Gambling, Space, and Time: Shifting Boundaries and Cultures

Introduction

1 Introduction Gambling, Space, and Time d av i d g . s c h wa r t z a n d pa u l i i n a r a e n t o Gambling, our current reading of the archaeological evidence and historical conjecture suggests, has been around nearly as long as human social life itself. a traveler surveying gambling on Earth, throughout time and across space, would find quite a diversity of expressions of humankind ’s gambling impulse.1 Betting on contests, both human and animal, subsumes a large part of gambling, from wagering on the results of an election to cricket fighting. Wagering on random elements has a similarly broad spectrum : nuts, bones, dice, cards, and random number generators are just a few of the gambling media that our traveler would find sprinkled throughout human history.2 There is both continuity and change in the evolution of gambling. The mechanics of gambling have not become appreciably more complex over time, for it takes just as much skill to choose a number to play in the lottery in a modern convenience store as it did to choose between odd and even in a Paleolithic hut. But the means to gamble have changed considerably, and hardly in a teleologically progressing straight line. The changing gambling media, material culture, and infrastructure of gambling are adaptations to technologies that are available in a given time and in a given place. The original bone dice, for example, were replaced by carved ivory and stone as humans gained more competence in fine craftsmanship . The triumph of mass production and plastic gave us machine-cut plastic dice. When block printing became widely available in Europe in the fourteenth century, playing cards became popular. The first playing cards had only images instead of numbers, for many who used the cards could not read. The spread of education as one part of the evolution of the nationstate and the improved literacy of the general population eventually added numerals to the cards. also illustrating the interdependency of broad societal processes, technology, and the material culture of gambling is the invention of the telegraph, which made possible the transmission of horse-racing 2 | G A M B L I N G , S PA C E , A N D T I M E results across thousands of miles in seconds. This shrinking of time and space created the first “virtual” gambling sites, illicit betting parlors connected to the tracks only by wire. and innovations have spread rapidly across space so that new ideas, products, and ways of doing things now become global much faster than some centuries, or even decades, ago. Within recent memory , gambling on a variety of games, from sports contests to poker, has become possible on computers and mobile devices, including one’s personal cell phone. The future will doubtless see gambling continue to keep pace with technological change and further twist the gamblers’ sense of distance and speed. The shifting fashions in gambling also reflect the relationship of this activity to time and the surrounding society. Today, online poker playing is a prominent form of social gambling. Three hundred years ago, placing wagers on various and sundry propositions at West End gentlemen’s clubs was. The way that people gamble tells us just as much about them as the games they are playing. Gender, generation, education, and socioeconomic background are only a fraction of the elements known to affect individual gambling behavior—which is further shaped by the laws, values, and moral codes of the surrounding society. For these reasons, the study of gambling transcends an analysis of lucid elements or patterns of legalization and becomes a commentary on culture itself. A Global Phenomenon Gambling is widely distributed across the globe. When surveying global cultures in 1948, anthropologist alfred Kroeber did not offer a catalog of peoples who gambled; instead, he offered a short list of those who did not.3 Our traveler, after encountering gambling on several jaunts through human life, would notice an intriguing paradox: though one would find gambling almost everywhere, it would receive broad societal sanction only in recent times. In law, as in technology, gambling has not always moved in a straight line. The legal status of gambling is almost always precarious: Even where approved, it is frequently a whisker away from recriminalization. It is only in the past one hundred or so years, with the boom in public-interest gambling that began in the 1920s and blossomed worldwide after...