Volume 35, Number 2 · February 18, 1988
Blood Sport
By Garry Wills
The Manly Art
by Elliott J. Gorn
Cornell University Press, 316 pp., $24.95
John L. Sullivan and His America
by Michael T. Isenberg
University of Illinois Press, 465 pp., $24.95
Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society
by Jeffrey T. Sammons
University of Illinois Press, 318 pp., $24.95
On Boxing
by Joyce Carol Oates
Doubleday, 118 pp., $14.95
Clifford Geertz has a lot to answer for. Ever since he published his essay on Balinese cockfighting fifteen years ago, sportswriters, who used to be (mainly) fans, have increasingly been social historians (or fans disguised as social historians).[1] They use sports to tell us about everything in society except sports—about the relations of the classes or the sexes, about the community's legal machinery, about its political values. Geertz found that cockfighting in Bali was both a protest against the legal order (first imperialist, then puritanically nationalist) and a replication of it, partly inverting and partly enforcing ordinary divisions in the society. This makes cockfighting 'a metasocial commentary upon the whole matter of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks,' with the fixed betting orders put under strain by the betters' identification with the cocks, who revert to harsher standards, whereby survival is the only privilege and death the only deprivation.
Review, 4034 words
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