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- Convenors:
-
Claire Loussouarn
(Goldsmiths, University of London)
Julie Scott (Canterbury Christ Church University)
Rebecca Cassidy (Goldsmiths)
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- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- C1
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 11 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
The workshop focuses on the productive life of uncertainty and its exploitation by the rapidly expanding European gambling industry. It investigates the contrasting ideas about risk and uncertainty made visible by gambling practices across various conceptual, territorial and political boundaries.
Long Abstract:
Since the 1980s in Europe and the United States in particular, risky methods of generating income, including gambling, became domesticated and mainstream, with the support and encouragement of governments from both sides of the political spectrum. Discourses concerning the value of work, saving and thrift were partially displaced by those of speculation, particularly through house and share ownership. The increased availability of credit meant that participation in markets came to define citizenship. In that context, uncertainty was recast as providing opportunities for profit to those able to gain access to markets of various kinds.
In Europe alone, gambling is worth an estimated €89 billion. It is characterized by local markets, regional regulation and globalising technologies. What can gambling ethnographies tell us about different ways of dealing with uncertainty? How does gambling compare with other forms of taking risks such as trading or entrepreneurship? What do gambling practices reveal about local social dynamics within and across national borders? How does technological innovation transform gambling practices? How do specific gambling practices translate in different jurisdictions? In this panel, we propose to examine the expansion of the gambling industry in Europe and the way gambling is practiced and developed across borders of different kinds: historical, geographical, regulatory and conceptual.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 11 July, 2012, -Rebecca Cassidy (Goldsmiths)
Paper short abstract:
Gambling in Europe is characterized by, one the one hand, globalizing technology and international operators and, on the other, locally distinctive markets and national legislation. This paper uses the example of the UK online gambling industry to explore this supranational phenomenon.
Paper long abstract:
The way we gamble has changed, bringing down boundaries between states, different sports and games, between gambling and other kinds of financial risks. Until the 1990s, commercial gambling was limited to 'bricks and mortar' sites including casinos, betting shops and racecourses. Today, up to thirty per cent of people betting online do so using their phones or handheld devices: access to a huge variety of products is virtually instant. The way we measure and regulate gambling, based on national surveys and statistics, has fallen behind.
The UK is the most mature regulated remote gambling jurisdiction in Europe, worth £896 million (Gambling Commission 2009). However, levels of taxation have limited growth of the industry and the majority of sites offering online gambling to UK customers are licensed in Gibraltar, Malta and the Isle of Man. The structural arrangements of the industry reflect the peculiar contemporary status of gambling and its controversial history in the UK. Gambling is a part of everyday life, through the National Lottery (since 1994) and licensed betting shops (since 1961), but it is also incompletely domesticated. It still represents a challenge to the values of thrift and hard work that have traditionally been considered a part of British identity.
Focusing on an offshore server, tracing and accounting for the connections it creates and severs, I will show how an anthropological toolkit can help us to better understand the UK remote gambling industry as a dispersed phenomenon.
Claire Loussouarn (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
Spread betting is a uniquely British product which allows individuals to bet on the movements of the financial market for a small margin. This paper will explore how spread betting blurs the constructed distinction between gambling and trading.
Paper long abstract:
Despite post-financial crisis commentaries which condemn the City of London for its greed and recklessness, working as a trader remains a highly regarded position in British society. Thanks to the internet and advances in technology, a growing number of individuals can realise their ambition of trading for themselves. Spread betting, a uniquely British product which allows individuals to bet on the movements of the financial markets for a small margin has played a central role in this democratisation of trading. However, while spread betting is allowing a wider range of the British population to take part in the stock market, it is also blurring further away the distinction between gambling and trading so carefully constructed by legislation through history. Sitting uneasily at the crossroad between gambling and financial regulation, spread betting revives the forgotten episode of the bucket shop in a new light. In this paper, the case of spread betting is used to examine that the distinction between gambling and trading as two diametrically opposed forms of risk-taking is problematic. It is argued, instead, that less valued forms of risk-taking activities should be reconsidered alongside more valued ones. Using ethnographic data among casino players and spread betters in London, it is demonstrated that when individuals are taking risks, success and failure are never permanent and as such need to be constantly re-interpreted.
Andrea Pisac (Goldsmiths College)
Paper short abstract:
This papers explores the everyday gambling practices in Nova Gorica - a town on the Italo-Slovenian border that used to be the dividing line between the West and the East. It is concerned with the historical/temporal as much as the spatial embeddedness of the gambling industry that thrives and is made possible by various kinds of border-makings.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the development of the Slovenian gambling industry since the 1980s and how it has shaped the country's national identity. In the last 30 years, Slovenian casinos have earned a reputation of being among Europe's finest. Yet it is not only casinos that attract guests, but also 'the country's unspoilt surroundings'. I look at how these distinguishing features of Slovenian casinos construct both the national and local identity, specifically against the neighbouring Italians.
The spatial and national(ist) border between, on the Slovenian side, Nova Gorica and, on the Italian, Gorizia, has created the dynamics sustaining the economic development of both towns. During socialism, the Italians profited from the influx of Yugoslav shoppers whereas today the Slovenians are reaping benefits from the burgeoning gambling industry which attracts mostly Italian customers.
My main questions concern the social life of the border itself. Seeing it as a living and ever-changing entity, I explore how porous it is in either uniting or separating: what/who is allowed to cross over and what/who is forbidden. Although today the border between the Italian Gorizia and the Slovenian Nova Gorica has lost the political significance it used to have, the differing national legislations regarding gambling supports the influx of the Italian money into Slovenia. In a sense the border has both disappeared and widened. It has widened through identity-making processes that distinguish 'the unspoilt Slovenia' from 'polluted Italian problem gamblers' and it has disappeared in order to allow the flow of gamblers' money.
Julie Scott (Canterbury Christ Church University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores casinos in Cyprus as a kind of bi-communal space characterised by volatility and uncertainty, where the contingency arising from games of chance is compounded by an ambiguous cultural intimacy between players whose everyday context is framed by the polarised discourses of the Cyprus conflict and the state.
Paper long abstract:
The 50 years following independence in Cyprus have seen the progressive spatial segregation of its Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities. Until 2003, contact on the island itself had been largely limited to a few highly regulated sites of officially sanctioned encounter, collaboration and co- existence. Despite an active bi-communal movement, bi-communal initiatives have touched only a tiny minority of the Cypriot population, most of whom have never taken part in a bi-communal activity. Gambling, in contrast, draws in a wide section of the population, and since the opening up of crossing points along the Green Line, Greek Cypriots have been pouring across from the south, where live gambling has been banned, to gamble in the 25+ casinos in the north. The casinos form a kind of bi-communal space bringing together people whose politics, attitudes and opinions may be antithetical; who may have no other bi-communal contact or commitment; but who negotiate a shared space which is characterised by ambiguity, contingency, and cultural intimacy (c.f. Herzfeld). Intimacy is not necessarily comfortable. It implies an engagement with the other - who remains, essentially, unknown and unknowable - which involves, at some level, risking the self - possibly physically, possibly psychically, or existentially. It may be deeply challenging, revolving around issues of trust, reputation, and honour. In this paper, I draw on four months of participant observation in casinos in the north of Cyprus, to consider how ambiguity is manifested and managed in these volatile casino spaces.