As much of the Western World
surfaces in a ball park, on a golf links, at a race track, or around a poker
table, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring.
For it is only apparently
cocks that are fighting there. Actually, it is men.
Ubud, Bali.
The towering shops and bar crawls of Australia-dominated Kuta is replaced
by yoga workshops, upmarket clothes shops, reiki chakra massages and vegan
cafes in of the Eat, Pray, Love crowd. The town serves as a hub for western
health and ethical lifestyles and a living museum to primitive culture, or at
least what tourists believe to be indigenous.
The Kecak,
or monkey dance, as it’s sometimes called, is performed in Hindu temples to a
regular audience of camera-wiedling holiday-makers. As you may have seen in Ron
Fricke’s film Baraka, the Kecak features a large group of
topless Balinese males, sat layered in a semi circle, chant to a polyrythmic
chrous of “cak cak cak” in hypnotic fashion. This wall of sound forms the
ambiance to which the Hindu play, based on India’s Ramayana, is performed. As the
play progresses, the chanting men gradually transform into monkeys.
It’s easy
for us to believe we’re experiencing a portal to a deep-rooted
culture from a forgotten time – it was actually invented by a foreign resident,
named Walter Spies, a German artist in the 1930s who blended the
pre-existing exorcist chants of the sacred Sangyang dance with imagery from
Indian poem.
He then sold
and packaged the show to Western tourists to be displayed in Bali’s temples and
beaches, as we witness an impressively staged representation of
seemingly authentic Balinese culture. Heritage tourism has become big business
for brand Bali, and a massive draw for seekers of the exotic.
By combining
the two separate sources, Spie’s hybrid creation was a cultural exaggeration of
the primitive to generate touristic voyeurism and excitement. It’s the perfect
spectacle – a visually dazzling, aurally captivating adrenaline rush with
a feeling of being whisked into the past for a short time.
This isn’t
the locals’ choice for a hit of spiritual engagement.
Cockfighting.
These colonially-constructed cultural showcases stand in place of what used to
be a less ornate, but more localized form of entertainment. Prior to the Dutch
invasion in 1908, cockfighting rings used to be at the heart of every Balinese
village. In fact, taxation of this bloodsport was a primary source of public
revenue. They were, and still are, held on temple grounds, sometimes using the
events as a blood offering to appease their gods and warn off
illness, crop failure and volcanic eruptions. For this reason, on the day
before Bali’s harvest season commences there simultaneous cockfights in
every village on the island.
It’s technically illegal,
therefore it’s an act of underground rebellion. You do not talk about Ubud
Fight Club.
These men’s
gatherings in semi secrecy represent an escape from Bali’s consumer
culture, where mens’ warrior identities have become packaged and commodified.
Here a more primal ancestral relationship to masculinity is carried out. These
are arenas where Balinese men can reclaim their sense of identity,
removing the colonially-constructed ideals invented for them by outsiders.
They
establish this with their cocks. It’s true that a thousand puns can be made
with this phallic term, but it’s also a similar sounding word in Balinese, so
the joke is not lost in translation. The owners spend much time grooming their
cocks, taking good care of them and show them off to a baying audience. The
metaphor impossible to ignore.
Animals have
low status in Bali, but in Bali’s fight clubs, men are forced to identify with
their animal alter egos, as a chorus of chanting by the betting
masses, circled around the main area of play bares more than a passing
resemblance to the more commercialised routine of the Kecak. It’s not hard to
imagine that Spies took inspiration from the energy and raw experience in
these events and repackaged them for the more art-minded consumer.
Like the Kecak, It’s a focused gathering, a set of energetic local tribes engaged in continuous flow. It’s traditional. It’s very ‘cultural’. Yet if many of the health and well-being crowd from Ubud’s spa-sect stumbled upon this truly authentic experience they may be put off a return visit to the island. Maybe they’d find it tasteless, unacceptable to their Western modern standards. It would get the animal cruelty stamp. It certainly wouldn’t garner a sponsorship from one of the numerous nearby vegan restaurants.
Comparisons
can be made to Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, secret
societies where geographically-diffused men flock wishing to revive a part
of themselves. Fight Club saw a feminised generation of men raised by women
seeking a more primal outlet to their packaged consumer lifestyle. A rejection
of consumerism ,or in Bali, commercialized representations of their ancestral
lifestyles, is enacted by fighting, cutting through the post-colonial
counterfeits to the immediacy of living.
How much can
you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?
Since
cockfighting has been around before the Dutch invasion, post-colonial
comparisons and reasoning can appear somewhat academic. Yet it’s precisely
because neocolonial Bali is firmly in place that the threads of true tradition
have been led underground.
Another film
that can encompasses these ideas would be 1994’s Once Were
Warriors, which centres around sections of New Zealand’s Maori population
that gather in pubs attempting to reclaim a displaced sense of
masculinity by fighting in their ‘tribes’. This is carried out in
the underbelly of a country that’s been gradually commercializing elements
of indigenous culture for tourism and international representation at sports
events and dance tours.
The tribal
element is present at the rings here. Friends back other friends’ cocks,
villagers bet on their own against outsiders and excitement is raised, along
with the amount of bets, when men of high status enter the ring. This is more
than quick Sunday escape – it’s a national sport, a way of life.
Some folk
literally ‘bet the farm’ on the outcome of a single fight, which usually only
last for a minute. It’s a far cry from Ubud’s Colonic Hydrotherapy Centre, but
as Tyler Durden says in Fight Club: “Self-improvement is masturbation, maybe
self-destruction is the answer”. Marla Singer, the book’s femme fetale says of
her own voyeuristic cancer group visits: “Funerals are nothing compared to
this. Funerals are all abstract ceremony. Here, you have the real experience of
death.” There’s no abstraction at Bali’s fight clubs. No leaflet handed out at
the door. What you encounter is visceral, violent and unsympathetic to
any Western standards of political correctness.
The day I
took these photographs, I had a vegan burger in Ubud for breakfast, went for a
bike ride along the rice paddies and stumbled across the cockfighting by chance
ten minutes out of town. I headed back for a massage and finished the evening
with a viewing of the Kecak, which I’d been excited to see since my first
viewing of Baraka.
Both the Kecak and the cockfighting events are a stimulating cultural
experience. Even if the the Bali that most visitors see itself isn’t
wholly authentic, does it really matter? After all, ignorance, especially for
the ethical tourist coming to eat, pray and love themselves for a week, is
bliss. By Simon Slater
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