Muchongolo Dance Contests: Deep Play in the South African Lowveld

This article argues that Geertz's concern with cultural performances as "stories people tell themselves about themselves" continues to be a valid focus of anthropological inquiry. Like Balinese cockfights, muchongolo dancing contests in the Bushbuckridge municipality of South Africa offer metacommentary on everyday life and struggles in the form of a competition. Through the juxtaposition of movements and costumes with the actions of spectators outside the dance arena, and through the lyrics of songs, the dancers enact a confrontation between xintu (the past, tradition) and xilungu (the present, ways of whites). This war of images and words stimulates a critical consciousness about political economic processes that cannot be captured by simplistic labels such as acquiescence and resistance. (Dance, tradition, modernity, Shangaan, South Africa) ********** Few anthropological works are as controversial as Geertz's (1972a) famous study of the Balinese cockfight. Geertz wrote this essay to demonstrate the central postulates of his interpretive approach: that people's actions are signs intended to convey meanings, and that "doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of 'construct a reading of') a manuscript--foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherences, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shared behavior" (Geertz 1972a:106). He treats the cockfight as an acted text, as a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves. When men engage in cockfights, Geertz suggests, they lay their own public selves on the line through the medium of their cocks. The men engage in status rivalry, a "deep play" that transcends calculus of material loss and gain and is a matter of life and death. Geertz finds the text subversive and disturbing. The fight says that beneath the skin of every Balinese man is an animal and that the Balinese experience is really less about poise, grace, and charm, than about jealousy, envy, and brutality. The cockfight reveals these hidden values in the context of the terrible massacres that occurred in Bali after 1965. Critical commentators claim that Geertz does not really show how to access and interpret these unspoken Balinese values. Some of his interpretations, such as his comparisons to Macbeth, are clearly those of the metropolitan scholar rather than those of Balinese themselves (Crapanzano 1986). Second, commentators also question the appropriateness of Geertz's textual metaphor, arguing that it is problematic to collapse data of various sorts (direct observations, interviews, and secondary accounts) into the status of a single type, a text (Kuper 1999). Third, critics claim that whereas Geertz provides a thick description of the actual cockfight, his analysis of the context to which the event relates is thin. Geertz only pays lip service to the history of the cockfight and to the manner in which it relates to the changing political economy of Bali. His general theoretical approach, it is claimed, privileges meaning over all else and hardly speaks about politics, violence, and exploitation (Roseberry 1982 and Scholte 1990). While accepting these criticisms, this article warns against throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water. Despite the shortcomings of Geertz's analysis, his concern with local representations and with allegory continues to be valid. This is especially pertinent in the study of South Africa, where a one-sided emphasis on political economy often eclipses the valuable insights to be derived from the analysis of cultural meanings (Gordon and Spiegel 1993). (2) This essay aims to demonstrate the validity of Geertz's concerns with reference to an analysis of muchongolo (lit., traditional) dance contests in Bushbuckridge, a remote magisterial district in the South African lowveld. Contra some of his staunch critics, we aim to show that a focus on genres of cultural performance such as cockfights and dances elucidates rather than conceals consciousness about political economic processes. …