itself remains intimate and intact. To expose it,
however, it is necessary to turn to the aspect of cockfighting around which all the others
pivot, and through which they exercise their force, an aspect I have thus far studiously
ignored. I mean, of course, the gambling.

In the first place, there are two sorts of bets, or toh. There is the single axial bet
in the center between the principals (toh ketengah), and there is the cloud of peripheral
ones around the ring between members of the audience (toh kesasi ). The first is typically
large; the second typically small. The first is collective, involving coalitions of
bettors clustering around the owner; the second is individual, man to man. The first is a
matter of deliberate, very quiet, almost furtive arrangement by the coalition members and
the umpire huddled like conspirators in the center of the ring; the second is a matter of
impulsive shouting, public offers, and public acceptances by the excited throng around its
edges. And most curiously, and as we shall see most revealingly, where the first is
always, without exception, even money, the second, equally without exception, is never
such. What is a fair coin in the center is a biased one on the side.

The center bet is the official one, hedged in again with a webwork of rules, and is
made between the two cock owners, with the umpire as overseer and public witness. This
bet, which, as I say, is always relatively and sometimes very large, is never raised
simply by the owner in whose name it is made, but by him together with four or five,
sometimes seven or eight, allies- kin, village mates, neighbors, close friends. He may, if
he is not especially well-to-do, not even be the major contributor, though, if only to
show that he is not involved in any chicanery, he must be a significant one.

Of the fifty-seven matches for which I have exact and reliable data on the center bet,
the range is from fifteen ringgits to five hundred, with a mean at eighty-five and with
the distribution being rather noticeably trimodal: small fights (15 ringgits either side
of 35 ) accounting for about 45 per cent of the total number; medium ones (20 ringgits
either side of 70) for about 25 per cent; and large (75 ringgits either side of 175) for
about 20 per cent, with a few very small and very large ones out at the extremes. In a
society where the normal daily wage of a manual laborer – a brickmaker, an ordinary
farmworker, a market porter – was about three ringgits a day, and considering the fact
that fights were held on the average about every two-and a-half days in the immediate area
I studied, this is clearly serious gambling, even if the bets are pooled rather than
individual efforts.

The side bets are, however, something else altogether. Rather than the solemn,
legalistic pactmaking of the center, wagering takes place rather in the fashion in which
the stock exchange used to work when it was out on the curb. There is a fixed and known
odds paradigm which runs in a continuous series from ten-to-nine at the short end to
two-to-one on the long: 10-9, 9-8, 8-7, 7-6, 6-5, 5-4, 4-3, 3-2, 2-1. The man who wants
the underdog cock shouts the short-side number indicating the odds he wants to be given.
That is, if he shouts gasal, “five,” he wants the underdog at five-to-four (or,
for him, four-to-five); if he shouts “four,” he wants it at four-to-three
(again, he putting up the “three”), if “nine” at nine-to-eight, and so
on. A man backing the favorite, and thus considering giving odds if he can get them short
enough, indicates the fact by crying out the color-type of that cock – “brown,”
“speckled,” or whatever.

Almost always odds calling starts off toward the the long end of the range -
five-to-four or four-to-three- and then moves toward the shorter end with greater or less
speed and to a greater and lesser degree. Men crying “five” and finding
themselves answered only with cries of “brown” start crying “six.” If
the change is made and partners are still scarce, the procedure is repeated in a move to
“seven,” and so on. Occasionally, if the cocks are clearly mismatched, there may
be no upward movement at all, or even movement down the scale to four-to-three,
three-to-two, very, very rarely to two-to-one, a shift which is accompanied by a declining
number of bets as a shift upward is accompanied by an increasing number. But the general
pattern is for the betting to move a shorter or longer distance up the scale toward the,
for sidebets, nonexistent pole of even money, with the overwhelming majority of bets
falling in the four-to-three to eight-to-seven range.

The higher the center bet, the more likely the match will in actual fact be an even
one. In a large-bet fight the pressure to make the match a genuinely fifty-fifty
proposition is enormous, and is consciously felt as such. For medium fights the pressure
is somewhat less, and for small ones less yet, though there is always an effort to make
things at least approximately equal, for even at fifteen ringgits (five days work) no one
wants to make an even money bet in a clearly unfavorable situation. And, again, what
statistics I have tend to bear this out. In my fifty-seven matches, the favorite won
thirty-three times over-all, the underdog twenty-four, a 1.4 to 1 ratio. But if one splits
the figures at sixty ringgits center bets, the ratios turn out to be 1.1 to 1 (twelve
favorites, eleven underdogs) for those above this line, and 1.6 to 1 (twenty-one and
thirteen) for those below it. Or, if you take the extremes, for very large fights, those
with center bets over a hundred ringgits the ratio is 1 to 1 (seven and seven); for very
small fights, those under forty ringgits, it is 1.9 to 1 (nineteen and ten).

The paradox of fair coin in the middle, biased coin on the outside is thus a merely
apparent one. The two betting systems, though formally incongruent, are not really
contradictory to one another, but part of a single larger system in which the center bet
is, so to speak, the “center of gravity,” drawing, the larger it is the more so,
the outside bets toward the short-odds end of the scale. The center
bet thus “makes the game,” or perhaps better, defines it, signals what,
following a notion of Jeremy Bentham’s, I am going to call its “depth.”

The Balinese attempt to create an interesting, if you will, “deep,” match by
making the center bet as large as possible so that the cocks matched will be as equal and
as fine as possible, and the outcome, thus, as unpredictable as possible. They do not
always succeed. Nearly half the matches are relatively trivial, relatively
uninteresting-in my borrowed terminology, “shallow”- affairs. But that fact no
more argues against my interpretation than the fact that most painters, poets, and
playwrights are mediocre argues against the view that artistic effort is directed toward
profundity and, with a certain frequency, approximates it. The image of artistic technique
is indeed exact: the center bet is a means, a device, for creating
“interesting,” “deep” matches, not the reason, or at least not the
main reason, why they are interesting, the source of their fascination, the substance of
their depth. The question why such matches are interesting-indeed, for the Balinese,
exquisitely absorbing-takes us out of the realm of formal concerns into more broadly
sociological and social-psychological ones, and to a less purely economic idea of what
“depth” in gaming amounts to.

Continued in …..