A story I tell myself about myself.

"What sets the cockfight 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 functionalist sociology would have it, that it reinforces status discriminations, 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.  Its function, if you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience; a story they tell themselves about themselves."

I view this quote as both interesting and important in the scheme of the entire essay.  The quote describes the underlying meaning and sentiment behind the cockfight.  The cockfight is more than just a gambling game or entertaining sport in the Balinese culture.  It represents the manner in which the Balinese willingly sort their own culture into social classes, exerting more interest and spending more money on those who are more socially relevant, while doing the opposite to those who are lower on the social ladder.  The Balinese personally engage in sorting their social classes, in essence telling a story of their own hierarchy to themselves.