Comparative Discussion of the Racialized Play of Symbolic Capital in Cultural and Political Economies of Indigenous Gambling in Australia and the United States

Fiona Nicoll

doi:10.5204/ijcis.v2i2.27

Abstract

This article aims to unsettle a pervasive cultural distinction between gambling – on one hand - and the competitive games of society – on the other - by exploring the role of whiteness as a form of symbolic capital in two different but closely related nations. Rather than following Pierre Bourdieu in relegating gambling to the constitutive outside of neo-liberal cultural and political economies, where sub-proletarian subjects are rendered simultaneously the object of an academic gaze and of public worrying about problem gambling, I will explore racialized dimensions of the many games of strength, skill and chance that constitute everyday culture in ex-settler-colonial nations. Comparative discussion highlights the role of gambling in mediating and transforming relationships of sovereignty between Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens in Australia and the US.

Highlights

I begin by posing a question which has been troubling me for several years
In a context of perhaps unprecedented military, diplomatic, economic and cultural exchange between Australia and the United States and at a moment when the gaps in health, wealth, employment and education between Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens in both countries have been the subject of sustained public debate and policy interventions, why has there been virtual silence in Australia about the role of gambling in supporting the material and cultural aspirations of Indigenous people in the US? This question is posed with the awareness that many ideas for improving conditions of Indigenous citizens have crossed the Pacific over this period, most notably that of attacking ‘cultures’ of welfare dependence through policy settings which encourage ‘mutual responsibility.’
This research on the way gambling respectively mediates cultural, political and economic relationships of sovereignty between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and Americans is not presented as a prescriptive goal for organizing gambling regulation in Australia or advancing Indigenous social justice agendas

Summary

Introduction

This question is posed with the awareness that many ideas for improving conditions of Indigenous citizens have crossed the Pacific over this period, most notably that of attacking ‘cultures’ of welfare dependence through policy settings which encourage ‘mutual responsibility.’. It is posed to register concerns about how the concept of ‘cultural dysfunction’ which underpins mutual responsibility discourses has naturalized what might otherwise look like the systematic under-development of remote Indigenous Australian communities in the period which followed the High Court’s overturning of the legal doctrine of Terra Nullius (which framed the continent as unowned by Indigenous people) in its 1992 finding of native title in the ‘Mabo’ decision. While native title claimants had to prove their cultural authenticity had withstood the ‘tide of history’ according to anthropological criteria of pre-colonial ‘tradition’, ‘traditional culture’ was being blamed for a range of destructive patterns within remote Indigenous communities from domestic violence and pedophilia to unemployment and truancy

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion