Response to "Deep Play: Notes on teh Balinese Cockfight"

When you start reading Geertz essay you start off thinking that you he is an arrogant man. He starts by talking how "eager to please" he is and how "everyone ignored" him. This starts out by making the reader feel like he is an out sider. He says, of the Balinese people's coldness to him, "The indifference, of course, was studied". This makes you feel like he is standing on a pedestal in the village watching all the people going around judging and watching them. You feel, as the reader, that he doesn't know anything about these people because he is an outsider.
As the essay goes on he talks about an experince he has during a raided cockfight. Speaking of how the village emprassed him afterwords Geertz says, "wewere suddenly the cneter of all attention". He goes on to talk about how he interacted with the people by saying, " I must have told the story, small detail by small detail, fifty times bye the end of the day." To me this makes him sound like the friend everyone has that tells the story of his huge fish that he catches again and again, even if no one asks about it. To me this farther discredits Geertz study of the people, because it seems that he just cares about how he fits into the picture.
Geertz continues to talk about cockfights and their importance in the Balinese culture and society. Speaking of the relationship of cocks and their owners he says, "identification of Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable." He stresses the importance of the fights and discusses in depth the social edict of them. He discuss the different bets that can be made on a game and the implications they have. He goes on to list what he thinks as the 17 basic rules of the cock fights. As you read you begin to feel that cock fighting is a major aspect of the Balinese culture and that it defines culture status. At one point he says, "You must be on cocks of your own group... if you do not people generally will say, 'What! Is he too proud for the likes of us?...'". Then as the essay is coming to an end he says how cockfights have no social impact. He says, "You cannot ascend the status ladder by winning cockfights." He completely turns on what he has been saying. You feel like he has just gone and said that everything said to that point doesn't matter at all. It is like he says that he was just kidding about what he has said. At this point as a ready you loose all trust you had in Geertz, if you had any. He goes on to talk about poetry and texts and how a culture is a cumulation of texts that you can't read as an outsider.
Over all I think that Geertz's essay was a failure because he looses the readers trust throughout the essay so that the reader won't believe anything that he says. Since he is trying to make a statement about a society, by loosing the readers trust he is unable to get his point across because no one is listening.