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In the words of
Meyer (1977), a gambling industry represents an
extreme case of an institutional field which
must
produce and disseminate myths legitimating its
practices.
Despite such stigmatized status, the past decade
has witnessed a vast and rapid expansion of the
casino industry throughout both the U.S. and
world—the number of U.S. states permitting
casinos
increased from 2 to 27 from 1988 to 1999, while
the number of countries increased from 77 to 109
(Nevada Gaming Control Board; Bear Stearns 2000;
Eadington 1999; Thompson 1998). Various
explanations have been offered for this
phenomenon. Popular explanations emphasize a
liberalization of
public values concerning gambling, or changes in
modes of governance from paternalistic
prohibition to
regulatory liberalism. Such accounts prove
inadequate, however, when we attempt to apply
them to other
activities of “vice” such as drug use, for which
increasing public acceptance has been
accompanied by
increasingly repressive forms of regulation.
Most scholarly writings on casino gambling,
meanwhile,
have explained its spread as the result of the
economic desperation of contemporary states
(Hunter and
Bleinberger 1995; Vogel 1994; Rose 1998). In
troubled times, the argument goes, moral and
social
concerns are set aside by community leaders and
publics in order to attract (casino) capital
investment to
depressed areas. By looking at gambling from the
point of view of states in dire financial
straits—i.e., as
1 As with many seemingly objective facets of the
contemporary casino industry, the use of the
terms “gambling” and
“gaming,” while seemingly non-problematic, are
political choices. In Nevada, the birth of
“gaming” was part of a
larger intentional project on the part of casino
operators to cleanse from their image the
negative associations carried
by “gambling.” In this paper, I have decided to
embed my discourse within that of my object of
study. I thus refer
to Indian “gaming,” as tribes themselves do, and
South African “gambling,” as state and corporate
elites do. But in
generic situations such as the one to which this
footnote refers, I find myself using “gambling,”
probably as a
reflection of my own biases and beliefs.
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