Here a nice piece on Clifford and Hildred Geertz experience when dealing with Balinese.

Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders, professional ones, and the villagers dealt with us as Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their life who yet press themselves upon them: as though we were not there. For them, and to a degree for ourselves, we were nonpersons, specters, invisible men.

We moved into an extended family compound (that had been arranged before through the provincial government) belonging to one of the four major factions in village life. But except for our landlord and the village chief, whose cousin and brother-in-law he was, everyone ignored us in a way only a Balinese can do. As we wandered around, uncertain, wistful, eager to please, people seemed to look right through us with a gaze focused several yards behind us on some more actual stone or tree. Almost nobody greeted us; but nobody scowled or said anything unpleasant to us either, which would have been almost as satisfactory.

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For Balinese cockfighting is not just a game, it is a social activity with complex system that an outsider will find it difficult to understand but for Balinese it is run in their blood. There is a complex social system in a cockfighting game. All Balinese values and codes of life is translated into this game. There are traditional ethical codes in a cockfighting game that a Balinese will obey unconsciously, maybe it is not appropriate to call it ethical code but rather a set of behavior that all Balinese will do in every cockfighting match without any outside pressure, it is their social instinct. Here are some examples of Balinese social instinct in cockfighting.

photo taken from flickr.com/photos/cafiso/

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