ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Volume 10. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019. x, 203 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$120.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78920-221-2.
Ward H. Goodnenough once remarked that successful ethnography is in many ways much like describing a very complicated game, reliant as it is upon acute awareness of rules, relations, transactions, and causations. Few works of anthropology have taken that insight more seriously than Anthony Pickles’ Money Games. In this highly original book the author uses gambling in a variety of forms as an analytic through which local cultural forms, economic assumptions, cultural evaluations, and social relations become visible and meaningful in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The result is a timely intervention in contemporary scholarship that cannot fail to make you revisit and rethink some of the classic theses of economic anthropology.
Based on extensive fieldwork in the Highland capital of Goroka, Pickles demonstrates how gambling has become a widespread and ubiquitous pastime in contemporary PNG despite being unknown in the country prior to colonial times. As such, it emerges as a quintessentially modern pursuit, intrinsic to the urban night-time economy and male sociality. These are well-rehearsed topics in the burgeoning anthropology of gambling but the diachronic observations provide little more than a temporal framework for this study that stands out as an inventive and highly sophisticated intervention in debates about money, value, and everyday life at the fringes of the capitalist economy.
Through six substantive chapters Pickles traces the social life of gambling and its proponents in the modern frontier town of Goroka. In the process he walks us through buoyant marketplaces, lugubrious “pokie joints,” and council camps, vividly demonstrating how gambling in various guises—from card games to slot machines and sports betting—becomes a way for local urbanites to navigate a rapidly changing social scene.
Adding colour and depth to the ethnographic descriptions is the author’s comprehensive outline of the history and cultural currency of gambling as it is perceived by his interlocutors. Having only been introduced to the Highlands in the 1950s, different varieties of card games, the topic of the first three chapters, have all come into being in living memory, and stories of their invention are readily told. Of particular importance at the time of Pickles’ fieldwork was the local game dokta bom (doctor bomb), reportedly thought up by a local physician who was inspired by a scene from the 1997 Hollywood blockbuster Titanic. Bom, as it is generally referred to, is played at a fast pace, with gameplay lasting merely minutes, and is explicitly about demonstrating great speed and fluency. The game thus facilitates the types of fast transactions that are associated with commodity trade and modern life, and are favoured as a social performance by urban youth.
Such observations about the way gambling, like other economic transactions, is always and inevitably mediated by local moral discourses, is an organizing thread throughout the book. But rather than buying into sweeping moralizing that dismisses gambling as an intrinsically questionable practice, Pickles’ interlocutors provide more sophisticated forms of critique that tie different forms of gaming to various cultural types. A game like (dokta) bom, is seen as money-centred and associated with the perceived selfishness of youth, while kwin, which has a longer local pedigree, is considered more in line with “the Melanesian way.” Here, card games become overwritten with local value narratives in ways that make them important clues to cultural perceptions and everyday economic thinking, and Pickles’ analysis of them is exemplary for anyone with an interest in social change more broadly.
This ability to tie gambling to broader economic practices, processes of identification, and social changes, is one of the key strengths of this monograph. Pickles never allows the reader to think about gambling in isolation, but rather as part of a socio-economic complex of exogenous forces that include monetization, commodification, and marketing that have made inroads into Highland imaginaries and everyday lives since the 1950s. However, rather than arguing that the introduction of money economies represented a rupture in local relations, he uses the notion of pragmatism to demonstrate how Gorokans have found ways to make sense of money and integrate it into their existing moral frameworks. Indeed, his “ambition is to illuminate how new social practices emerged from particularly Melanesian forms that have analogues in the markets of other developing economies” (97).
Pickles’ text is always, and somewhat self-consciously, in dialogue with the long tradition of Melanesian ethnography. And like his intellectual forebears he makes good use of structuralist dualities such as fast/slow, modern/traditional, and individual/social, without ever allowing these to limit his analyses. There are interesting references to fundamental Melanesian concepts such as kula, moka, and the gift/commodity debate (although the analysis of these in relation to the author’s gambling material is, by his own admission, still underdeveloped). The same can be said about the relatively casual engagement with gender and gambling, a broad topic that is only afforded six pages at the end of chapter 1. Pickles alludes to a growing interest in that analytical direction, however, and I am looking forward to reading his future work on such aspects of gambling.
As fascinating the ethnographic detail from Papua New Guinea is, I would be doing the author a disfavour to read this book only as a locally situated ethnography that will chiefly interest regional specialists and students of Oceania. Pickles has an assertive grasp on cross-cultural gambling studies and quite explicitly sets out to develop arguments that go beyond the immediate context of contemporary Melanesia. Throughout the book he moves between historical analyses of moral discourses on gambling to critical engagement with a variety of gambling forms in many ethnographic contexts and, in the process, presents a measured critique of the discipline’s shortcomings in theorizing gambling. Overall, this is an engaging and thoroughly interesting ethnography that will be of great interest to all students of economic anthropology, the cultural and social dynamics of Pacific Island communities, and the interdisciplinary field of gambling studies.
Geir Henning Presterudstuen
Western Sydney University, Sydney