An Ethnography of Fate and Face: Field Notes from the Velodrome

• In Event: Japanese Gambling in its Sociocultural Context

Abstract

How do gamblers make sense out of regular defeat? What keeps patrons frequenting the betting shop? How do they cope with a fate that is hardly ever on their side? Most researchers have approached gambling as pathological and problematic behavior that needs correction. Shifting the emphasis from the economic to the sensational and social dimensions of gambling enabled structural functionalists and symbolic interactioniosts alike to gain a deeper understanding of the role of such apparently irrational behavior in modern society. My study of track cycling (keirin) in Japan, however, demonstrates the necessity to reconcile the material with the immaterial level. As a legalized exception to the governmental ban on gambling, keirin provides an ambiguous space to challenge official ideologies of hard work and frugality. My paper will address the meaning/s of public gambling by analyzing the internal organization of this deeply ambiguous lifeworld. Field notes from the velodrome are consulted to outline the spatial arrangements and temporal sensations that disconnect the keirin experience from everyday life and and reconnect it with its material dimensions. The ephemeral promises of upward mobility based on physical and social capital and the meaning of chance are vectors that relate the performance by the athletes to the working class biographies of their spectators. Referring to a Goffmanian concept of “face-work” and Devereuz’ basic framework of a social theory of gambling, I argue that class, gender and life course are three dominant vectors to understand performance and behavior of gamblers in Japan’s velodromes.

Author

• Wolfram Manzenreiter, University of Vienna