SYG-1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Cock Ring, Symbolic Culture, Erving Goffman
Document Summary
This apparent amusement and seeming sport is, to take another phrase from. The (cid:862) tratificatory(cid:863) angle (cid:862)its flat out head-to-head aggressiveness, makes it seem a contradiction, a reversal, even a subversion of it. In the normal course of things, the balinese are shy to the point of obsessiveness of open conflictbut here they portray themselves as wild and murderous, with manic explosions of instinctual cruelty. The slaughter in the cock ring is not a depiction of how things literally are among men, but, what is almost worse, of how, from a particular angle, they imaginatively are. What, as we have already seen, the cockfight talks most forcibly about is status relationships (prestige), and what it says about them is that they are matters of life and death (p. 446) One only has to learn how to gain access to them. (p. 453)
