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Pickles, A.J. 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7524-602X
(2016)
Gambling.
In:
Cambridge Online Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Abstract
Gambling occurs when a person commits one or more valuable items (a ‘stake’) to an event or series of events packaged together, and where the result determines a loss or win at a rate agreed before the final stake is committed. The practice is or was not present everywhere and is often marginal in a given society, and some gambling variations escape the boundaries of this definition. Some include financial speculation within the phenomenon of gambling, but I do not cover that literature here. Anthropology has made valuable but often overlooked contributions to the study of gambling based on both comparative examples drawn from small-scale societies and marginalized peoples and by engaging critically with the gambling industry and concepts drawn from policy-oriented disciplines such as psychology, criminology, sociology, microeconomics, statistics, and the health sciences. In this entry four pioneering anthropological studies of gambling are summarized and compared. I then review current regional and thematic trends in the anthropology of gambling. Thereafter I review the anthropology of the gambling industry itself and the relationship of both to other disciplinary perspectives on gambling. I delineate some causes for the two-decade-long surge in the anthropology of gambling, and lastly suggest that the field has become rich enough to support new and original syntheses that would significantly enhance ‘gambling studies’.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Global Development (formerly School of International Development) |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 12 May 2020 00:17 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Sep 2024 08:15 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/75117 |
| DOI: | 10.29164/16gambling |
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