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Rather, we must take such
beliefs as themselves “social” or “moral facts”
to be explained (Durkheim 1984: xxv). In the
words of
Goffman (1986), we must examine how both
gambling as an individual activity and those
institutions in
which it occurs are labeled as deviant
(stigmatization) or acceptable (normalization).
Having exposed the
socially constructed nature of such labels, our
second step is that of figuring out who the
primary agents
are in this process—i.e., who is labeling what
to whom—and for what purposes. In short, we must
construct a “political economy of the symbolic
violence” surrounding the stigmatization and
legitimation
of casino gambling (Bourdieu 1972).
Two distinct theoretical traditions offer
initial frameworks for understanding this
process. The
first is classical Marxism, which assumes the
ability of a hegemonic fraction of the
capitalist class to
influence the state to produce laws and act
generally to advance its interests. The
regulation of various
forms of vice will thus have less to do with
public or state values than with the interests
of capitalist
elites. The social historian Schivelbush (1993:
153) thus argues that the seventeenth century
invention of
hard liquor “was to drinking what the mechanical
weaver’s loom was to weaving”: by destroying
traditional ways of life, it created a dependent
class of wage la borers. The second is the
Foucaultian
3 As the state’s recent deregulation of its
public utilities attests.
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