Natasha Dow Schull
Weatherhead
Resident Scholar 2002-2003
Living with the Machine: An Ethnography
of Gambling Addiction in Las Vegas
Natasha
Schll conducted fieldwork for her dissertation in Las Vegas, a city
commonly acknowledged as the epicenter of late capitalist consumer
culture. Through the life stories of local women who consider themselves
addicted to gambling machines, her analysis probes the links between
lived experience, gender, and the intensifying technological circumstances
of life in the contemporary United States. Schll imagines her project
as a response to a question posed by one of the gamblers in her study:
"How to live with the machine?"
Unlike
traditional slot machines, gambling devices such as video poker involve
an element of skill that heightens their appeal. They have been called
"electronic morphine" and "the crack cocaine of gambling,"
and represent one of the fastest-growing sectors of the gambling industry.
Where table games such as craps and blackjack involve social interaction,
gambling machines "technologize" the play, creating a direct
and isolated relationship between player and machine. Addicted gamblers
describe an experience of "machine escape" in which boundaries
between human and machine become ambiguous. In the words of one gambler:
"You are the machine, the machine is you."
"The
technologized form of addiction that you see in compulsive machine
play is a kind of knot through which you can explore larger dilemmas
of the contemporary world," Schll observes. Over eighteen months
of fieldwork in Las Vegas, she conducted research among gamblers,
doctors of "pathological gambling," engineers of gaming
machines, and casino managers. Her research seeks to understand the
dynamic interaction between gamblers' lives, technologies of chance,
and an economic context in which consumption and addiction are intimately
associated.
Drawing
from a diverse range of scholars including Foucault, Freud, B. F.
Skinner, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Georges Canguilhem, and Sherry
Turkle, Schll is investigating what happens "when acts of autonomy,
free will, choice, and agency are pushed to their extremes in environments
of intensified consumer excitation, challenging the assumptions of
'consumer sovereignty' and 'rational consumption' that underlie our
economic system." She asks, "What can gambling addicts tell us about the
constraints and possibilities for human life under the increasingly
automated conditions of American consumer culture?"
Affiliation at time of fellowship: Ph.D. Candidate, Department
of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
