Reading Blog 1: Two cocks go at it for fun (in Bali)

The reading assignment this week was about a man, an archaeologist, who with his wife, also an archaeologist, went to Bali to study the culture of the people there. Apparently it was just the two of them on the trip as it does not indicate from the excerpt if they were part of a group that may have been mentioned in previous pages. They were also given land from the government and documents stating they were there strictly for research if they ran into trouble with the police of the villages in Bali. I liked that in the small villages the people acted as mentioned on page 1 in the second paragraph as if they were not there since the village was a close-knit community and it was hard to infiltrate their culture because they do not know the nature of the two outsiders. However, if the landlord of the house and the village chief spoke to them and knew of them, why did they not encourage the Balinese to talk to the outsiders? Were they given a translator for the trip? And if so, could not he have also encouraged the Balinese to talk to them? One aspect of the reading that I am not too fond of is the cock fighting due to the fact they fought to the death and the corpse of the loser would get mutilated in a way to gloat. Even though they pampered the cocks prior to the fight and during, they only did it out of self-gain since gambling also played a role into it. Gambling on the fights also did not sit well for me since they were already poor, but they still put their money in these expensive pools in order for a fight to happen. If the cock fights were there for spiritual reasons only, then that would not be a problem as it is integrated into their culture and somewhat required.