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

Abstract

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

Language at the Limits of the Human: Deceit, Invention, and the Specter of the Unshared Symbol

“…They were places for local people to learn about modernity and then take that “civilizing” influence back to their remote villages that were in many cases only visited once a year by patrol officers. However, missionaries were becoming increasingly concerned that the labor lines were instead becoming hotbeds of gambling and alcohol consumption (see Laycock 1972; Marshall 1980; Pickles 2021), in addition to the administration’s concerns about anti-administration sentiment. In biannual conferences throughout the 1950s between the administration and the main Christian missions, the question of moral dissolution in the labor lines came up, with most of the missionaries in favor of the legal prohibitions on alcohol (the Catholics were a partial exception) and the continued criminalization of any gambling.…”