This tension is at the heart of the cultural diagnosis made by the American sociologist Erving Goffman in 1967 based on his ethnographic study of gambling in Las Vegas, where he worked as a blackjack dealer and was eventually promoted to pi…Caillois, Goffman, and Geertz each referred to coin-operated machine gambling in the course of their analyses, and each of them dismissed it as a degraded, asocial form of play not worthy of cultural analysis. For Caillois, it was pure alea…preoccupations of contemporary culture. But what kind of clues, and how to access them? Unlike Goffman’s card gaming or Geertz’s cockfighting, machine gambling is not a symbolically profound, richly dimensional space whose “depth” can be pl…
Clifford Geertz
anthropologist · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Geertz appears here as an anthropologist whose ethnographic work on cockfighting established a model for reading cultural practices as symbolically dense texts that reveal deeper social meanings. The course readings invoke him alongside Goffman to establish a critical precedent—both scholars dismissed machine gambling as too trivial or degraded for serious cultural analysis—which the readings then contest by arguing that slots demand the same interpretive attention Geertz afforded to cockfighting. His approach to culture as a system of meaningful symbols becomes the methodological foil for rethinking what kinds of practices deserve ethnographic depth.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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