Introduction: Gambling as Analytic in <scp>M</scp>elanesia

Pickles, Anthony J.

doi:10.1002/ocea.5057

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 33 publications

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“…What is more, the presence of money prompted the creation of an alternate type of spacetime which cut across that required for feasting – namely, gambling. Gambling has been a productive analytic for tracking social and economic transformations in the Pacific, and Pacific peoples' understandings of their own social worlds, as the two Oceania special issues devoted to it attest (Pickles 2014; Zimmer 1987). For the purposes of this analysis, I set aside economic considerations, instead examining gambling as a frontier of ‘space, time and rules that creates excitingly structured contexts’ that reshape ritual timespace (Pickles 2019:1).…”

Section: The House That the Allocation Of Village Funds Builtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sago Versus Rice and the Reorganisation of Ritual Spacetime: Competing Modes of Dependency in an Age of Decentralisation in Asmat, Indonesian Papua

Davies

2021

Oceania

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Asmat social worlds are permeated with multiple forms of dependency. In this paper, I ask how different modalities of dependency inter‐relate within the space and time of Asmat life, and how this is being reshaped by Asmat's increasing incorporation within broader structural orders during a period of national decentralisation. First, I describe how relations of dependency shape everyday life, through a discussion of the time and space of quotidian food distribution and concomitant claim‐making. Then, I outline how forms of inter‐clan interdependency innovate on the above pattern during ritual feasting, which generates remarkable social co‐presence through ritualised interdependent work. Finally, I explore how feasting interdependence, and its organisation in space and time, is being warped by ‘The Allocation of Village Funds’ (‘Alokasi Dana Desa’), a decentralised government grant. I do so via a case study of a ritual feast house construction project, in which Asmat villagers attempted to reckon with new forms of dependency typified, in indigenous discourse, by the distinction between ‘sago’ and ‘rice’ as local versus introduced staple foods associated with contrasting regimes of action. At stake here, in the collision between indigenous and newly emergent modes of dependency, is the viability of socially valuable modes of ritual life, which, in an age of decentralisation, are becoming shaped by and reliant on new types of forces outside of the community's own labour and control.

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Section: The House That the Allocation Of Village Funds Builtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sago Versus Rice and the Reorganisation of Ritual Spacetime: Competing Modes of Dependency in an Age of Decentralisation in Asmat, Indonesian Papua

Davies

2021

Oceania

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The Escalation of Gambling in Papua New Guinea, 1936–1971: Notable absence to national obsession

Pickles

2020

History and Anthropology

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Future Papua New Guineans (PNG) start gambling from the 1880s. Gambling was then made illegal (for them but not for their colonisers). It takes off during World War II, becoming ubiquitous knowledge by the late 1970s, just after Papua New Guineans achieve independence from Australia. As incidence accelerates gambling relationships proliferate until they plateau at saturation point. This exciting, liberating, unpredictable cloud of activity became a threat to the prospect of an ordered, advancing independent modern nation-state. PNG legislators responded by banning playing cards completely. This is suggested as evidence of an 'escalation' because gambling became something new, a vehicle for imagining the nation as a truly connected whole through this relational technology, even if the image was an uneasy one. As the escalation occurred the acceleration plateaued once new recruits dried up and as economic development failed to materialise, revealing some useful socio-material guardrails for an anthropology of escalation.Gambling adoption, Australian colonialism, World War II, gambling law, Melanesia

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‘Almost everybody does it … ’ gambling as future-making in Western Kenya

Schmidt

2019

Journal of Eastern African Studies

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Introduction: Gambling as Analytic in Melanesia

Abstract: ABSTRACT

Cited by 6 publications

References 33 publications

Sago Versus Rice and the Reorganisation of Ritual Spacetime: Competing Modes of Dependency in an Age of Decentralisation in Asmat, Indonesian Papua

Sago Versus Rice and the Reorganisation of Ritual Spacetime: Competing Modes of Dependency in an Age of Decentralisation in Asmat, Indonesian Papua

The Escalation of Gambling in Papua New Guinea, 1936–1971: Notable absence to national obsession

‘Almost everybody does it … ’ gambling as future-making in Western Kenya

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