Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City

By Thomas M. Malaby

The only ethnography devoted to the practice of gambling as its core subject, Gambling Life considers the stakes of social action in one community on the island of Crete.
Backgammon caf s, card clubs, and hidden gambling rooms in the city of Chania provide the context for Thomas M. Malaby to examine the ways in which people confront uncertainty in their lives. He shows how the dynamics of gambling -- risk, fate, uncertainty, and luck -- are reflected in other aspects of gamblers' lives from courtship and mortality to state bureaucracy and national identity.

By moving beyond risk and fate as unexamined analytical categories, Malaby presents a new model for research concerning indeterminacy, seeing it as arising from stochastic, performative, and other sources. Gambling Life questions the longstanding valorization of order and pattern in the social sciences.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0252028287
• ISBN13: 9780252028281
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

An Ethnography of Risk, Performance, and Sociability

This study of gambling and everyday life in Chania, Crete, is an outstanding example of how anthropological ethnography can contribute to larger debates in the social sciences while remaining accessible and engaging to the casual reader. The author's intellectual objective is to shed light on reigning theories of risk and indeterminacy by exploring in finely grained detail how risk is operative and is experienced, interpreted and strategized against/upon by social actors in real life. The setting of the study is ideal for this purpose, as social life in this town is organized for many around the playing, practice and performance of gambling. A range of useful and non-jargony conceptual tools for capturing the experience of uncertainty are introduced (performative indeterminacy, instrumental nonchalance, e.g.), which heighten the feeling that true insight is occurring here. In fact, it is one of the impressive achievements of this book, that it manages to engage the serious scholar in ongoing disciplinary debates (about risk theory, social poetics, modernity and the state) while remaining a perfectly charming read for the nonspecialist.