Gambling, Space, and Time: Shifting Boundaries and Cultures

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Preface

This book started at the Thirteenth International Conference on Gambling and Risk-Taking. The triannual conference, organized by the University of Nevada, Reno's Institute for the Study of Gaming and Commercial Gambling, was at Lake Tahoe that year, and, as usual, it was an enlightening and inspiring week full of intellectually and socially engaging sessions.

We had both attended the conference since the late 1990s and had noticed a real shift. Back then, we were lucky to get a handful of people to hear a session about spatial and temporal issues. Now, there were enough papers to fill several sessions, and the rooms were packed. Why then, we wondered, was there still a lack of books that explained how gambling intersects with space and time?

We imagined the kinds of chapters we would like to see in a volume about this topic and started thinking about contributors. Before long, we had an encouraging lineup for a book and its authors. We—a geographer and a historian—believed a book like this was important because gambling, particularly casino gambling, is often taken out of its temporal and spatial contexts. A narrow focus on player pathology or regulatory and management issues leaves many to assume that the gambling itself changes little through space and time. A gambler is a gambler is a gambler, the argument goes.

But the ways in which gambling changes as it spreads over space and time are what makes it so interesting. Within the past twenty years, we have seen the nature of the game of poker dramatically changed by online play. Future historians will be able to chart the changes this spatial freedom brought to the game; already we have witnessed an upswing in traditional, terrestrial poker, fueled in large part by the action online. The poker played by Wild Bill Hickok and Chris Ferguson is hardly the same game, despite the many continuities. Yet even when the changes are less obvious than they are with poker, there are fascinating lessons to be learned.

We boldly hope that this book is only the beginning. Our intent is to start a conversation that spills further across disciplinary boundaries and leads to theoretically and methodologically ambitious research into the relationship of gambling, space, and time.

We thank the contributors for their interest in the idea, willingness to share their expertise, and tremendous patience. We salute Bill Eadington, Judy Cornelius, and their crew for a great conference series—and we will keep attending. And we cheer the magic of Kirsti Lehto and Arttu Paarlahti, the cartographic wizards of the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Introduction

Gambling, Space, and Time

DAVID G. SCHWARTZ AND PAULIINA RAENTO

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 nation-state 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 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 World War II, that gambling has become a truly normative business. And it has become an increasingly big, multibillion-dollar business. Metropolitan Las Vegas (Clark County), the world's leading center of gaming know-how and capital, alone generated a gaming revenue of more than $8.8 billion in 2010.⁴

Indeed, the global institutionalization of gambling has created a pattern of centers and peripheries, which can be identified at multiple scales. By no means is gambling distributed evenly across space, and this holds irrespective of whether we look at the world, a continent, a country, a region, or a particular town. Figures 0.1 and 0.2 illustrate which particular countries and U.S. states have adopted gambling as a major business. In contrast, some areas, most notably the Islamic cultural sphere from North Africa to Central Asia and Indonesia, appear as relatively peripheral from the perspective of legalized big-business gambling. The motives for, and forms of, the business vary and are conditioned by local, regional, and national circumstances, such as cultural values, economic developments, and political cultures. For example, in some Nordic Countries, in northern Europe, the state owns the gambling operators, the profits of which are returned to society through charities and as subsidies to cultural, social, and academic institutions. In many other countries, the operators are multinational corporations that pay for their licenses to, and are taxed by, the host governments. The prominence of the Caribbean and other tropical island destinations in figure 0.1 illustrates the importance of gaming for tourism developers: The presence of these small islands especially on the map of leading table-game destinations in the world (figure 0.1A) is disproportionate to the relative size of their population or their national economies. Variations in the style of gambling from one place to another add to this heterogeneity, as a comparison of worldwide table-game and slot-machine infrastructure shows in figures 0.1A and 0.1B. The maps show that whereas North Americans favor slot machines, many Asians prefer table games. Tradition and local physical geography may also have an impact on the type of gaming establishments, as is the case of riverboat gambling on the Mississippi River in the United States (figures 0.2A and 0.2B). These kinds of conditions and preferences are reflected in the makeup of local offerings and speak about regional micro-cultures of gambling.

Nor is gambling evenly distributed within countries or states, as is evident in the data behind figures 0.1 and 0.2.⁵ In Europe capital and other easily accessible major cities typically have a casino as one part of their entertainment mix. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean casinos have become an increasingly common constituent of urban redevelopment projects executed in public-private partnerships. Location at the dividing line between jurisdictions, against a territory where gambling is prohibited, can be very lucrative for a gambling establishment. Gambling is therefore very typical of border towns. Border towns that specialize in gambling highlight the relationship between law and space, for legal codes are always rooted in a particular space, a jurisdiction. That a law—a regulatory code—prohibits gambling here but not there creates movement between these spaces, which are characterized by different economic activities, political atmospheres, moral conduct, and cultural realms. This movement happens at the Nevada-Utah border (figure 0.2), where wide-open gambling meets the different moral, cultural, and legal realm of the Mormon culture area.⁶ In the twin towns of West Wendover, Nevada, and Wendover, Utah, the Nevada side makes a living off catering to gamblers from Utah, whereas some choose to live on the Utah side because of their values and lifestyle preferences.⁷ Similar locational business rationale and movement of people and money can be observed at the level of countries or their special administrative regions, as is the case of Macao, which belongs to China. Figure 0.1 illustrates how gambling services focusing on table games, popular among Chinese customers, have sprung up in China's neighboring countries to benefit from this vast market where gambling is not allowed. In this way, gaming establishments contribute to the creation of a borderland, a functional region where the existence of legal territorial differences motivates movement of goods, people, and capital across the dividing line and creates a particular culture of its own.

Understanding Boundaries and Culture

Different types of dividing lines form the theme of the first segment in this book about the fundamentally spatial and temporal character of gambling. The four chapters in Boundaries, Space, and Time illustrate how lines that divide, differentiate, and organize spaces of gambling are multifaceted and constantly changing. Through its conceptual tool kit the segment sheds comparative light on how and why gambling-related boundaries are often fiercely contested and constantly renegotiated.

In order to comprehend the complex relationship we highlight the idea that boundaries come in different forms. In our conceptual tool kit the strictest dividing line is the border, which refers to the above-mentioned politico-administrative and judicial dividers between territories. Borders typically separate countries (nation-states) and other jurisdictions (such as states, provinces, and counties) from one another. Borders are often negotiated into existence by formal agreements, delineated and demarcated on the ground and on maps, and controlled by law, with the help of law enforcement. By their nature borders are accurate, exact, and detailed. When they are not, or there is disagreement over the location of a border, territorial disputes are common.

On a frontier, borders are in the early stages of formation. This concept refers to margins of settled and mapped territory. For Star Trekkers, the final frontier is space, "where no one⁸ has gone before. For those interested in gambling, the best-known and perhaps most relevant historical example is the westward-moving frontier of the young United States and the gradual consolidation of the federal state in the nineteenth century. Despite the claimed closure of the frontier at the turn of the century,⁹ many activities associated with the frontier and territorial consolidation continued for decades thereafter, highlighting the process-oriented character of the concept of frontier. A certain liminality,"¹⁰ typical of these transitional spaces, still characterizes the sense of place in the American West, at least if one is to believe the multiple representations of the frontier in popular culture.¹¹

Boundary in its flexibility is a good general term for describing a broad spectrum of dividers. These dividers not only exist in physical space but also separate cultural, moral, social, and economic realms. Moral boundaries have been (and are) critical in the evolution of attitudes toward, and legislation of, gambling. The status of gambling in Western societies has fluctuated between the extremes of an outlawed, immoral vice and an acceptable, financially and socially beneficial pastime. Changes in moral attitudes, conventions about appropriateness, and economic needs have adjusted legal and social boundaries, determining what can be allowed and what must be sanctioned. Boundaries for gambling have varied accordingly from one era and place to another. Nor have these boundaries been the same for everyone. Instead, what individuals may, or may not, do in a particular culture has depended on their socioeconomic status, sex, and age.

A gambling establishment's market area has boundaries as well. A market area commonly spills over borders of jurisdictions and rarely ends abruptly, but its limits are easier to define and are better known than those of the moving frontier. Two gaming establishments may compete over the same customers, and there might be a transitional zone from which customers can go in either direction to gamble. This creates a contest about where the boundary of influence and one's catchment area lies. Physical distance matters, but other factors also affect individual gamblers' destination choices.

Further illustrating the flexible nature of the concept of boundary is its relationship with that of identity, which is one factor behind gambling (or any other consumer) behavior and an indicator of mental or emotional distance from a gambling establishment. To separate one unique entity from another—me from you and us from them—a boundary is always necessary. The separating element—the boundary maker—can be language; ethnic, racial, or cultural background; social upbringing and wealth; age; gender; sexual orientation; or a multitude of other denominators attached to individuals and groups of people. Individual human beings wish to belong to a group of peers and be comfortable with their style and choices as a consumer. An us forms a culture, at least if one defines culture broadly and relativistically as something that groups of people do. Broadly defined culture is the theme in the second part of this book.

In the four contributions under Culture, Space, and Time, gambling is seen as one constituent of human culture in general and of consumer and leisure cultures in particular.¹² Law and judicial boundaries are only one part of what makes a space in which gambling is permitted into a gambling place. Culture, how people shape, and are shaped by, their gambling behaviors, is another integral component. Individual and group attitudes toward, or practices of, gambling form a variety of subcultures that exist in concrete spaces—they take place somewhere—and evolve and change over time. Networks and shared practices, experiences, perceptions, and emotions contribute to the meanings assigned to particular spaces and make them places, spaces with meaning.¹³ Positive places are places of affection and good feeling: For one reason or another, one likes to gamble and feels comfortable in Gaming Establishment X but not in Y. Negative places can evoke bad memories and strong associations of image. Perceptions of bad luck, big losses, and a mismatch between the place's atmosphere and one's own style are factors that can make one feel uncomfortable in a place. These kinds of experiences affect behavior: Instead of faithfully coming back to a particular gambling place, one avoids it. A casino, therefore, is more than a building housing colorful carpet, slot machines, and beverage service. Rather, it is an arena for social interaction defined by a complex set of rules and mores. The contributors to this collection seek to understand a bit more of these behaviors, their places, and the interaction of these with broader trends in space, time, and society.

An Interdisciplinary Focus on the United States and Europe

Gambling research and this book are apt examples of an interdisciplinary endeavor. The motivation to cross disciplinary boundaries typically emerges from a particular question and from an influential development in society. In the case of this book, the motivation (and goal) is to comprehend how space and time help in understanding gambling and how particular disciplines and case studies can contribute to this understanding of gambling geography, history, and culture. The focus on space and time, with emphasis on boundaries and culture, reflects recent developments in both gambling and its research. These include the global growth of the gambling industry, the expansion and institutionalization of gambling research, and dissatisfaction with previous research when trying to make full sense of these processes. This collection also reflects the development of social sciences in general, for there has been a general shift toward postmodern and cultural approaches over the past few decades. With these approaches has come the prominence of qualitative methods, which unite the studies in this book.

The stand on interdisciplinary collaboration in this book is frankly un-apologetic. We see this collaboration as an opportunity and strength and hold that conceptual experimentation, exploration beyond conventions, and curiosity toward hybridization lead to fresh creativity and innovation.¹⁴ This book, and an interdisciplinary joining of forces in general, therefore promotes a critical exchange of ideas and provides food for thought for those who wish to expand their horizons toward new research questions and approaches. The call for broad conceptualization and for uninhibited exploration of interdisciplinary potential also roots this book in a particular temporal context and its fashions: in the international, interdisciplinary emphases of contemporary academia. The book is representative of interdisciplinary publishing: an edited volume in which diverse groups of scholars team up to assess particular themes from multiple angles.¹⁵ The eight contributors to this book represent four countries and six academic disciplines: anthropology, geography, history, law, political science, and sociology.

The chapters and their authors exemplify how the study of gambling, too, has its own spatial and temporal characteristics, that is, its own geography and history. The network of gambling expertise has gradually become global, but there are clear centers of scholarship. Much of gambling research centers in the English-speaking Western cultural sphere: in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. The representative of these prime centers of research and scholarship in this book is the United States. Established and more recently emerged major corporate centers of gambling as well as relative peripheries are discussed in the chapters. But other countries and linguistic spheres have gradually been added to the map of gambling research. In this collection authors from Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden represent these relative newcomers and explore contemporary challenges, little-used methodologies, and a variety of scales of gambling environments and cultures (from national to micro levels of place-specific subcultures). In these European countries, gambling research has begun to institutionalize beyond the endeavors of individual scholars. Like the global business of gambling, the academic world has benefited from modern communication technologies, and new virtual and material spaces for scholarly interaction have developed. Among the outcomes of this interaction in virtual and geographical space are new books, material-cultural objects that represent the evolution of printing technologies, literary tradition, and