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…A zone in which time, space, and social identity are suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process may seem an unpromising object for cultural analysis. Yet such a zone, I argue, can offer a window onto the kinds of contingencie…
Jackson Lears
historian · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Jackson Lears appears only as a passing reference in the course material, invoked in a discussion of how cultural analysts approach zones of mechanical repetition and suspended social identity—presumably in contrast to richer symbolic spaces. The excerpt suggests his work helps frame questions about what constitutes a legible or analyzable cultural space, particularly when that space (like machine gambling) resists the depth-plumbing approach of earlier anthropologists like Goffman and Geertz. His relevance here seems to concern how we read contingency and anxiety in contemporary systems that may appear unpromising for cultural study.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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