The Interpretation of Cultures Selected Essays

What sets deer hunting apart from the ordinary course of life lifts it from the realm of everyday practical affairs and surrounds it with an aura of enlarged importance is not, as a functionalist society would have it, that it reinforces status, but that it provides a metasocial commentary upon the whole matter of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks and then organizing the major part of collective existence around that assortment.

What the deer hunt says--it says in a vocabulary of sentiment--the thrill of risk, the despair of loss, the pleasure of triumph; yet what it says is not merely that risk is exciting, loss depressing, or triumph gratifying, but that it is of these emotions, thus exampled, that society is built and individuals are put together.

If we go to see Macbeth to learn what a man feels like after he has gained a kingdom and lost his soul, uppers go to deer camp to find out what a man, usually composed, aloof, and almost obsessively self-absorbed, feels like when he has totally triumphed or been brought totally low.

Every people, the proverb has it, loves its own form of violence. The deer hunt is the uppers' reflection on theirs--on its look, its uses, its force, its fascination.

Like the Balinese cockfight, the deer camp's hierarchies and traditions mirror the larger social order of the community. Like the cockfight, the stakes are so high in this pastime that participation in it seems irrational to outsiders.