Thanks,
Thomas Malaby
malaby@fas.harvard.edu
In my dissertation project I explore attitudes toward risk and uncertainty in Greece by examining the common (though illegal) practice of gambling. I am focusing on the city of Chania, on Crete, a city known for its gambling and other forms of aggressive recreation. My research in Chania indicates that Greek approaches to gambling involve a particular means of engaging indeterminacy. Specifically, gambling to Chaniotes (residents of Chania) is often an opportunity to perform socially, to risk on a throw of the dice or a hand of cards not only material wealth but also, and more importantly, the social position of the gambler. This is often done without any overt attempt to calculate probabilities, in sharp contrast to how gambling is currently perceived in America (both popularly and in academia) as singular, obsessive, and focused on outcome prediction. Instead, I have found that local concepts related to chance, probability, and fate are variously manipulated and (re)formed in gaming contexts. For example, one local concept often invoked by gamblers, gouri (which can be loosely glossed as luck), is closely tied to the immediate social circumstances and to each gambler's ability to maintain or change these circumstances. In my dissertation on Greek gambling I examine and use indigenous concepts such as this one to build a model for exploring differing notions of uncertainty.
Gambling is ubiquitous in Greece, and in Chania it is practiced at most hours of the day in taverns, coffeehouses, and leskhes (gambling clubs). While it is most visibly a male practice, there are, however, strong indications that women gamble as well. I found that women, while almost never seen in the male-dominated coffeehouses, nonetheless play in the leskhes, or gambling clubs, despite the fact that the difference between these types of businesses is often otherwise unclear. The gambling consists mostly of card and dice games of varying complexity, but Chaniotes will gamble on more unusual things. They will, for example, bet thousands of drachmas that a fly will next land on one of two plates of sweets. It seems that any event where the outcome is uncertain is fair game, and the stakes can also vary widely. There is also far more gambling at certain times of the year, particularly around the New Year, when nearly all Greeks gamble extensively, many in their homes rather than in the coffeehouses.
An important preliminary finding is that gambling in Greece is directly tied to claims about personal status and identity. As such, gambling is among men an arena of contest, at times characterized by symbolic violence. This is most vividly realized when the player who is to cut the cards instead 'castrates' the dealer by grabbing the deck and dealing once around the table from the bottom, saying, "I'll castrate you [tha se mounoushiso]!" The symbolic violence associated with card-playing has particular resonance in Chania, as Crete (and Chania specifically) was a strong center of violent resistance against both Ottoman and German rule
The terms of this contest of manhood balance two contradictory beliefs. On one hand, a gambler demonstrates his eghoismos, his self-regard, by showing indifference to material wealth. This he does by boasting about his losses and risking large sums without a care. On the other hand, a man must provide for his family, and a gambler who bankrupts his family has no filotimo, no honor. Gamblers skillfully walk this thin line, betting enough to seem free of money's hold upon them, but not enough to jeopardize seriously their financial stability. This distinctive feature of gambling in Greece is not just an attitude; it is a physical disposition, an embodied practice of dramatic tosses of cards, near-invisible transfers of money, and surreptitious glances at opponents hands.
What is important is not just the amount that is bet, but even more how that money is bet and won or lost. In this arena of contest it is often he who plays (and loses) most spectacularly who often wins, at least socially. Several indigenous concepts that I have encountered in the field will be crucial to understanding this aspect of gambling activity. For example, the invocation by gamblers of the concept of gouri is particularly revelatory of the ways in which winners and losers often act differently. Gouri is frequently translated as"lucky charm", but its meaning is far more general: anything from a time of day to a particular position at the card table to a semi-ritualized activity (always drinking a Greek coffee before playing, for example) to the presence (or absence) of someone can bring a player good or bad luck. The entire immediate social scene (for example, that of a coffee-house) can be claimed to bring one good or bad gouri. Luck, then, is here seen as a social, rather than an individual or cosmological, phenomenon because the focus is on the individual's relationship to these local influences and on his or her ability to maintain these circumstances if the person is winning or to change them if he or she is losing. A losing player may try to shake things up, to change the gouri, while a winning player tries to change nothing in the situation around him or her, avoiding conflict and, in a way, performing his or her "non-performance". In neither case, however, is the amount of money on the table visibly at issue; the issue is how each player can demonstrate an ad hoc deftness in responding to (and perhaps claiming to control) the shifting whims of chance.
It is this practiced nonchalance toward material risk which runs counter to many stereotypical expectations about gambling in America. Popularly, gambling is associated with other forms of investment with risk. Bookstores throughout the U.S. are filled with books on odds calculation for gambling in casinos. They reflect this general concern with material gain, with beating the odds and controlling the outcome. Not coincidentally, among the social sciences the study of uncertainty has gained prominence primarily in economics, where it is treated as a condition for rational decision-making. Here again, what is emphasized is gain (expected utility) with regard to possible outcomes and their relative probabilities.
An anthropology of uncertainty remains to be written. It is a subject long of interest to economists, but its scope suffers from a lack of studies outside the American context. My dissertation, based upon work on gambling and risk in Chania, Crete, will be an empirically grounded first step toward expanding our ideas about human attitudes toward the aleatory character of experience. It will demonstrate the necessity of incorporating an understanding of social performance into an area previously seen as quintessentially economic, and outline how risk in Greece is, rather than tamed and quantified, instead engaged and performed.