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…
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