Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Status

Professionals

Felix Stein — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 15:51:42 +0000

SOAS University of London

Initially published 21 Apr 2020

Abstract:

Professions are institutionalised bodies of specialised knowledge and practice around which divisions of labour within contemporary societies are organised. As well as performing a collective function, membership within a profession offers individuals upward social mobility and meritocratic recognition. Professional expertise is so ubiquitous in societies around the world that we tend not to ask how and why specialised occupational groups have emerged, how they produce, control, and apply their knowledge, and how the meanings of professionalism differ from one context to the next. Anthropologists’ early focus on colonial settings attuned them to view professionals as instruments of political power and control, particularly in biomedical contexts. Subsequent studies have produced a diverse array of interpretations, seeing professionalism as a performative or aesthetic practice that sits apart from the messy realities of work, as a marker of prestige and class mobility, and as a site of ethical engagement and debate. Recent approaches tend to focus on the ways in which professional identity is made through everyday practice and the struggles entailed in maintaining it, rather than viewing it as a label conferred automatically on the basis of training. Finally, the study of professionals has prompted renewed attention to anthropologists’ own claims to professionalism, and the social networks, institutions, and epistemic assumptions needed to sustain it.

Introduction

In a conversation between Scottish physician David Livingstone and a Tswana ritual expert in 1857, the mission doctor attempted to disprove the rainmaker’s arguments about his influence on rain. Livingstone drew on European models of empirical reason, referring to himself as the ‘medical doctor’ and to the rainmaker as ‘rain doctor’. He implied ironically that their contest of ideas was being fought on equal ontological terms (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991: 211). Thereby, Livingstone also suggested something about the way in which an incipient ideology of professionalism served as a marker of expert knowledge and authority in this colonial setting of southern Africa.

This interaction took place during a period in which the professionalisation of spheres of expertise such as medicine and law was occurring alongside the acceleration of industrial capitalism and technological development in the nineteenth century. It was aided by various institutional forms such as associations, systems of accreditation, and ethics codes, which demarcated the formal parameters of professional knowledge and served as barriers to entry. As such, professionalisation was an exclusionary process of formalising and limiting claims to expert knowledge. It standardised expertise in ways that made it quickly transportable around the world. For instance, from the late-nineteenth century, the professionalisation of medicine rendered population health amenable to state intervention. Professionalism emerged as a new form of governance, intertwined with state projects at home and in the colonies.

The study of professionalism, tied to the emergence of modern state bureaucracies, traditionally fell under the remit of sociology rather than anthropology. Key figures studying it include the sociologists Talcott Parsons and Everett Hughes, influenced by the foundational works of social theorists Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Both Weber and Durkheim witnessed the emergence of occupational groups in Europe’s transforming societies.^[1] Durkheim had asserted early on that professionals were custodians of morality and collective interest. Professional ethics provided solidarity in an industrial society that risked moral dissolution under the sway of free market philosophy (1992). Weber focused less on professionals and more on bureaucracies, maintaining that power in society becomes legitimised and regulated by rational and depersonalised bureaucratic systems that impose rules on human behaviour.

Writing in the 1930s during a period in which society risked collapsing into fascism, Talcott Parsons, was fascinated with the question of how society’s fragile stability was maintained. He held that professions did maintain stability but differed from bureaucracies because they emphasised collegial and individualist values rather than hierarchies. Yet both bureaucracies and professions shared important commonalities: they demarcated specific, restricted functions in the workplace and they formalised standards of practice, making people’s roles distinct from their personalities and individual circumstances. For Parsons, professionals—like bureaucrats—were essential components of ‘modern’ industrial society, harbingers of rational principles holding society together through the creation of shared values and goals. Concepts of ‘mandate’ and ‘license’ were later developed and deemed necessary for professions to exist, as they formalised relationships of trust within society (Hughes 2009). As well as entrusting some of its necessary functions to these contained spheres of expertise, society could offload onto the professions responsibility for its more disturbing elements. For instance, disease would be dealt with by medical professionals and crime by lawyers (Dingwall 2008: 4–5).

By the 1970s, the idea that professionals served as a kind of ‘glue’ for social cohesion gave way increasingly to a view of professionalism as a mechanism of control and elitism. This position was exemplified in the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who viewed professionalism as a source of power, or what he called ‘social capital’, that could be used to gain political and social status (Bourdieu 1990).

Given anthropology’s original focus on so-called ‘traditional’ societies, Parsons’ contemporaries in anthropology limited their interest in expertise to a focus on ‘ritual experts’, such as the rainmaker in Livingstone’s account. But as anthropologists turned their attention to colonial actors and to the bureaucratic workings of the state, they began to focus on professional expertise itself. Today there exists no distinct subsection of anthropology devoted to the study of professionals. Instead, work on professionalism is disparately nestled in a number of different areas, including the anthropology of expertise, science, and technology studies and the study of states, bureaucracies, and corporate settings. This entry therefore draws together some key strands from different sub-fields of the discipline. They include considering professionals as agents of social control, status, and class mobility, as well as a more recent focus on professionalism as an ethical and aspirational project.

Professionals as agents of social control

Anthropology’s early encounter with professionals, aside from within the academe itself, began in colonial settings. The study of colonialism highlighted early on that professionals are not just the benign experts they often see themselves as, but that they are also social actors embedded within colonial and other power relations. The aforementioned conversation between Livingstone and the rainmaker is a good example of this. In addition to the more overt forms of conversion, it was through assertions of professionalised expertise that the Tswana were drawn subtly and inexorably into the hegemonic structures of colonising culture (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991). Professional knowledge, religious authority, and colonial power converged to produce new regimes of domination. Medical missionaries and military doctors throughout the European colonies set out not only to ameliorate ill-health—often brought about or exacerbated by brutal labour regimes—but to ‘civilise’ colonised populations.

While medicine was a key locus of professional expertise in colonial settings, it was not the only one. In Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) in the early twentieth century, colonial administrators were concerned about feeding a growing population; in particular, how to sustain rural populations while extracting the labour of male migrants who travelled for work to the mines. Worried about constraints on the self-sufficiency of ethnic groups such as the Bemba, they drew on the expertise of scientists who determined that the widely practiced agricultural method—a semi-nomadic, slash and burn system known as citimeme—was wasteful (Richards 1995 [1939]). A study by an anthropologist and a historian fifty years later revealed that a series of highly adaptive and varied aspects of citimene had been overlooked by colonial officials, tasked with the job of defining and controlling such practices (Moore & Vaughan 1994). Professional expertise in this instance reproduced narratives compatible with political agendas. The authors revealed, moreover, that the colonial preoccupation with citimene was not only to do with food supply but with how to control populations and to create permanent residences in order to implement taxation. However, the study is careful not to arrive at a singular conclusion, showing that while professional knowledge could not be taken at face value, neither could it be dismissed as mere colonial representation.

The work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault equipped anthropologists with a language to understand professionals as instruments of political power. Foucault was particularly influential in studies of medical settings. In The birth of the clinic, published in 1963, he argued that biomedical knowledge, formalised through systems of professionalism, rendered patients’ bodies passive objects of control and intervention (Foucault 2002 [1963]). His approach made it possible to describe how a ‘medical gaze’ became embroiled in systems of racialised exploitation. One ethnographic history of a mission hospital in the Belgian Congo shows that medical missionaries became ‘colonial agents of a form of indirect rule’ (Hunt 1999: 165). Nancy Rose Hunt describes the medicalisation of childbirth, in a context where concerns of colonial administrators about a falling birth rate motivated medical attention to safe childbearing. Locally trained midwives became valued professionals and important culture brokers, ‘inviting, persuading and compelling’ women to attend a clinic, despite growing fears prompted by caesarean deaths (Hunt 1999: 230-1). Notwithstanding their suspicions, local women also brought themselves to hospital during difficult births and appropriated colonial items such as soap and birth certificates to suit their needs. Colonial powers often viewed this process as a ‘civilising’ practice, using doctors in rural hospitals to implement hygiene and other state directives in what the author describes as a project of ‘medical, bodily and demographic control’ (Hunt 1999: 6). Yet through detailed descriptions of professionals such as the midwife Malia Winnie, Hunt resists straightforward arguments about colonial intrusion and local reaction. The experts in this setting – teachers, nursing men and midwives – were ‘colonial middle figures’, engaged in a process not just of control, but of cultural mediation and negotiation, such as between local and medical meanings of bodily incision. Professional practice was one of translation, ‘a necessary condition of colonial life’ (Hunt 1999: 13).

In contemporary hospital settings, ethnographic studies show how ‘professional logics’ exert control over patients. In the United Kingdom, for instance, enactments of professional identity can construct asymmetrical power relations in which patients become subordinate. ‘Professional logics’ place demands on patients, who must display ‘due deference’ to medical staff and their expertise as a prerequisite for accessing care (White et al. 2012: 78). Take the example of a distressed elderly woman who arrives in a UK Accident and Emergency (A&E) Department with a bleeding nose caused by a fall. An on-looking doctor remarks that ‘many people here have nothing wrong with them’ (White et al. 2012: 72). Since the doctor perceives the woman’s condition as too minor to require his clinical expertise, the patient is deemed undeserving of care and rendered a ‘problem’. Professional knowledge demarcates patients as either legitimate or unworthy, impeding ‘the recognition of patients as persons’ (White et al. 2012: 72).

Ethnographic attention to professional practice suggests the ways in which professional hierarchies may reproduce the kinds of ‘indifference’ (Herzfeld 1993) that have long been associated with bureaucracies. Professions are embedded within, and may help to reproduce, power relations prevalent in society.

Performance and aesthetics of professionalism

A key feature that unites studies of professionals is the attention to the work process itself. It reveals that activities involved in performing and hence maintaining one’s professional status may be quite distinct from other aspects of professional work.

In a volume on international development professionals, David Mosse describes their tendency to move towards agreement and coherence, and focuses on the political effects of such convergences. Professionals must navigate the messiness, complexities, and disagreements entailed in their everyday practice while maintaining the appearance of coherence upon which their professional identities rely. In his research about an international development intervention in India, Mosse encountered ‘a professional habitus that automatically transferred the actuality of events into the preconceived categories of legitimate meaning and ideal process’ (Mosse 2011a: 22). By reproducing models and templates, engaging in ‘group think’ (Woods 2007), or forming closed networks built around certain norms of social interaction (Eyben 2011), they can create an appearance of efficiency and disguise the complex problems encountered in daily work.

Documents are a key technology through which the official narratives of professionals are produced (Riles 2006). However, the ways that documents are used vary depending on professional cultures. In certain contexts, their creation may have as much to do with building consensus and reproducing convergence, as with the stated purpose or content of documents (Green 2011; Hull 2012). Yet, the uses of paperwork change in contexts where professionals operate with relative impunity, as work on the Nigerian gendarmerie suggests (Göpfert 2013). Gendarmes are military police operating in rural areas, responsible primarily for traffic control, public order, and criminal investigations. They closely associate their professional status with their training in writing, a skill which they perceive distinguishes them from the police and military. In criminal investigations, gendarmes produce a procès-verbal, a document containing information about events, observations, and evidence pertaining to a crime, to be transferred to a public prosecutor. In the absence of scrutiny by seniors regarding the accuracy of the reports, gendarmes produce documents that are ‘aesthetically satisfying’ and through which they express their individual identities and statuses. While adhering to the required template, they alter font, type size, spacing, and use of symbols in the place of certain letters to personalise the appearance of the document. Verbose or technical language signifies professional status. It entails translating a witness’s words in a way that prioritises the ‘dramaturgy’ of the document over the accuracy of its claims (Göpfert 2013: 330). Crucially, gendarmes operate in an environment in which professional worth is achieved through the appearance of documents, while processes ensuring the reliability of content are absent. To be a professional in this context is to perform one’s individualism and intellect through presentation and writing style.

The performance of professional status is similarly important among international development professionals, albeit taking a different form (Eyben 2011). Travelling abroad for work, development professionals are physically and socially distant from the communities they are sent to assist (Eyben 2011: 145). Instead, they encounter host countries through enclosed, elite spaces of expatriate sociality, forming friendships with one another at picnics, sporting events, and parties. It is in these spaces that meanings of professionalism are made, because socialising brings a donor community into being, a necessary step towards policy coherence. However, because these ways of socialising do not include ‘getting to know the country and its people’, these activities reproduce the gap between policy agendas and grounded realities, a well-known problem in development practice (Eyben 2011: 141). In these examples, the performance of professionalism—whether in documents or in social gatherings—is more important than the specificities of official roles that people might play.

A discourse of professionalism also provides a language for disciplining people's physical appearance at work, especially of women. In a data-entry firm in Barbados, women are expected to perform ‘professionalism’, defined by their seniors in terms of their appearance and comportment (Freeman 1993). Yet women were explicit in describing their jobs as a far cry from their understanding of ‘professional’, remarking that jobs in agricultural and domestic labour were better paid than theirs. Contradictions emerged since some women said they preferred these jobs because they liked to work in a ‘professional enterprise’. They thereby acknowledged the higher status it conferred to them, all the while recognising its façade-like quality. Here, professional identity turns out to be ambivalent, as both a source of social value and an empty signifier.

Despite their claims to meritocratic values, professions may be as likely as other kinds of labour practices to mobilise differences such as gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or citizenship status. This applies even to sectors we tend to think of as the most formally rational and calculative, such as finance. In London’s banking sector, a cohort of culturally working class ‘barrow boys’—defined as ‘streetwise dealers from East and South London’—dominated the trading floor, where conspicuous consumption and homophobic jokes signified status and belonging at work (Zaloom 2006: 77). This changed dramatically when managers diversified their staff and began to recruit graduates—especially women and ethnic minorities—whose diverse, individual approaches, it was felt, could be harnessed for greater economic success. Managers viewed this as a process of ‘professionalisation’, suggesting that meanings of professionalism are derived at least partly from performances of class and social status.

The idea of professionalism as a performance is captured by economic anthropologist David Graeber’s provocative claim that large numbers of professional, middle-management and administrative roles are ‘bullshit jobs’; that is, jobs lacking any meaningful contribution to society and existing ‘just for the sake of keeping us all working’ (Graeber 2018). These jobs include those located in industries such as financial services, telemarketing, corporate law, public sector administration, human resources, and public relations—as well as the various roles that exist to support these industries. There is a performative quality to the jobs since, Graeber suggests, those who occupy them would readily admit that their roles lack meaningful social purpose. However, this point of view may overlook the ways that such roles, even if failing to contribute to loftier projects of the public good, may meaningfully signify personal, aspirational goals, especially in places where upward mobility is by no means assured. This brings us to the next theme of professionalism: as a route to upward mobility.

Status, aspiration and class mobility

As well as focusing on cultures of work itself, anthropologists studying professionals have also shed light on class mobility and aspiration. They followed professionals not only in their official roles at work but also in their lives beyond the workplace, as family and community members and as citizens. They have sought to understand the role of professional identity within wider life projects shaped by lifestyle aspirations and class trajectories. Witnessing the burgeoning bureaucracies and professional networks emerging in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, Weber recognised the importance of education and occupation as features of one’s ‘life chances’. New cultures of professionalism and white-collar employment were coming into being in ways that oriented scholars towards a focus on a growing yet differentiated middle class.

In India, professional employment in the government sector was formerly viewed as the hallmark of what it meant to be middle-class. Yet new cultures of consumerism have made middle-class lifestyles more widely accessible (Donner & De Neve 2011). Anthropologists turned their attention from workplace identity to cultures of consumption in trying to understand this so-called ‘new’ middle class. This shift partly reflected that labour casualisation and the decline of secure employment made it harder and harder for people to build their identities around their workplace. Instead, consumerist ideologies emerged that offered alternative forms of inclusion as well as opening up new lines of exclusion (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000). These insecurities also meant that middle-class lifestyles were increasingly precarious and were often funded by risky borrowing (James 2015). From these studies, it emerges that a focus on consumption practices is insufficient for understanding middle-class experiences. Instead, it may be necessary to look at the intersections between values created at work and the ways that status and aspiration are formed beyond it.

While consumption is a marker of class status, forms of belonging created by professional identities equally persist. In India, a rapidly expanding information technology (IT) industry has created demand for highly skilled jobs. This is accompanied by a growing disdain among young, educated people towards public-sector employment, which they associate with low salaries and the draconian hierarchies of an earlier era (Fuller & Narasimhan 2007: 142). Reflecting on what this shift means for people’s identification with ideas of Indian nationhood, C.J. Fuller & Haripriya Narasimhan draw on research with IT professionals in Chennai to repudiate assumptions that globalisation leads people to abandon a commitment to the Indian nation. While many of these young professionals seek to gain ‘exposure’ by working overseas, they aspire to settle and build their lives back in India, assured of a highly paid job in the sector. This optimism orientates people towards new ideas of nationhood that depart from earlier ideas associated with Nehruvian nationalism (cf. Saxenian 2016).

Elsewhere in India, professional work is less secure. In a remote, rural region of Uttarakhand, government programmes are increasingly delivered through the quasi-independent institutions of government-funded NGOs (Bear & Mathur 2015). These organisations are populated by ‘young professionals’, a term borrowed from international development jargon. They are university-trained engineers and computer programmers holding short-term contracts. While their salaries were on a par with those who held permanent state employment, their temporary status and lack of housing or health insurance made their positions more insecure than their government-employed counterparts. Nonetheless, many were relieved to have found employment at all, and hoped that it would pave the way to a job in the city, a gateway to the middle-class milieu they wished to participate in. They did not hold ‘government jobs’ and actively dissociated themselves from what they saw as an anachronistic workplace order of draconian hierarchies and deferent submission embraced by their permanently-employed colleagues. This represented a distancing from the state because of their insecure contractual positions and because of the appeal of the growing private-sector industries of the kind described by Fuller and Narasimhan. In Ghana, too, professional qualifications do not necessarily lead to economic fulfilment or middle-class status. Yet professionals in Accra’s media and knowledge economy nonetheless view themselves as bearers of ‘respectable nationhood’ (Kauppinen 2017: 270).

The meanings of professionalism are influenced by wider social and political shifts. In China, new values of professional autonomy came about as market-based practices of labour allocation began to emerge in the 1990s (Hoffman 2010). Formerly, the government allocated jobs to graduates according to a system known as ‘iron rice bowl’, leaving them with no choice about which job they would do or where they would live. In a new market-based system, emphasis is placed on individual choice, which is nurtured through events such as graduate job fairs. Yet the government continues to influence this process, through managing and funding some of the recruitment events and through an on-going ‘moral education’ of university students and graduates. New market practices encouraging choice and personal responsibility combine with earlier socialist ideas about service to the nation to produce a ‘patriotic professionalism’ among these young adults (Hoffman 2010). Despite the choices that people now have, the previous security provided by the state as part of the ‘iron rice bowl’ has given way to a more precarious set of circumstances with less secure pensions and poor access to health care (Hoffman 2010; Hsu et al. 2007: 3). Since the collapse of Chinese socialism amounted to a process of de-institutionalisation, understanding its aftermath requires studying the ways that institutions are being constructed (Hsu et al. 2007: 3). Hence, professional practice becomes an important site for understanding contemporary China.

Anthropologists have reflected on a number of other ways that people articulate ideas of belonging through their professional identities. For young urbanites in Nairobi, Rachel Spronk shows, professionalism offers a source of identity that allows them to bypass ethnic differences which they have come to view as divisive (Spronk 2012). Similar observations are made about civil servants in Ghana (Lentz 2014) and nurses in South Africa (Hull 2017).

Migration offers many professionals a route to new forms of prestige. But as professional expectations are formed in one context, working overseas can produce a jarring reassessment of one’s own credentials. Czech nurses felt their self-worth as professionals undermined when they discovered themselves ill-equipped to perform the strict workplace protocols they encountered in hospitals in the UK and Saudi Arabia (Bludau 2014). When they returned to the Czech Republic, some were frustrated by the absence of such protocols and were motivated to initiate change as a way to sustain the professional identity they had come to associate with overseas practices. Consequently, we can understand professionalism to be ‘rooted in one’s personal history and built on through professional and personal experiences’ (Bludau 2014: 877, italics in original). Migration offers a particularly useful lens for exploring this issue.

Professional status can also offer an alternative workplace ethic to ‘clientelism’. Among civil servants in Ghana, for example, professionalism is associated with the ‘state’ and with a universalist ethos of service to the nation. In contrast, patronage is associated with ‘government’, and was practiced ‘unofficially’ and less readily spoken about (Lentz 2014). Here, professionalism offers a language of political neutrality that is part of workplace ethos. Thus, we may need to investigate further how patrimonial practices frequently associated with post-colonial government dovetail with workplace configurations. Notions of professionalism promise to be important pieces of this puzzle.

Professional ethics and care

Viewing professionalism as a site of governmentality, a performance, or a route to prestige risks overlooking ethical projects at work. Recent anthropological debates have highlighted that bureaucracies do not only reproduce indifference, governmentality, or structural violence but are also sites in which ideas about the ‘public good’ come to be debated, contested, and developed (Bear & Mathur 2015). Bureaucracies are ‘an expression of a social contract between citizens and officials that aim to generate a utopian order’ (Bear & Mathur 2015: 18). A focus on professional values and practices offers a mode for investigating the ways that such ethical practices come into being.

As my own study of nurses in a rural government hospital in South Africa shows, a professional ethic can be located in a long history of mission medicine as well as in more recent forms of public sector management and post-apartheid ideas of citizenship (Hull 2017). Work and citizenship are in South Africa indelibly linked in the post-liberation period. If apartheid was to be understood partly as a system of racialised exclusion from the workplace, especially from professional work, then to be fully a citizen was to become synonymous with salaried employment as an entitlement and a signifier of national identity. Yet far from being an automatic entitlement, the identity of ‘professional’ can be precarious, especially for an occupation that has struggled historically to legitimise its status vis-à-vis the male-dominated world of medicine. Nurses struggle with the dilemma of how to care in a situation where ideas of public accountability are reduced to narrow techniques such as audit. In this setting, nurses build their identities as professionals in relation to memories of mission medicine, contemporary religious practice, and ideas of ‘calling’, as they negotiate and reimagine their role as carers. Professional identities have as much to do with the ‘relational, affective, and ritualistic’ dimensions of work, and the meanings of care that they produce, as with the disciplining practices more frequently associated with management professionals (Brown 2016: 592). Approaching public administration through the lens of ideologies and ethics of professionalism focuses attention on the ethics of care that are entailed.

In many of these studies, well-documented themes in the sociological literature reappear, such as the tension between collective values and individual reputation. For foreign news correspondents, professional legitimacy is less about official accreditation and more to do with in-house socialisation in which one absorbs organisational culture and builds one’s individual reputation through ‘face-to-face acquaintance’ (Hannerz 2004: 81). In a social-media dominated world increasingly oriented towards a work ethos of ‘self-as-business’, the imperative to engage in personal branding characterises many white collar fields (Gershon 2017). Such tensions have long featured as part of the search for professional identity, rather than being singularly located in the turn to neo-liberalism. Nonetheless their intensification during a period of privatisation and outsourcing raises interesting questions about the shifting parameters of professional legitimacy, autonomy, and ethics. So too do tendencies towards de-professionalisation, as more sophisticated technologies reduce the human skills required in certain fields. Challenges to professionalism have also been launched by professionals themselves: for instance, as development workers attempt to locate expertise in the realm of ‘local knowledge’; or new forms of participative, citizen engagement work to subvert the hierarchies that produce taken-for-granted expertise (Mosse 2019).

The study of professionals may lead anthropologists to turn a critical eye on themselves. It can be difficult if not impossible to carry out ethnographic research among professionals, since anthropologists often discover that their interlocutors refuse to be objectified according to the knowledge regimes of a different field of expertise (Boyer 2008: 39-40). Anthropologists might be most effective through a collaborative approach with their interlocutors and by becoming attuned to the scepticism and reflexivity that professionals harbour about their own practice. Attempts to achieve these aims in practice often encounter obstacles. Reflecting on his experiences of researching an international development intervention in India, David Mosse described the objections that professionals raised to his claims about the successes and failures of the project. They made official complaints, fearing their professional reputations were being compromised by his research findings (Mosse 2011b: 21). For Mosse, this tension had to do with the need for professionals to deny or suppress complexity as a core feature of sustaining professional identity and legitimacy. In their complaints, the concept of professionalism was drawn upon explicitly as a basis for denying that such informal practices existed. Mosse argues that professionals were ‘professionally committed to their denial’ (2011b: 21). This problem returns us to a central epistemological challenge for the anthropological study of professionalism, as outlined by Dominic Boyer: ‘How can I [the anthropologist] document another expert culture without precisely re-framing their expert knowledge in the analytical categories of my own, thus absorbing them into my jurisdiction?’ (Boyer 2008: 41). In order to reach a collaborative approach, anthropologists may have to recognise the contingencies of their ways of knowing and accept a kind of epistemic parity with the theoretical and technical frameworks of other professional fields.

Conclusion

A profession is generally understood as a standardised body of knowledge and practice situated within organisational or institutional contexts. Its authority is widely recognised, popularly mandated, and relies on state-sanctioned systems of training and accreditation. Yet as we scratch below the surface of formal definitions, it is evident that rather than denoting a fixed meaning, the category of ‘professional’ is produced and reproduced through messy organisational practices and socially embedded systems of knowledge production and power dynamics. Rather than being a label conferred automatically on the basis of formal accreditation, the term ‘professional’ is always in the making. Moreover, the work entailed in producing an appearance of coherent, successful professionalism can often sit apart from the ‘real’ work of professionals from day to day. Professionalism may best be understood, therefore, as ‘process rather than product’ (Mosse 2011a: 3). Running through the study of professionals is a core tension: are professionals seeking private advancement, perhaps even at the expense of those who rely on them, or are they committed to collective, ethical endeavours? The question is partly the legacy of early sociological understandings of society as a moral project existing in tension with private pursuits. It becomes more nuanced as we turn attention to the lived experiences of professionals, who strive to build satisfying working lives while navigating expectations of all sorts in their families, communities, and workplaces.

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Woods, N. 2007. The globalizers: the IMF, the World Bank, and their borrowers. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Zaloom, C. 2006. Out of the pits: traders and technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University Press.

Note on contributor

Elizabeth Hull is a senior lecturer in anthropology at SOAS University of London. She is author of Contingent citizens: professional aspiration in a South African hospital (Bloomsbury 2017).

Dr Elizabeth Hull, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London, WC1H 0XG, London, United Kingdom. e.hull@soas.ac.uk

[1] A detailed discussion of the sociology of professionalism is provided by Robert Dingwall (2008).

Feasting

Felix Stein — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 09:01:32 +0000

Chloe Nahum-Claudel

University of Cambridge

Initially published 12 Oct 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16feasting

Abstract:

Feasts are special meals (food out of the ordinary in kind or quantity) shared among an enlarged circle of people. They are occasions for many kinds of activities, not only eating and talking, but musical performances, formal speech, prayer and sacrifice, politicking and commerce. Feasts are ubiquitous throughout the world and human history: consider museums filled to brimming with the knives, jugs, cups and platters of past feasts. Archaeologists have dominated the study of feasting over the last thirty years, using it as a means to approach the most important questions of their discipline in new ways. In socio-cultural anthropology by contrast, the study of feasting as a discrete and clearly defined phenomenon does not exist. This means that insights into feasting are buried in the ethnographic record and tangled up with theorizations of more prominent themes like ritual, ceremonial exchange, and sacrifice. This essay is a dig for some of this buried treasure. It takes a semiotic approach to show that feasts have world-making effects because they both achieve concrete goals – mobilising resources, exciting passions, negotiating political positions – and realise deeply held values.

Introduction

Feasts are ‘total social phenomena’: complex happenings that are at once religious, mythological, economic, social, and aesthetic in nature (Mauss 2002 [1925]: 49, 101). This opening assertion immediately suggests similarities between feasts and rituals. Both are highly structured events that are densely meaningful and intensely memorable to participants. They involve a high degree of social coordination (bringing people together and organising their work) and the accumulation and expenditure of significant resources. They shape the arrangements in which we live and the values we live by. This makes them windows onto everything that is of prime interest to anthropologists; what better way to understand a people than to attend a feast or a ritual? Unlike rituals, however, about which anthropologists continue to publish reams and reams, never tiring of proposing new definitions and disputing ritual’s significance within wider human experience, ‘feasting’ does not exist as a defined area of study in socio-cultural anthropology.

Where feasts have received attention is in literatures about parts of the world where they are the exemplary form of ritualised sociality. This is the case with Chinese banquets and associated guanxi practices (e.g. Yang 1994; Kipnis 1997; Yang 1994) and Georgian supra – sumptuous meals presided over by a toast-master (e.g. Manning 2012; Mars and Altman 1987). It is worth noting that both are relatively similar to historical European feasts: luxury foods and alcoholic drinks are consumed at laid tables and gender distinctions and social hierarchies are marked. However, we need to begin by defining feasting in a way that encompasses greater diversity than these relatively kindred forms, whilst remaining specific enough to distinguish feasts from other important events.

Let’s start with the obvious features that distinguish a feast from other events: feasts always involve the sharing and eating of food, even when it may be underemphasised compared to the other activities going on around it such as gifting, music-making, dancing, and oration. It is useful to keep the specific – edible, drinkable – materiality of feasts in mind. Especially apt, therefore, is the archaeologist Brian Hayden’s definition of the feast as ‘any sharing of special food (in quality, preparation, or quantity) by two or more people for a special (not every day) event’ (Hayden 2001). Many rituals contain a feasting element but at the centre of the feast is always food and drink.

Even a review essay must take some theoretical perspective and so I will start by making explicit three propositions that define my approach. First, as mentioned above, we need to pay attention to food and eating to make space for the feast within the wider frame of ritual. Second, feasting is universal: it is found worldwide and throughout human history. It is both ‘primitive’ in the sense that it is there at the origin of human culture, and booming today when restaurant expenditure in the USA and the UK is soaring at the expense of meals cooked and eaten at home, and programmes like ‘Come Dine with Me’ highlight the risk and excitement of food-mediated interactions with strangers, and ‘Bake Off’ unites the British nation.

Of course, whether you think feasting is universal or not depends on how you define it in the first place. I like the archaeologist’s roomy definition because it allows us to explore what is shared even with primates and hominid ancestors; what is specifically human; and then the myriad cultural variations within this. Writing in this vein I distance myself from the idea that feasting only exists in certain kinds of societies and historical epochs. For example, some anthropologists define feasting in a more limited way and argue that it arrived in human history with forms of social stratification (see Hayden 2014: 44), flourished in Classical and Medieval Europe and was then crushed by a subsequent history of rationalization and secularization so that today ‘feasting is no longer part of our experience’ (Valeri and Hoskins 2002: 6). In order to counter this view, in the first section of this essay I draw briefly on biological anthropology and archaeology to explore the evolution of feasting behaviour and throughout I freely compare examples from various historical epochs and parts of the world.

The third and final proposition is that feasting is better understood as ‘foundational’ rather than ‘functional’, and this requires a little explanation. ‘Functionalist’ perspectives tend to see feasts as responsive to pre-existing conditions in the world which feasts uphold or reproduce. So hierarchy may be supported by status competition between feast sponsors, or stratified seating arrangements among guests; communitarianism by the sharing of food from a common pot; or ecological balance by the resource-control that cyclical feasts enable. In contrast, the foundational perspective suggests that feasts make rather than reflect qualities of the world. The organization of labour, resources, time, relationships, and pleasure in feasting generates particular kinds of social arrangements, values, economies, and temporalities. This reorientation from function to foundation is associated with symbolic anthropology, which in general terms assumes that every time we speak or act as humans, our specific and concrete actions evoke the wider categories that organise social life and therefore have the capacity to recreate and transform them (see e.g. Stasch 2011). In the second section of this essay I will show that many anthropological accounts can be read as either making functional or foundational claims. Finally, I show how the foundational lens accounts for various aspects of feasts: the moral and political contestation they provide an arena for; the work and resources they marshal; and the invisible powers they engage. Because feasts are important at multiple levels of experience simultaneously (biological, economic, political, cosmological, social), they tend to realise fundamental characteristics of the world.

Preparations for a feast in rural Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea in October 2015[1]

The earth oven is opened and the food is displayed prior to speech-making and careful distribution

The cultural nature of feasting

Scholars of human evolution suggest that feasting is shared by primates, hominid ancestors, and humans. Just as a Cambridge College feast has its alpha male (usually ‘the Master’ even if he is a she) who sits surrounded by an elite group and eats and rises first, so too during chimpanzee feasts, such as that observed by Jane Goodall in the late 1960s, rank and status are acknowledged and displayed, with meat passing from higher to lower ranking males (Jones 2008: 34). Contemporary primates nonetheless lack fire with which to cook food and this is a limitation they share with our more distant hominid ancestors who also feasted on raw meat. At the site of Boxgrove, near Chichester in southern England, archaeologists uncovered evidence of a feast on 400 kg of raw wild horse meat, held half a million years ago by Homo heidelbergiensis, a hominid predecessor of Neanderthals, who were probably the first hominids to control fire and cook, at least as long as 80,000 years ago (Jones 2008: 78). Jones suggests that it was when our ancestors began to share food face-to-face around glowing hearths that feed became food and the threat and danger of fire, direct eye contact, and the exposure of teeth, was turned into a sociable event (Jones 2008: 1–2).

This takes us to the influential sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, who suggested in a 1910 essay on the ‘Sociology of the meal’ that it was in meal-taking that humans rose above their identities as selfish organisms to become social persons. Simmel noted that, strictly speaking, food could not be shared because the same food cannot be put into two mouths. However, if eating is an inherently exclusionary and selfish activity, humans, he said, had transformed it into a habit of gathering together to take common meals (Simmel 1997 [1910]: 130). Simmel’s juxtaposition of selfish organism and social person is an early example of how the meal has served as a paradigm for human culture. This argument was elaborated in the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas in the 1960s and 1970s. Lévi-Strauss showed that cookery was a language-like system (Lévi-Strauss 1964, 1968), Douglas’s focus was on the structure of meals. She stressed that unlike grazing cows who ruminate constantly, human’s meals are routinised and ritualised, marking the passing of time and drawing spatial boundaries and social distinctions. In short, ‘food is not feed’ (Douglas 1977: 7). To take Douglas’s best known example, the American family has a daily cycle of three meals with allotted times and formats for each, as well as an annual cycle marking festive occasions and a third, longer-term cycle, marking the life-cycle transitions of family members. Additionally, there are seating arrangements, dress codes, and tacit rules about the order in which foods should be consumed (Douglas 1972). Imitating Douglas’s style of analysis, archaeologist Martin Jones observes that feasts in his Cambridge College involve especially elaborate boundary mechanisms. He counts thirty-three items of food-sharing technology arrayed for his use at a feast; notes that his body is encased in seven items of extra attire, which he wears only on feasting occasions; observes the panels which separate areas of food preparation, service, and consumption; and comments on the seating arrangements, which carefully mark his status relative to others, many of whom are strangers (Jones 2008: 32).

In summary, anthropologists have long argued that the sociable sharing of carefully cooked food, in delimited times, spaces, and social circles, is at the heart of what makes us human.

Function versus foundation

The hardiest assumption about feasts is that they are functional in some social or biological way: they create social solidarity, enhance the feast-giver’s status, or help humans adapt to their environment. This was an important argument for anthropologists to make in the colonial era when other people’s feasts were often perceived to be irrational and wasteful and were sometimes even prohibited. Various functional explanations for feasting behaviour flourished in the decades after World War Two when anthropologists flocked to the densely populated highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and documented the devotion of massive resources to periodic pig feasts. Reflecting the Australian colonial administration’s disapproval (and anticipating the attitude of her readers), anthropologist Marie Reay introduced the Kuma ‘Pig Ceremonial’ thus:

People hoard and fatten their pigs for years in preparation for the Pig Ceremonial … A clan kills practically all its pigs at once, and people who are starved of pork and fat then stuff themselves with it to the exclusion of other foods … Few opportunities for eating pork remain for two or three years after this orgy (Reay 1959: 21).

Reay’s book is actually about why these practices make sense in terms of the religious beliefs of Kuma people and their social priorities: the pig kills created fertility, prosperity, and renown. In a materialist rather than a culturalist tradition, Rappaport (1967) argued that pig-raising strategies were a rational way of converting vegetable crops into high-quality animal protein. He attempted to prove, based on both qualitative and quantitative types of analysis, the adaptiveness of social constraints surrounding the consumption of pigs in terms of population control and the satisfaction of human nutritional needs. Yet others emphasised the political importance of periodic pig kills, which brought together autonomous groups from a large region and were the context for alliance-building; the show of clan solidarity and strength; and the stage for individual and group status competition (Meggitt 1974; Strathern 1971). All these approaches share assumptions of functionalism, i.e. that things generally fit together coherently and ‘work’. They can all also be read as foundational since they stop short of reducing feasting to a single, dominant function.

Perhaps the best illustration of engagement with functionalist arguments alongside the articulation of a more foundational perspective is Michael Young’s ethnography, Fighting with food (1971). Young’s book about Goodenough island life focuses on the way that an abstract system of values and an esoteric domain of magical knowledge are motivated by, and find their most compelling expression in, feasts. Goodenough Island is one of many in the Massim archipelago, which lies off the south-eastern tip of New Guinea. A Goodenough festival’s climax was a large distribution of pigs and vegetable food to visitors assembled in the sponsor’s village. Visitors gathered around platforms and stands on which food was displayed, listened to the sponsor and other chiefs’ speeches and then watched as the display was disassembled and guests received food. With his gifts of food-wealth the chief repaid debts he had accrued and marked new debtors, among them enemies who received the food along with a message about the offences they had committed against him – adultery, abuse of hospitality, theft, insult, and meanness. The distribution was therefore a great drama in which ‘visitors delight in unexpected scandals or delicts suddenly brought to light’ (Young 1971: 244). Aside from its entertainment value, the festival was, Young said, an ‘instrument of social control’, which worked by public shaming and the obligation to repay. He suggests that it worked rather well, providing a mode of redress which did not resort to physical aggression or warfare (Young 1971: 264). He suggested that one of the reasons Goodenough islanders in the 1960s took competitive food exchange to such an extreme was the colonial suppression of warfare (Young 1971: 233, 250). Feasts worked as a kind of system of justice and conflict resolution that was better than anything colonial officials could think to impose. Young therefore suggested that colonization could lead to feasts’ flourishing rather than to their inevitable extinction. This is a trend other scholars have also noticed in other parts of the world (e.g. Kirch and Sahlins 1992; Masco 1995) where there have been colonial booms in feasting and exchange activity. On the basis of his historical analysis of Kwakwaka'wakw Potlatch, Masco suggests that feasting tends to flourish during phases of great historical upheaval because it allows people to work through the new conditions they find themselves in and thereby to seize control of their lives (Masco 1995: 57). Masco and Young therefore both show that feasts are foundational to both people’s enduring identity and their capacity to direct historical change.

While Young is keen to demonstrate the rationality of feasts and festivals in terms of their equivalence to Western legal and political systems, much of his book is about elucidating the value system in which food serves as political currency. Festivals brought political credit and fame to sponsors who proved that they could incarnate the paramount moral values of industriousness, self-discipline, and magnanimity (Young 1971: 252). As the crucial events in Goodenough people’s lives, much of their everyday behaviour is oriented to cultivating the right kind of knowledge and moral disposition to enable them to succeed at feasting. For example, Young describes how men test their mettle and the power of their anti-hunger magic by keeping their best yams to rot, uneaten, inside their houses. This is one way in which they harden themselves into virtuous food abstainers who never admit hunger or allow themselves to be seen eating in public (Young 1971: 159). It is in the context of these values, for which feasting is the ultimate stage, that the giving of food between adult men is an aggressive act which shames the recipient. This is why at the Goodenough festival’s climax, upon the distribution of great plenty, nobody eats.

Eating and not eating

On Goodenough island and in Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the drama of the feast is in the gathering together, display, and distribution of food and not in the eating itself. Portions of food may be deliberately too large to eat or they may be distributed raw or undercooked (Rubel & Rosman 1978: 305). In the Goodenough extreme, eating is explicitly taboo. Perhaps a more common pattern is that hosts, as sponsors and owners of the feast, serve guests but do not eat themselves. What happens then is that food serves to oppose two groups of people (givers and receivers). This is the case in most Amazonian feasts where hosts are defined by their role as givers of food or drink, and guests as eaters and drinkers. I will give two examples, one in which hosts are forceful and the other in which they are humble.

The Tamara festival of the ’Wari of Western Amazonia begins when guests from other subgroups arrive singing at a foreign village only to be humiliated by hosts, who stuff food into the incomers’ mouths pitilessly while insulting the quality of their singing. The guests passively accept this treatment and continue to complain of hunger despite the large quantities they are fed (Vilaça 2010: 64–5). What is going on here is that guests are being treated as the animal prey of hosts, and the mutual stranger status of the two groups is being affirmed.

Among the Enawenê-nawê with whom I work and who live south-eastwards of the ’Wari in Brazilian Amazonia, in each season of the year there is a different opposition between offering and consuming parties within a single village: women serve men, men serve women, or the men of one clan serve the men of the remaining eight clans. As in the ’Wari case, the emphasis is precisely on the reversibility of the oppositions enacted through relations of production and consumption – the point is to take turns and to create a dynamic of reciprocity. Unlike in the ’Wari Tamara festival, Enawenê-nawê hosts are humble because they are providing nourishment to others who incarnate spirits whom the hosts wish to sate and gratify. Both these cases contrast with others in which the identity of eaters and servers is fixed by hierarchy or gender and is usually non-reversible. A very clear example of this is the Georgian feast (supra) in the form it took in late Soviet times, when men sat at tables to eat from ever-full platters and to drink wine from bottomless cups, while women garnered resources, cooked, and stood ready assiduously serving and pouring (Manning 2012: 153–5). There was no supra in which women sat while men served them.

The ethnographic and historical record gives us every permutation of shared and restricted commensality. I will end with two extremes, both taken from European contexts, past and present. In a transfiguration of former medieval feasts at which noble men shared the King’s table, at Versailles the King began to take his meals seated alone, surrounded by standing courtiers – making this feast a public event with no commensality (Freedman 2015: 103). In contrast, the paradigmatic act of sociability at European formal dining occasions is the act of standing to toast the embodiment of a shared ideal (‘The Bride and Groom’; ‘The Queen’) around a table, touching glasses (or merely lifting them) and making eye contact (or gazing into space) before everyone simultaneously drinks. Toasting, which links two uses of the mouth (communication and consumption) is a concrete expression of accord in mind and communion in body. It can be convivial and heartfelt, or formal and even strained, but its affordances are the same. Waiters and waitresses don’t join the toast, so that one-way offering and sharing coexist.

Risky, anti-social feasts

If feasts are fundamental to the creation of the world in which people live then why are they so prone to fail? They can descend into drunken blowouts, jeopardising all the good outcomes that they promised, or alternatively they can fall flat, remaining so formal and constrained that they never generate the ‘effervescence’ which sociologist Emile Durkheim (1995 [1912]) saw as their ineffable brew. Feasts may also meet with disaster and have overtly dysfunctional outcomes: sponsors can produce too little food or drink for their guests, hostilities can break out, and there is the ever-present threat of poisoning – in London’s Mayfair or in Brazilian Amazonia. I suggest that the very fact that feasts are so prone to fail is a sure sign that they are efficacious and consequential.

Fights at festive family meals are a staple of novels and dramas. A great example is the Danish film, Festen (directed by Thomas Vinterberg), which is an exploration of the perversion of family values through the souring of the feast. It follows the unravelling of an upper-class dinner party on the occasion of the senior male of the family’s sixtieth birthday. Sinister family secrets are revealed as tensions build painstakingly over many courses and increasingly malevolent toasts. There is probably always a degree of brinkmanship entailed in orchestrating feasts. One of the reasons for this is that hosts tend to work to the boundaries of what they can pull off. Freedman (2015: 103–4) provides various medieval examples of hungry stampedes trampling the food, of melting confectionery sculptures, and of other dramatic failures born of audacious ambition.

The spectre of poison is the ultimate spoiler. In medieval times, specialist tasters ritually tested food before it reached the mouths of nobles and royals. The Amazonian Kuikuro also ritually test drinks for poison but their motives are more communitarian. Like many Amerindians, the Kuikuro make their special drinks from the juice of bitter manioc, which is high in cyanide and can be lethal to humans when raw or undercooked. The cyanide is gradually transformed into sugar through prolonged boiling. The Kuikuro dramatise the danger of poisoning and its overcoming by designating a man as a formal taster. He very publicly assumes responsibility for protecting the community and its guests. He sips the drink after it has been boiled for some time and always pronounces it to be, as yet, unsafe to drink. Only once it has been re-boiled and tested a third time does the official taster pronounce it safe to drink (Dole 1978: 232). The drink is then passed among all the guests, a sharing which, after such an ominous start, emphasises their peaceful coexistence.

Undoubtedly the most spectacular and laborious of the feasts held by the Amazonian Enawenê-nawê is a reunion between two halves of the population, on the one side the hosts and all the women of the village, and on the other, the fishermen who return from an approximately sixty-day fishing expedition. The hosts do everything they can to find out when the fishermen are likely to return so that women can correctly time the production of about 4,000 litres of a manioc and corn porridge called ketera. The fishermen have been far from their gardens living off dry bread and flour, and they are said to eagerly desire this drink. Indeed, the homely drink is a necessity for successful reunion, since it reminds the men of the human mores they have side-lined at the fishing dams. Inconveniently, the drink has to be made fresh and the process takes a minimum of eight hours from start to finish. This means that if women hear a distant hum of engine noise which indicates the possibility of the fishermen’s imminent arrival, they will wake in the night to start frantically grating manioc. This is a work of anticipation. The whole event is defined by uncertainty about the timing of the fishermen’s arrival which is coupled with their potentially dangerous disposition. The huge quantity of ketera and its laborious preparation makes a show of indomitable preparedness in the face of all this risk and anxiety. If this feast was not prone to go disastrously wrong then the reunification of the community would not be such a climactic achievement.

Morality and politics under negotiation

I have now established that feasting neither necessarily upholds or upends social and political orders; rather, it is part of their making, their maintenance, and sometimes also their undoing. In fact, feasting seems to be a key infrastructure for specifically political action. A feast can serve any end – reformist, conservative, or revolutionary – but what is always true is that feasts are a flash point for political and moral contestation. On the side of revolution, Mao Zedong forbade large banquets and ancestor commemorations when he became chairman of the new people’s republic in 1949 (Goody 1982: 173) and during the Cultural Revolution he closed both restaurants and brothels in a renewed attack on indulgence (Goody 1982: 149). At the other pole is conservative luxury. Sumptuary laws like those issued by Edward II in 1283 limited the number of courses that were permitted at any feast and controlled the populace’s access to food and drink. These laws were intended to preserve the existing hierarchy by restraining feasting by persons of inferior rank, who were perceived as threatening upstarts, imitating the great men of the kingdom (Goody 1982: 141). In ancient Greece we find something intermediate; a constitutive tension between luxury and puritanism within the elite. In Homer’s epic poems, elite heroes feast on the simple fare of bread and platters of meat. This made them equals, joined by the fellowship of the table where eating and drinking, talking, fighting, and politics were inseparable so that access to the table equalled access to power (O'Connor 2015: 92–6). Homer’s depiction of frugal, egalitarian commensality in the male public sphere was probably an idealised one but it inspired later generations for whom feasts, banquets, and all-male drinking parties remained key political fora and had to be continually reformed against the subversive threats of excess and luxury (O'Connor 2015: 109–11).

Politics and feasting are perhaps nowhere more self-consciously entwined than in Georgia, where debates about the proper form of the traditional feast, the supra, are always about authoritarian governance, and where attempts to reform the supra aim at nothing less than transforming statehood (Manning 2012: 148–76). In the 1980s, supra were feats of endurance, lasting up to eight hours during which toasts were interspersed with singing, dancing, and recitations (Mars and Altman 1987: 272–3). There could be twenty or more rounds of toasts in an evening (each requiring a man to drain his glass). Because everyone present was mentioned in at least one toast and the toasts passed through the clinking of glasses from one speaker to the next, the assembled company became linked across distant tables (Mars and Altman 1987). Stalin is famed to have ruled from his lavish dinner table (Freedman 2015: 106) and was a Georgian by birth, and Manning suggests that every Georgian toast-master is under Stalin’s shadow as the ‘dictator’ of the feast table. In the post-socialist era, people disagree vociferously about whether the supra is a noble, indigenous form of civil society or a vehicle for authoritarianism masquerading under the guise of a harmless tradition (Manning 2012: 172). Critics comment that the toast-master is elected but that his election is a farce since there is only one candidate and he always wins unanimously (Manning 2012: 167–8). Manning mentions a young professional woman telling him in 2001 that rather than having a supra for her birthday party she had celebrated with a ‘democracy’. This she described as a feast at which there was no toast-master to tell people what to do (Manning 2012: 169).

It is easy to see all this as mere metaphor, but both Manning and Altman and Mars, whose work I have drawn on here, make the stronger argument that politics happens in and through the supra. Thus the ‘cultured supra’ (not a drunken orgy) was actively propagated throughout the Soviet Union as good socialist culture and it was under late socialism, with its relative bounty, that supra flourished (Manning 2012: 175–6). Later, the proliferated supra had unintended consequences for Soviet rule. The supra in 1980s Georgia allowed people to be good socialists in a way that worked for them. Through the linkages established through toasting, people obtained scarce jobs, permits and licenses, and places at university for their children (Mars and Altman 1987: 278) which were hard to get through the strictures of state bureaucracy.

Feasts can always uphold or threaten the naturalised pecking order among classes and kinds of people, and to end this section I want to reflect briefly upon the banning of native peoples’ feasts by colonial governments. We have seen that feasting and status competition are a major part of European cultural heritage, so why was feasting among the newly discovered peoples of the colonies often met with surprise, disdain, and even criminalization? Marcel Mauss answered this question in one way in his 1925 essay The gift. He said that Native peoples were being judged according to the standards of Enlightenment rationalism and its theories about the kind of economy that was ‘natural’. For rational utilitarian thinkers this was an economy which provided for men’s needs (Mauss 2002 [1925]: 92). Colonists had difficulty accepting that economies that were supposed to be ‘primitive’ were elaborate prestige contests rather than being organised around a struggle for survival (Mauss 2002 [1925]: 96).

A more cynical or real-political explanation emerges from the outlawing of potlatch in the American northwest between 1884 and 1951, which is a famous example of the resolute colonial repression of feasting. Potlatch was an exchange practice led by ranked nobility who distributed property and food to validate their status which was based on their connection to the supernatural powers that controlled the fecundity of the natural world (Masco 1995: 44–7). Before the mid-nineteenth century animal furs, canoes, mats, meat, and slaves were the currency of potlatch and gradually, over the next hundred years, trade goods and then money replaced them (Masco 1995: 51–53, 69–72). In 1889 the founding father of American anthropology, Franz Boas, famously criticised the ban on potlatch by arguing that the potlatch was very similar to the economies of ‘civilized communities’, involving finance and debt calculations (High 2012: 368). As Masco (1995: 65) shows, Boas’ argument was unlikely to be persuasive since it was precisely because the administration recognised that potlatch incorporated capitalist practices to support a ritual economy which was outside of European control that they wanted to stamp it out. They correctly singled out the potlatch as the Kwakwaka'wakw people’s dominant world-making practice. Attacking it was their way of destroying the native cosmology and turning hunters into ‘productive’ farmers and Christian citizens (Masco 1995).

The potlatch has been approached and re-approached from every angle in every era of anthropological scholarship, which shows that feasts work at multiple levels, are dense with meaning, and are constantly shape-shifting as they transform historically. However, it is surprising that while the potlatch is always called a ‘feast’, very little of this scholarship (with the exception of Walens’ Feasting with cannibals, 1981) is about the food or the eating. Perhaps this is because it seemed obvious to anthropologists that ‘traditional’ peoples should hunt and feast to generate further plenty and exceptional that they should have developed modern systems based on debts and interest.

Production before the feast

We now need to turn back the clock and go behind the scenes of feasts. Instead of analysing feasting from the moment the table is laid or the food displayed, we need to explore the organization of time, labour, and resources that go into feasts. The causal nature of feasts’ world-making capacity comes to light in these processes. Rupert Stasch’s (2003) ethnography of the West Papuan Korowai’s sago-grub feasts is a great illustration of the way that bringing about a feast generates people’s core values and reshapes their social and physical environment. It is also a good example of an analysis which concentrates on feast preparation, as opposed to consumption. Stasch’s emphasis is proportional to the Korowai’s own: these feasts marshal resources amassed over a decade and involve two months of intensive work but are all over in 24 hours.

Korowai usually live in single or paired small households, separated from their nearest neighbours by stretches of forest. This small circle continuously processes sago palm starch from the stands within their clan’s territory to meet their basic food needs, at a rate of about one palm every ten days (Stasch 2003: 360). About once a decade, however, different families associated with a clan build houses in a huddle and work together to prepare a feast. They fell up to 1,000 mature sago palms and break open the trunks so that, over a month or so, fat, juicy grubs develop in the exposed pith (Stasch 2003). As the grubs develop, the feast sponsors build a longhouse in which to host invitees. So that the guests are well-fed, the grubs need to be harvested when they are fat but because of the nature of grub development, this is just before they turn into beetles and fly away (Stasch 2003: 372). Grub maturation is inherently uncertain and difficult to time, depending on a range of unpredictable conditions. It is readily scuppered, for example, by the flooding of sago groves (which are low-lying and prone to flood). All of this means that the Korowai have apparently got themselves into a tricky situation because good relations with allies depend on a plentiful and timely crop of grubs, which can never be assured (Stasch 2003: 369). Stasch’s argument in this article shows that perverse as this all seems, grubs are well-suited to the ambivalent quality of Korowai social relationships. The riskiness of a feast based on such a tricky food-stuff ensures the continuing unstable nature of Korowai inter-local alliances and the brinkmanship characteristic of all Korowai socialising.

Stasch’s concentration on the symbolic weightiness of the work that leads up to the feast, which thrusts the Korowai into a mode of production and sociality that is profoundly contrary to their everyday lives, leads me to a second way in which feast preparations are constitutive of social life. The intensified work that is involved in preparing for a feast creates time apart from workaday life long before the guests arrive. Based on Enawenê-nawê ethnography I have argued that intensified production does not so much lead up to a feast, but in a sense is the feast (Nahum-Claudel forthcoming). This is very tangible in the Enawenê-nawê context, where inebriating drinks are shunned, feast foods are just ordinary foods, and people always eat them in moderation. Unlike elsewhere in Amazonia, there is no Bacchic catharsis through coerced gorging on beer, copious vomiting, or paralysing intoxication (e.g. Stolze-Lima 2005: 311; Sztutman 2008: 230; Vilaça 1992: 189; Viveiros de Castro 1986: 354). Rather than consumption, energised collective work itself provides life’s thrills and pleasures. Thus the annual ceremonial calendar involves many ritualised work events which seem to be about celebrating productive activity itself, by synchronising, staging, choreographing, and musicalising ‘mundane’ forms of subsistence agricultural and cooking work. One of these involves all the women of the village waking to pound dried corn seed and manioc fibre in hardwood standing mortars in the dead of night. They pound in an accelerated, syncopated rhythm and, because so many of them do so all around the circular village, the ground shakes.

If feasting is the pleasurable tonic that makes workaday life bearable and marks barren expanses of time with memorable events, it is also the case that production before the feast generates the energetic ebbs and flows that are so important to social life, cognition and the vitality of peoples’ bodies. In the words of Olivia Harris, who came to similar conclusions about agricultural work parties in the Bolivian Andes, work to produce food can itself be a ‘celebration of human energy, creativity and capacity to make and expand relationships’ (Harris 2007: 143).

Invisible guests with power over life and death

From the food-laden alters at Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations to the ambrosia poured for the gods in ancient Greece, at feasts all over the world food and drink is shared with gods, spirits, and ancestors; prayers are spoken, food is consecrated, and libations are spilled. Eating and drinking become the medium for a connection between two dimensions of the world: phenomenal and invisible, living and dead. Hubert and Mauss’s book (1964 [1898]) has been the starting point for thinking about sacrifice in anthropology along with Detienne and Vernant’s (1979) landmark analyses of Classical sacrificial practices. In broad terms they demonstrate that feasts are means to influence the forces that people understand to have ultimate control over the world of the living. There can be no clearer statement that feasts are foundational than many peoples’ certainty that on them rests the health of the population, the fertility of the earth, and the migrations of fish and game.

How is it that people and invisible guests can eat the same food? A common pattern is exemplified by the Kuma of Highland Papua New Guinea, where the immaterial part of the pig (the ‘shadow pork’) is devoured by ancestral ghosts while the surviving relatives feast on its flesh and fat (Reay 1959: 142). This assures that everyone’s appetite for pork is satisfied so that ghosts refrain from harming their surviving relatives. The Cree of Manitoba, Canada describe much more complex and various channels of communion with different kinds of invisible agents (spirits, the souls of game animals, and living game animals) at play during their ‘eat-all’ feasts (Brightman 1993: 224–35). Here tensions exist between blockage and communion, exploitation and reciprocity. Brightman describes a 1977 feast at Watt lake in which four boiled beavers (and all the stock), macaroni cheese, bannocks and doughnuts were eaten to the point of nausea and beyond. At the same time that Brightman writes about the feast in terms of the sacrificial gift which anticipates a future return of plentiful game, he shows that the feast is a coercive act rather than a reverent one. By gorging on meat – eating or burning every last scrap within a space that is blocked off from animal spirits – humans hide their exploitation of animals while they engage in a ‘collective and aggressive act of magical control’ over them (Brightman 1993: 235). The channel of influence is not only both open and closed, it is also two-way since as well as feeding spirits, people incorporate the essence of the game they eat to endow themselves with hunting prowess.

There is an unusual degree of elaboration of human-spirit commensality among the Enawenê-nawê, where food is considered to be owned by, and therefore always owed to, predatory spirits (see Nahum-Claudel 2012, forthcoming). The Enawenê-nawê live with this causal connection between food production, consumption, and mortality by sharing with the spirits every day. Mundane commensality is therefore feast-like because it involves the public display, distribution, and consumption of food and drink in the village’s public central arena. This implies that almost all fishing, agriculture, and cuisine is devoted to large-scale catering, minimising the amount of food that is consumed privately and selfishly inside the house – the kind of eating that incites the spirits’ aggression and leads to soul loss. What all these examples show is how metaphysical conceptions of socio-political relations, not only between living people but between beings in general, are worked out through accumulation, expenditure, commensality, and feeding.

Conclusion

Feasts mobilise people’s values, their morality, and understanding of the world of which they are a part. They have particularly powerful world-making effects because they are both irreducibly concrete – satisfying hunger, exciting pleasures, coordinating the political-economy, and embedding themselves in the organization of time and memory – and expansively meaningful, simultaneously expressing and generating deeply held values. It is because feasts have this force that they can fail in so many ways: from the mundane to the disastrous. And it is because feasts work at so many levels that they have been so open to competing understandings about their function. Feasts do do a lot of things and it is a matter of perspective whether we choose to approach them in terms of their effects on other domains of life, conceived as separate and outside of them, or as internally linked, in causal and conceptual ways, to the whole of life. Within this broad argument, I have shown that the ‘total’ feast takes many forms and have surveyed a range of feasts to open up questions and suggest the following important lines of contrast.

The sharing of food is not a simple matter of a feast’s definition (as it is for Simmel’s meal) but rather a matter of cultural value: people may share communally or feed one another to generate oppositions which may be fixed or reversible. Feasts can uphold the order of things – maintain solidarity or affirm status hierarchies – but they are rarely free of political and moral contention. The questions, Who feasts? On what? And to what end? are pressing ones for political authorities and their opponents alike. Feasts can usefully focus broader debate or be flash-points for conflict. These high stakes make feasts risky undertakings.

A feast’s consummation is often rather transitory in contrast to the elaborate labours that lead up to it. Moving from the feast as event to process highlights the importance, which has long been recognised in anthropology, of exploring the constraints and possibilities offered by a feast’s productive base, be it sago grubs or luxury food and wine. How are resources amassed? With what technology and organization of time and division of labour? These factors should not be understood as external determinants but rather as the social and physical matter that is consciously moulded by people as historical agents. Again, it is because feasts mobilise passions, values, resources, and people all at once and with intensity, that they are great contexts for experimentation and reform. Through them people work out ways to accommodate the forces that constrain them while realising their wider ideals. Finally, feasting invariably transcends the social, and eating and drinking appear to be particularly powerful mediums through which to attempt to exert control over invisible agencies that encompass human life – be it the state, the feudal order, the ecology, or the spirits and ancestors who determine life and death.

References

Brightman, R. 1993. Grateful prey: Rock Cree human-animal relationships. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Detienne, M. & J.-P. Vernant 1979. La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec. Paris: Gallimard.

Dietler, M. & B. Hayden 2001. Feasts: archaeological and ethnographic perspectives on food, politics, and power. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Dole, G. 1978. The use of manioc among the Kuikuro: some interpretations. In The nature and status of ethnobotany (ed.) R.I. Ford, 217-47. Ann Arbor: Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan.

Douglas, M. 1972. Deciphering a meal. Daedalus 101, 62-82.

——— 1977. Introduction. In The anthropologists' cookbook (ed.) J. Kuper, 1-8. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Durkheim, E. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press.

Freedman, P. 2015. Medieval and modern banquets: commensality and social categorization. In Commensality: from everyday food to feast (eds) S. Kerner, C. Chou & M. Warmind. London: Bloomsbury.

Goody, J. 1982. Cooking, cuisine and class: a study in comparative sociology. Cambridge: University Press.

Harris, O. 2007. What makes people work? In Questions of anthropology (eds) R. Astuti, J.P. Parry & C. Stafford, 137-67. Oxford: Berg.

Hayden, B. 2001. Fabulous feasts: a prolegomenon to the importance of feasting. In Feasts: archaeological and ethnographic perspectives on food, politics, and power (eds) M. Dietler & B. Hayden. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

——— 2014. The power of feasts from prehistory to the present. Cambridge: University Press.

——— & S. Villeneuve 2011. A century of feasting studies. Annual Review of Anthropology 40, 433-49.

High, H. 2012. Re-reading the potlatch in a time of crisis: debt and the distinctions that matter. Social Anthropology 20(4), 363-79.

Hubert, H. & M. Mauss 1964 [1898]. Sacrifice: its nature and function. London: Cohen and West.

Jones, M. 2008. Feast: why humans share food. Oxford: University Press.

Kerner, S., C. Chou & M. Warmind (eds) 2015. Commensality: from everyday food to feast. London: Bloomsbury.

Kipnis, A.B. 1997. Producing guanxi: sentiment, self, and subculture in a North China village. London: Duke University Press.

Kirch, P.V. & M. Sahlins 1992. Anahulu: the anthropology of history in the Kingdom of Hawaii. Chicago: University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1964. Le cru et le cuit (Mythologiques 1). Paris: Plon.

——— 1968. L'origine des manières de table (Mythologiques 3). Paris: Plon.

Manning, P. 2012. The semiotics of drink and drinking. London: Continuum.

Mars, G. & Y. Altman 1987. Alternative mechanisms of distribution in the Soviet economy. In Constructive drinking: perspectives on drink from anthropology (ed.) M. Douglas, 270-9. Cambridge: University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'homme.

Masco, J. 1995. "It is a strict law that bids us dance": cosmologies, colonialism, death, and ritual authority in the Kwakwaka'wakw Potlatch, 1849 to 1922. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, 41-75.

Mauss, M. 2002 [1925]. The gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.

Meggitt, M. 1974. “Pigs are our hearts!": the Te exchange cycle among the Mae Enga of New Guinea. Oceania 44, 165-203.

Nahum-Claudel, C. 2012. Enawene-nawe "potlatch against the state". Social Anthropology 20, 444-57.

——— forthcoming. Feasting with killers: vital diplomacy in Amazona. New York: Berghahn.

O'Connor, K. 2015. The never-ending feast: the anthropology and archaeology of feasting. London: Bloomsbury.

Rappaport, R. 1967. Pigs for the ancestors: ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea people. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Reay, M. 1959. The Kuma: freedom and conformity in the New Guinea Highlands. Cambridge: University Press.

Rubel, P.G. & A. Rosman 1978. Your own pigs you may not eat: a comparative study of New Guinea societies. Chicago: University Press.

Simmel, G. 1997 [1910]. Sociology of the meal. In Simmel on culture: selected writings (eds) D. Frisby & M. Featherstone, 130-6. London: Sage.

Stasch, R. 2003. The semiotics of world-making in Korowai feast longhouses. Language and Communication 23, 359-83.

——— 2011. Ritual and oratory revisited: the semiotics of effective action. Annual Review of Anthropology 40, 159-74.

Stolze-Lima, T. 2005. Um peixe olhou para mim: o povo yudjá e a perspectiva. São Paulo: UNESP.

Strathern, A. 1971. The rope of moka: big-men and ceremonial exchange in Mount Hagen, New Guinea. Cambridge: University Press.

Sztutman, R. 2008. Cauim, substância e efeito: sobre consumo de bebidas fermentadas entre os ameríndios. In Drogas e cultura: novas perspectivas (eds) B. Caiuby Labate, S. Goulart, M. Fiore, E. McRae & H. Carneiro, 219-50. Salvador: Edufba.

Valeri, V. & J. Hoskins 2002. Fragments from forests and libraries: essays by Valerio Valeri. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press.

Vilaça, A. 1992. Comendo como gente: formas do canibalismo Wari' (Pakaa Nova) Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ.

——— 2010. Strange enemies: indigenous agency and scenes of encounters in Amazonia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Viveiros de Castro, E. 1986. Araweté: os deuses canibais. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar.

Walens, S. 1981. Feasting with cannibals: an essay on Kwakiutl cosmology. Princeton: University Press.

Yang, M.M.-h. 1994. Gifts, favors, and banquets: the art of social relationships in China. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Young, M. 1971. Fighting with food: leadership, values and social control in a Massim society. Cambridge: University Press.

Note on contributor

Chloe Nahum-Claudel is a postdoctoral research fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. She has fieldwork experience in Brazilian Amazonia and Highland Papua New Guinea. Her work explores agriculture and the cosmology of livelihood; human relations with non-humans; cookery, food and eating; ritual, and the nature of work; and politics in non-state societies. She is the author of Vital Diplomacy: The Ritual Everyday on a Dammed River in Amazonia.

Dr Chloe Nahum-Claudel, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. cn253@cam.ac.uk

[1] The feast was sponsored by the author (pictured). Women prepare bananas and sweet potatoes for the earth oven while men butcher the pig and prepare a blood cake.

Gambling

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Anthony Pickles

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16gambling

Abstract:

Gambling occurs when a person commits one or more valuable items (a ‘stake’) to an event or series of events packaged together, and where the result determines a loss or win at a rate agreed before the final stake is committed. The practice is or was not present everywhere and is often marginal in a given society, and some gambling variations escape the boundaries of this definition. Some include financial speculation within the phenomenon of gambling, but I do not cover that literature here. Anthropology has made valuable but often overlooked contributions to the study of gambling based on both comparative examples drawn from small-scale societies and marginalised peoples and by engaging critically with the gambling industry and concepts drawn from policy-oriented disciplines such as psychology, criminology, sociology, microeconomics, statistics, and the health sciences. In this entry four pioneering anthropological studies of gambling are summarised and compared. I then review current regional and thematic trends in the anthropology of gambling. Thereafter I review the anthropology of the gambling industry itself and the relationship of both to other disciplinary perspectives on gambling. I delineate some causes for the two-decade-long surge in the anthropology of gambling, and lastly suggest that the field has become rich enough to support new and original syntheses that would significantly enhance ‘gambling studies’.

Introduction

Gambling is not a universal human activity. Betting is restricted to a subsection of any given population, and there are some areas of the world, most notably the Pacific Islands and Inuit communities, where gambling was once unknown. Many intentional communities, religious orders, and nation states ban gambling or discourage it, and most states impose variously effective regulations and prescriptions on the legitimate forms of gambling, the contexts where it is permitted, who may play, the odds that may be offered and the proportion of revenue to be appropriated by states, independent bodies, and charities. The dominant discussions in the study of gambling are therefore who gambles and on what, why they gamble, and why some people (ethnic and/or cultural groups, genders, income brackets, etc.) gamble more frequently and/or with higher stakes. Ancillary debates centre on the relationship between games and gambling, the perceived causes of wins and losses, the correlation of gambling to other activities perceived as ‘risky’, and the role of gambling in redistributing valuables within and across societies. Anthropology has played a key role in moving beyond a problem-oriented approach to gambling by virtue of its attention to the context and symbolism of gambling within cultures. Oftentimes the ethnography itself challenges broadly held assumptions such as the idea that gambling addiction is to be understood as an individual failing, and the notion that humans calculate risk like (not very proficient) economists. As the anthropology of the Global North has matured, and the gambling industry has become more corporate than mob-run, there is now a growing body of literature that tackles gambling ‘at home’ ethnographically. These have generated excellent ethnographic insight into the mutual construction of gamblers as ‘addicted’ or ‘compulsive’.

Pioneering anthropological studies

Studies by three twentieth-century anthropologists loom large over contemporary anthropological studies of gambling. These are Clifford Geertz (1973), James Woodburn (1982), and Gregory Bateson (1973). The first two are primarily ethnographic accounts in which gambling plays an illustrative role in demonstrating and enacting broader social dynamics, while Bateson provides a theoretical framework for the study of play as a field that encompasses gambling. Another, almost completely forgotten antecedent which is of at least equal value, is Alexander Lesser’s pioneering account of Pawnee (Native American) hand games (1969 [1933]).

Geertz analyses cockfighting in Bali and the two forms of gambling that surround it. Once two cocks have been matched as evenly as possible, in the centre a large even bet is assembled by two coalitions built around the two cocks. These people appear subdued. In contrast, small individual bets are then made around the periphery at odds that are shouted boisterously across the arena. Drawing on the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Geertz argues that the stakes are so high among the central group that the benefit of winning (marginal utility) is less than the cost of losing (marginal disutility), which can be devastating, and that therefore gambling is a display of fixed status performed through a deliberately even playing field that instead of benefitting any one party simply excludes those who lack the wealth to participate. Peripheral, low-status gamblers are the itinerant class. The fixed status of people in Bali is therefore reinforced, and the game plays out their rigid hierarchy as ‘a story they tell themselves about themselves’ (Geerts 1973: 448). The fame of Geertz’s account is such that most later literature cites it simply to refer to the fact that gambling practices can be a microcosm for cultures as a whole, whatever form the later argument takes.

Woodburn is concerned with the maintenance of egalitarian societies in Africa, and how gambling on a low-skill game can have redistributive effects that even out accumulations of wealth. The Hadza are nomadic hunter-gatherers. Woodburn observed that Hadza men spend most of their time in camp gambling with valuables such as metal-headed arrows whose origins are geographically restricted. By tossing bark discs against a tree and reading which way up they fall, men circulate a range of items that are unevenly distributed. By a combination of keeping the items one wins and wants and staking what one doesn’t, and by pressuring winners into playing again until they lose, desirable items slowly become distributed evenly. Woodburn’s research has had a lasting influence on anthropological studies of small-scale societies that gamble; it has become emblematic of gambling as a mechanism for enforcing egalitarianism.

Bateson’s theory is of a different order. From observing monkeys playing, he derives that play is bounded up by ‘metacommunicative’ signals. Each player communicates to other players that what is happening when they play does not have the same consequences that it would were they not playing. Threat is another example of ‘metacommunicative’ action: the person doing the threatening implies that their threat might become reality if the threatened does not comply. For Bateson, gambling is to be understood as a combination of threat and play (1973: 154). The point is unelaborated, but we may take it to mean that when stakes are introduced to forms of play in which there are winners and losers, the imperative to pay up after a loss is backed by an implicit threat of violence. Despite its un-anthropological origins and level of abstraction, Bateson’s theory is often invoked in a manner similar to Geertz’s, to suggest that gambling is a site of special ‘meta-’significance. An advantage of Bateson’s formulation over Woodburn’s and Geertz’s is that it preserves the thrill of the game, which, after all, is why people say they play, and why gambling appears preferable to more sober forms of ritual or redistribution. As a form of play/threat, gambling is set apart from everyday life, thereby introducing a theoretical space in which one can comprehend the excitement of gambling.

Alexander Lesser, a student of Franz Boas, made a truly remarkable (but very much overlooked) longitudinal study of an indigenous gambling game among the Pawnee of the Great Plains (1969 [1933]). Pawnee ‘hand games’ were complicated games of chance revolving around teams of players who hid counters in their hands and actively deceived opponents who tried to guess which hands contained the counters. What sets Lesser’s account apart from the simple descriptions of games that often appear in early anthropology is his attention to the historical transformation, or ‘temporal career’, of this particular cultural trait over forty years (1969 [1933]: 334). Hand games before 1890 were used by Pawnee for recreational gambling, but through a tumultuous period of US domination, the games fell into disuse only to be resuscitated as an integral part of the Pawnee version of the revivalist Ghost Dance religion^[1] that swept through Native American communities in the subsequent years. The hand games were, in the process, transformed from gambling game to ritual performance. Then, when the Ghost Dance religion gave way to Christianity, the hand games became mundane Pawnee equivalents of the domestic card games favoured by whites in the US. Lesser’s book offers the first and still the most comprehensive account of how the games that support gambling shift roles and forms in order to adapt to contemporary concerns.^[2]

Contemporary regional foci

A surge in anthropological accounts of gambling in the last two decades has forged new ground by highlighting the sheer variety of games in their myriad social contexts. Because the field was initially narrow, many anthropologists studying gambling address themselves more to regional cultural concerns than the topic of gambling per se. Inevitably, therefore, the problematics are to some extent a product of the regions where they conduct fieldwork. I have picked three regions as examples: the Mediterranean, East Asia, and Oceania, but what follows is by no means a comprehensive overview.

Mediterranean-based anthropological studies of gambling are few but influential. The main examples stem from Greece (Herzfeld 1991; Malaby 2003; Papataxiarchis 1999), and all situate gambling as a form of valorised resistance. For Herzfeld, aggressive masculinity is demonstrated through nonchalantly submitting one’s wealth to mocking chance at illegal coffeehouse gambling. Players boast of their losses rather than their wins. They walk a knife edge between a devil-may-care attitude towards money and perceived irresponsibility to one’s wife and family. If they lose too badly or too often, men experience a collapse in male status as they are forced to surrender financial power to the woman of the house. Papataxiarchis similarly foregrounds bravado in his description of gambling on the island of Lesbos, but locates it instead in the antagonism between local society and encompassing orders that are embodied in people’s dependence on state-issued currency. Gambling allows for disinterested sharing and the public renunciation of money as a symbol of external state domination. Malaby’s book-length ethnographic monograph on Cretan gambling continues this masculine tenor. He describes the local repertoire of gambling games (backgammon, dice, poker, and lotteries) and the way these games situate gamblers, non-gamblers, and the state in relation to each other, and how gambling allows people to construct the self around a stance to the various manifestations of contingency. A recent contribution by Scott (2013) complicates the issue of valorising resistance through her research on Cyprus, a contested island divided between Greece and Turkey. Scott evaluates the role of casino gambling in Turkish-controlled territory as a space where Greek and Turkish Cypriots construct stereotypes of each other. The stereotypes are literally played out through the kinds of choices each group is thought to make during hands of blackjack in what appears a relational elaboration on the idea of gambling as resistance.

Gambling in Asia is a vast, temporally deep, and socially salient topic. History reveals attempts to ban gambling in China as early as the fourth century B.C., and gambling is mentioned in the Hindu epic Mahabharata. There is some evidence that cards were brought to Europe from China. What comes across from contemporary literature on East Asia is a diverse and thriving gambling scene which I cannot do justice to here, and which requires much more research. East Asia boasts a lively and localised repertoire of card games used for both high and low stakes gambling, together with a range of legal and illegal lotteries and casino and horse race gambling meccas in Hong Kong, Singapore and especially Macau, which has taken over from Las Vegas the designation as the global centre of gambling. Bosco, Liu, and West review the rural and peri-urban phenomenon of an illegal lottery that became wildly popular in China during the late 1990s, and has links to neighbouring Taiwan (2009). Employing accepted social-scientific reasoning, they cast lottery gambling as a form of symbolic resistance to economic paternalism. Again based in rural China, Steinmüller writes against this narrative, claiming that (among other games) zha Jinhua, a game similar to poker, connects to the widespread equation of social exuberance with ‘heat’, foregrounding a mid-level, regional preoccupation with hotness and coolness (2011). By situating his analysis at this scale, Steinmüller gains greater explanatory purchase than an appeal to abstract terms like ‘resistance’ in China, where it seems not to hold anything like the same cultural cachet as in the Mediterranean.

Overseas Chinese communities figure prominently in anthropological accounts of the way gambling contributes to minority communities’ collective self-definition. This is perhaps unsurprising given their fame as gamblers, their role as migrant labourers and traders in various colonial regimes, and the prevalence of Chinatowns in metropolitan centres (Basu 1991; Loussouarn 2010; Papineau 2005). Loussouarn is emblematic of the wider literature in challenging the consensus that because (in her case, Chinese) minorities gamble more they are irrational, instead providing a cultural analysis of peoples who value confrontations with contingency in a context of risky migration choices and minority status.

For all these specifics, Mahjong remains the most famous and probably the most played of East Asian gambling games, both at home and abroad, though it has not received proportional attention (Festa 2006). Four players use a set of 144 tiles and each player attempts to gain a winning set of four melds and a pair. The discourse emerging from China centres on the transition from socialism to capitalism and the transmogrification of traditional attitudes to hospitality and efficacy through gambling practice. The explosion in popularity of the mechanical game pachinko in Japan after the Second World War also cries out for anthropological treatment (Schwartz 2006); superficially the game resembles pinball but with potentially hundreds of balls in play at any one time. The aim is to get as many small metal balls as possible, which may be exchanged for prizes.

To the indigenous peoples of Oceania (including New Zealand and the best part of Australia), gambling was a novel practice; in Australia it arrived 300 years ago, but in parts of Papua New Guinea people learnt of gambling as late as the 1960s. As such, gambling had to be placed within a repertoire of imports such as Christianity, money, wage labour, and a swathe of new technologies and commodities. Initial guiding concerns for anthropologists were the role of gambling in integrating new practices, especially as modes of redistribution, and the association of gambling with young men who were rebelling against patriarchal control (Zimmer 1987). Given the novelty of gambling, the Pacific literature also contains a trove of freshly invented and constantly transforming games and a fresh exploration of gambling’s possibilities (see Laycock 1966; Pickles 2014a). Elsewhere I have described how in Highland Papua New Guinea, the games that were initially introduced bifurcated into two streams of card games, one fast and one slow, and have since been supplemented by slot machines and betting on Australian horse racing at a bookies (Pickles 2013; 2014a). These latter forms of gambling have introduced a ‘house edge’, meaning the house always wins in the long run, a feature that was otherwise absent in games that didn’t have a ‘house’. Given that a proportion of house revenues are given to the state through taxation, it is worth noting that it is only these games that are legal. Recent studies concentrate on the capacity of unseen forces and the gambling games in which they operate as ways in which Pacific people explore a wide range of ideas about efficacy (Mosko 2014; Pickles 2014b). In a context where gifting and demand sharing play a pivotal role in social life, gambling has also served as a means to explore the potential of state-issued currency, another introduction (Pickles forthcoming).

Gamblers playing a card game called bom in Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea

The gambling industry and the wider field

Anthropological studies of the gambling industry represent an area of proven analytic potency and considerable growth. They are not restricted to one region, but they are conceptually united because they deal with: (1) technologies and mathematics that are often very similar or the same; (2) international consortia; (3) shared legal frameworks; and (4) parallel interest from other academic disciplines that can be glossed under ‘gambling studies’.^[3]

As a commercial industry that relies heavily on permissive state regulation, the gambling industry funds a significant amount of social science research, exercising soft power over the theoretical paradigms within which academics operate. Tied as they are to evidence-based policy, the gambling field is consequently dominated by psychology, criminology, sociology, microeconomics, and the health sciences. With some commendable exceptions (Cassidy 2014a; Schüll 2012), anthropological writings and the works they reference sometimes choose to circumvent this literature, pointing out the historically and geographically contingent development of the concepts involved (Hacking 1990; Reith 1999). One of the most valuable attributes of anthropological studies of the gambling industry is the ethnographic necessity for critical engagement with the same concepts that are used by the industry, by related academic fields, and in the lives of gamblers themselves (e.g. ‘leisure’, ‘addiction’, ‘responsible gambling’, ‘problem gambling’, ‘compulsive gambling’, and ‘pathological gambling’).^[4] Critical appraisals of social science approaches to gambling stemming from anthropology and sociology represent a potent counter narrative, but these accounts are rarely taken seriously in the more instrumental, policy-oriented ‘gambling studies’ literature (McGowan 2004).

The most prominent case of socio-cultural anthropology actively resisting industry-promoted concepts and trends is Natasha Dow Schüll’s outstanding Addiction by design (2012), an ethnography of the machine gambling (slot machine) industry in Las Vegas. Schüll uncovers the thin margin between gambling machine and person, riffing on the interstitial space that constitutes them both as models for each other within a machine-formatted head-space that is known as ‘the zone’. Schüll follows the affective link from players to machines and through to the architects of escape, those who make the machines, process the data, and engineer the casino floors. And it is escape that is offered; not something for nothing, but nothing as something. Schüll’s informant-players are beyond the desire for a win; they wish to kindle a space where ‘you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with’ (2012: 2). There is no escape, for addiction and its treatments are shown to be couched in the same language of actuarial self-management as gambling. Schüll refuses to shy away from exposing industry-affiliated research; she reveals the means by which the gambling industry manipulates opportunities for funding so that research is forced to concentrate on individuals’ propensities to addiction and to steer clear of the interplay of machine and person. She argues that the lack of an obvious intra-bodily aspect in this ‘behavioural’ kind of addiction has either led or enabled researchers to put their focus on the biological make-up of individuals, and drawn attention away from the substantive manipulation of people by gambling machines. What results from the analysis is a nuanced theorization of a society-wide cognitive dissonance between self-regulation and addiction.

A flourishing subdiscipline

From sluggish beginnings, the anthropological literature on gambling is surging. Part of this phenomenon must be put down to the expansion and maturation of anthropology as a discipline, but a more important factor is the increasing visibility and public acceptance of gambling within the Global North, where the vast majority of anthropologists receive their training. Set against this background, anthropology’s response to a global gambling phenomenon appears belated, and the centre ground of gambling analysis has been effectively co-opted by problem-oriented disciplines that generate quickly digestible instrumental outcomes. The flourish of anthropological publications in the last two decades has its roots in ethnographic particularism and regional concerns, but the result has been a wealth of cases that, if harnessed, speak to a single identifiable phenomenon. Of this they are on the cusp. It remains to be seen whether anthropologists will be able to make good on their unrivalled breadth of experience and produce the paradigm-changing analyses that are required in order to account for the diversity in gambling practices and perceptions seen across the world.

As things stand, anthropologists tend to produce qualitative analyses centred on the gambling experience and the relationship of gambling to the broader socio-cultural context, emphasising that what we know about gambling is irreducibly tied to how we come to know about it (see Cassidy, Pisac & Loussouarn 2013). These contributions are important but undervalued. Ethnographic particulars have yielded excellent data that has been used to plot the presence of gambling against other social phenomena, the best cross-cultural correlation for gambling being presence of state-issued currency and high levels of inequality (see Binde 2005; Pryor 1977). This data is intriguing, but insufficient. Above all, anthropological studies of gambling have shown that the local meanings, uses, strategies, efficacies, symbolism, and effects of gambling can be so manipulated and transformed as to destabilise consensus on what gambling represents as a sociological phenomenon. What emerges instead is gambling as a space of socio-cultural introspection, an underdetermined ritual which privileges form in order to interrogate possibility. It is above all this insight which must figure in broader syntheses. By beginning from an anthropological perspective, broad statistical correlations offer just the merest (but nevertheless profoundly enticing) glimpse into the real boundaries of cultural difference.

References

Altman, J. 1985. Gambling as a mode of redistributing and accumulating cash among Aborigines: a case study from Arnhem Land. In Gambling in Australia (eds) G. Caldwell, B. Haig, M. Dickerson & L. Sylvan, 50-67. Sydney: Croom Helm.

Basu, E.O. 1991. Profit, loss, and fate: the entrepreneurial ethic and the practice of gambling in an overseas Chinese community. Modern China 17, 227-59.

Bateson, G. 1973. Steps to an ecology of mind: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and epistemology. New York: Paladin Books.

Benjamin, W. 2006. Notes on a theory of gambling. In The sociology of risk and gambling reader (ed.) J.F. Cosgrave, 211-4. New York: Routledge.

Binde, P. 2005. Gambling across cultures: Mapping worldwide occurrence and learning from ethnographic comparison. International Gambling Studies 5, 1-27.

Bosco, J., L.H-M. Liu & M. West 2009. Underground lotteries in China: the occult economy and capitalist culture. Research in Economic Anthropology 29, 31-62.

Brady, M. 2004. Regulating social problems: The pokies, the Productivity Commission and an Aboriginal community. Discussion paper submitted to the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, National Australian University, Canberra, Australia.

Caillois, R. 1961. Man, play, and games (trans. M. Barash). London: Thames & Hudson.

Cassidy, R. 2002. The sport of kings: kinship, class, and thoroughbred breeding in Newmarket. Cambridge: University Press.

———, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn 2013. Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk. London: Routledge.

——— 2014a. Fair game? Producing and publishing gambling research. International Gambling Studies 14, 345-53.

——— 2014b. Afterword: Manufacturing gambling. Oceania 84, 306-14.

Dostoyevsky, F. 1996 [1866]. The gambler (trans. C.J. Hogarth). New York: Dover Thrift.

Festa, P.E. 2006. Mahjong politics in contemporary China: civility, Chineseness, and mass culture. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 14, 7-35.

Gariban, G., S.F. Kingma & N. Zhorowska 2014. Never a dull day: exploring the material organization of virtual gambling. Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 107-21. London: Routledge.

Geertz, C. 1973. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books.

Goffman, E. 2006 [1969]. Where the action is. In The sociology of risk and gambling reader (ed.) A.F. Collins, 225-54. New York: Routledge.

Goodale, J.C. 1987. Gambling is hard work: card playing in Tiwi society. Oceania 58, 6-21.

Hacking, I. 1990. The taming of chance. Cambridge: University Press.

Herzfeld, M. 1991. A place in history: social and monumental time in a Cretan town. Princeton: University Press.

Huizinga, J. 1970 [1949]. Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture. London: Paladin.

Laycock, D.C. 1966. Three native card games of New Guinea and their European ancestors. Oceania 37, 49-53.

Lesser, A. 1969 [1933]. The Pawnee ghost dance hand game: ghost dance revival and ethnic identity. New York: AMS Press.

Loussouarn, C. 2010. ‘Buying moments of happiness’: luck, time and agency among Chinese casino players in London. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Social Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Malaby, T.M. 2003. Gambling life: dealing in contingency in a Greek city. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

McGowan, V. (ed.) 2004. How do we know what we know: epistemic tensions in social and cultural research on gambling, 1980–2000. Journal of Gambling Issues 11.

Mosko, M.S. 2014. Cards on Kiriwina: magic, cosmology, and the ‘divine dividual’ in Trobriand gambling. Oceania 84, 239-55.

Papataxiarchis, E. 1999. A contest with money: gambling and the politics of disinterested sociality in Aegean Greece. In Lilies of the field: marginal people who live for the moment (eds) S. Day, E. Papataxiarchis & M. Stewart, 158-75. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.

Papineau, E. 2005. Pathological gambling in Montreal’s Chinese community: an anthropological perspective. Journal of Gambling Studies 21, 157-78.

Pickles, A.J. 2013. ‘One-man one-man’: how slot-machines facilitate Papua New Guineans' shifting relations to each other. In Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 171-84. London: Routledge.

——— 2014a. Introduction: gambling as analytic in Melanesia. Oceania 84, 207-21.

——— 2014b. ‘Bom bombed Kwin’: how two card games model kula, moka, and Goroka. Oceania 84, 272-88.

——— forthcoming. The other face of money: gambling, transfers and the economic frontier, Papua New Guinea. Unpublished book manuscript.

Pina-Cabral, J. de 2002. Between China and Europe: person, culture, and emotion in Macao. Oxford: Berg.

Pisac, A. 2013. Croupiers’ sleight of mind. In Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 59-73. London: Routledge.

Pryor, F.L. 1977. The origins of the economy: a comparative study of distribution in primitive and peasant economies. New York: Academic Press.

Reith, G. 1999. The age of chance: gambling and western culture. New York: Routledge.

Rizzo, J. 2004. Compulsive gambling, diagrammatic reasoning, and spacing out. Public Culture 16, 265-88.

Sallaz, J. 2009. The labor of luck: casino capitalism in the United States and South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schüll, N.D. 2012. Addiction by design: machine gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: University Press.

Schwartz, D.G. 2006. Roll the bones: the history of gambling. New York: Gotham Books.

Scott, J. 2013. ‘Playing properly’: casinos, blackjack and cultural intimacy. In Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 125-39. London: Routledge.

Simmel, G. 2006 [1911]. The adventurer: 1911. In The sociology of risk and gambling reader (ed.) J.F. Cosgrave, 215-42. New York: Routledge.

Steinmüller, H. 2011. The moving boundaries of social heat: gambling in rural China. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, 263-80.

Veblen, T. 2007. The theory of the leisure class. Oxford: University Press.

Woodburn, J. 1982. Egalitarian societies. Man 17, 431-51.

Van Wyk, I. 2012. ‘Tata ma chance’: on contingency and the lottery in post-apartheid South Africa. Africa 82, 41-68.

Zimmer, L.J. 1987. Gambling with cards in Melanesia and Australia: an introduction. Oceania 58, 1-5.

Note on contributor

Anthony J. Pickles is a social anthropologist and Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. His forthcoming monograph is entitled The other face of money: gambling in Papua New Guinea. Other publications include a special issue of Oceania on gambling in Melanesia (2014).

Dr Anthony J. Pickles, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. ajp225@cam.ac.uk

[1] In dire times, the Ghost Dance movement synthesised new religious strictures with existing beliefs and above all emphasised the power of formal dances (long considered socially efficacious) to bring about a utopic transformation of Native American circumstances, generating prosperity and unity across Native American communities and release from colonial oppression.

[2] Other important influences include the following: anthropologists were late on the scene when it came to gambling, and often therefore trace their intellectual heritage from the philosophers Walter Benjamin (2006), Johan Huizinga (1970 [1949]) and Georg Simmel (2006 [1911]), the works of sociologists and cultural theorists such as Thorstein Veblen (2007) and Roger Caillois (1961), as well as Fyodor Dostoyevski’s The gambler (1996 [1866]). With the exception of Roger Caillois, these thinkers were concerned with the development of European and American gambling under the capitalist system or the proclivities towards gambling of a universal human subject modelled on European cosmologies. They therefore figure more prominently in anthropological studies of gambling in the context of capitalism and in the Global North.

The sociologist Erving Goffman is that discipline’s first point of reference on gambling, and his influence has been important to anthropology as well (2006 [1969]). Based on research in the US, he generalises about gamblers everywhere. Goffman begins by distinguishing between the objective mathematical risk of a given bet and the subjective risk experienced by players, and as a sociologist he is primarily concerned with the latter. Unlike anthropological accounts of gambling, which would by and large dismiss the relevance of statistical risk at this point, Goffman retains this mathematical framing for the problem of subjectively understood risk. His primary insight stems from this combination of statistical probability and perception. For Goffman, the ‘expected utility’ of a pot (i.e. the usefulness accorded to the money one might win by a player weighted by the probability of their winning it) is shot through with other subjective factors. These include the excitement of gambling and the ability of a pot to make a consequential difference to the player’s life after the game is concluded. Goffman defines the thrill of risk as ‘action’, and describes sociological reasons why people are attracted to ‘action’ in whatever form it can be found. The approach is a natural ally to Bateson’s in that the thrill of gambling is seen as a necessary, nigh fundamental part of the analysis of gambling.

Roger Caillois was an anthropologically informed French intellectual and critic, and a colleague of Marcel Mauss. Unlike Goffman, who begins with the assumption of conceptual hegemony during cognitive processes that are on the surface perceived differently by different actors, Caillois takes human diversity and divergent cultural history as the starting point for the development of approaches to games. His open-ended approach in making a global typology of games in Man, play, and games (1961) is in some respects still innovative today. For Caillois, all human play begins with paidia, which he defined as ‘spontaneous manifestations of the play instinct’ (1961: 28), from the Greek, but this is the extent of human similitude. Paidia is disciplined to various extents by a concept from Latin, ludus, the ‘pleasure experienced in solving a problem arbitrarily designed’ (Caillois 1961: 29). The resultant game takes a form that lies within a matrix of four tropes: directed contest, chance, mimesis, and disorientation. Caillois was also at pains to point out that ludus is not the only conceivable metamorphosis of paidia into social forms of prescription, and he takes the closest Chinese-language equivalent to paidia, wan, as his example. Wan is ‘oriented not toward process, calculation, or triumph over difficulties [as ludus is] but toward calm, patience, and idle speculation’ (1961: 33). For Caillois this was evidence of how China wisely worked out a contrasting philosophical destiny for itself, and that cultures’ destinies could be read from their games. Though dated, Man, play, and games remains the most ambitious attempt yet to model games across all cultures.

[3] Quantitative and instrumental accounts of gambling have a functional policy role backed by state and industry funding in wealthy nations of the Global North. It has been left largely to anthropologists to study small-scale societies’ gambling practices within their own social contexts, as well as gambling in nations which do not have the financial resources to support their own research. There are three notable points of intersection between these poles, the first being the wholesale adoption of gambling policy designed in the Global North by nations in the Global South (Cassidy 2014b). These are often driven by commercial interests and good-governance drives, and are a field ripe for anthropological study. The second is the development of gambling enclaves that attempt to entice gamblers from wealthy states to spend money offshore (Pina-Cabral 2002). Thirdly, the study of minority communities in settler states (particularly in the United States and Australia) are often tackled using quantitative and instrumental techniques, but have also been the subject of anthropological analyses (Altman 1985; Goodale 1987), and the results often represent stark and problematic contrasts (e.g. Brady 2004).

[4] Exemplars of such studies include horse racing in the UK (Cassidy 2002), croupiers in a Slovenian casino (Pisac 2013), casino gambling in the United States and South Africa (Rizzo 2004; Sallaz 2009), and participation in the South African lottery (Van Wyk 2012). The emerging field of online gambling is as yet somewhat of a blind spot (but see Gariban, Kingma & Zhorowska 2013).

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Status

Professionals

Introduction

Professionals as agents of social control

Performance and aesthetics of professionalism

Status, aspiration and class mobility

Professional ethics and care

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

Feasting

Introduction

The cultural nature of feasting

Function versus foundation

Eating and not eating

Risky, anti-social feasts

Morality and politics under negotiation

Production before the feast

Invisible guests with power over life and death

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

Gambling

​Introduction

Pioneering anthropological studies

Contemporary regional foci

The gambling industry and the wider field

A flourishing subdiscipline

References

Note on contributor

Introduction