In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

107 5 Trotting Territory The Cultural Realm of Swedish Horse Betting p e r b i n d e Human beings in social interaction create life worlds with shared symbols, meanings, and values. some forms of gambling, among them horse betting, therefore tend to evolve into bounded cultural domains with specific beliefs, norms, and traditions. Gambling becomes the core of a “world-building activity,” and previous research has concluded that a racetrack may constitute “a little cosmos of its own,” where the “reality experienced is an all-embracing reality.”1 This chapter concerns one such cultural realm established by gambling—the one created and re-created at the Åby trotting track in sweden at the days of racing. as part of an anthropological study of gambling in sweden, for about a year I lived like a person who has gambling as a main interest in life.2 Much of my gambling took place in betting shops and the casino in Gothenburg (Göteborg). I spent seventeen afternoons and evenings at the Åby trotting track and devoted many hours to off-track betting activities, such as studying race programs and selecting horses for the V75 pick-seven game. almost every saturday afternoon I watched televised trotting races and football (soccer) matches that I was betting on. Information that I have gathered by observations in gambling environments and through many hours of conversations with gamblers is thus combined with experiences and knowledge gained through my own gambling. some things about gambling are hard to learn from interviews with players, survey data, or psychological experiments; they are best learned by partaking in gambling with a genuine interest and an open mind. at least four earlier studies of on-track horse betting, and two of off-track horse betting, have taken that approach, as have a number of studies of other forms of gambling .3 Moreover, horse betting has been the subject of a few sociological studies, and there is one swedish ethnographic investigation.4 First, I will give a brief orientation about trotting in sweden and the Åby track. The following two ethnographic sections explore the two principal mo- 108 | G A M B L I N G , S PA C E , A N D T I M E tives for visiting the track: socializing and betting on horses. as a synthesis of these sections, I then analyze the cultural meanings that structure Åby trotting track as an institution. Finally, in the conclusion I identify the principal components of gambling at Åby and point out the importance of their integration into a cultural whole—a trotting territory set apart from the outside world. Swedish Trotting and the Åby Track The organized sport of trotting in sweden dates back to the nineteenth century, when trotting races were held mostly in the wintertime on frozen lakes.5 Today, trotting is a big sport. There are seventy-five tracks, of which thirty-three have facilities for betting (figure 5.1). The trotting tracks are run as nonprofit associations, organized in the national trotting association sTC (svenska Travsportens Centralförbund). There are about fifty-seven thousand warmblood and about eight thousand coldblood trotting horses in sweden . More than eight thousand trotting races are held annually, which is on average 22 races a day. In sweden, trotting is the dominant form of horse racing; only about 750 gallop races are held annually. Whereas gallop is generally perceived as an upper-class sport, the traditional image of trotting is that of a sport of the people, deeply rooted in swedish culture and countryside life. The archetype of trotting is rural folks racing with their work horses and wagons along a dusty countryside road, while the romanticized archetype of gallop—the “sport of kings”—is noblemen racing on their magnificent thoroughbreds over the green fields of a large estate. Farmers and rural people may train and breed trotting horses as a hobby or a part-time business. Most of the horses will never make it into the highest of the six national trotting divisions and will cost their owners more money than what they make in the races. Eventually, most of them end up as riding or leisure horses. There is always the chance, however, that a gifted foal can be trained to become a top-class trotter that makes much money. This traditional and somewhat romantic view of trotting is today eroding, since the most successful trotters rarely are success sagas from small farms in the remote countryside. Rather...

Share